One of the dreamy scenarios that urban planners like to put forward suggests that ‘downtowns’ are still relevant, because lawyers and accountants and corporate executives and other fancy guys in silk ties can interact in a way that the wide open spaces of suburbia don’t facilitate.
In this age of computer-driven communications, when you can have instant, sufficient, e-mail conversation with your lawyer, even if he is based in an ex-urban cornfield, many urban downtowns continue to struggle.
The notion of professionals coming together in a big, group hug still has some validity, in such fields as high-end manufacturing and R&D geekdom. The sophisticated tool-and-dye guy and the associated engineers may well perform better miracles when in close, personal contact — a gift from God to Connecticut, so that Pratt & Whitney and associated manufacturers don’t pack up their remaining few bags and abandon the state.
That being said, Pratt finally blustered and bought their way out of continued operations of a repair shop and engine overhaul operation in Connecticut. As parent company United Technologies keeps saying, over and over again, middle-level metal banging and the like are not activities a major corporation in competition around the world should be performing in Connecticut.
Beyond the street theater that had Pratt executives, Democratic politicians and union workers doing the labor negotiating cha-cha-cha over the closures, there may be a lesson worth learning for Connecticut in the bad news of two shutdowns.
Keep the boys and girls happy in the big, shiny Hartford office towers, selling property-casualty insurance. They are less inclined to run from the room screaming when Connecticut raises taxes than are the guys manufacturing widgets.
Keep the boys and girls happy who live in Fairfield County and sell Wall Street produce in the tri-state region; they prefer to live in snobby places and can hire clever accountants to wiggle out of the worst of Connecticut’s tax nonsense.
Keep the boys and girls who feast on venture capital to fund their weird little high-tech operations happy; their manufacturing costs are nil, they like to live near each other in relatively cool neighborhoods; and by the time the Connecticut taxman comes after them, they will have sold the business and moved somewhere warm, happy and low-tax.
Connecticut shouldn’t run away from the stereotype of a stuffy, upscale suburban office park. We are politically and economically inclined to be just that. At the high end, ‘manufacturing’ in an R&D kind of way can sustain itself here, but Connecticut has chased away its mills and low-end manufacturing to jurisdictions that offer up low taxes and cheap, three-bedroom ranch houses.
To pretend otherwise — to keep up the pretense that Connecticut loves the ‘working man’ — is to risk losing the high-end folks, without gaining much at the lower end of the pecking order.
Even in the nation’s boom years of the late 1990s, Connecticut lost substantial population. Nationwide, almost half of new businesses fail within five years. Why risk the future in a state that works so hard to be hostile to business development?
The best economic development strategy for Connecticut? Be honest. Welcome in the rich, financial-services folks with a moderate, flat-tax income tax regime. Praise the entrepreneurs; they’ll have a nice place to put their desks, even as they manufacture products somewhere else.
Tell the poor folks, the ‘working families,’ the low-end manufacturers, that all Connecticut really wants is gardeners to tend to the mansion shrubs and flowers.
And, while you’re at it, shrink government down to the size of a Greenwich cocktail party — and privatize the few government services that rich folks actually need.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
