Author:
Ned Depew
[ Edit | View ]
|
Date Posted: 11:04:53 07/27/05 Wed
Gene -
If you want to live in Disneyland, there are apartments available in Orlando.
Smarth Growth advocates urge a balance of tourism with other uses that include clean manufacturing, retail, agricultural, etc., etc., etc.
There is no one simple answer and a flexible economy - which can respond to the vagaries of national and international economics - will have a constantly shifting balance - with some facets in ascendance while others are in decline.
The paternalistic "Company Town" model you and Tom advocated with SLC has been a loser since the 1950s. Examples from Pittsfield and Schenectady - abandoned and eviscerated by GE - North Adams - where dependence on Sprague Electric led to years of economic depression - Flint and Detroit MI, and even Hudson in the 70s and 80s - abandoned by the Cement Industry and left with a plummeting population and tens of thousands of feet of boardecd -up retail space on Warren Street prove this point.
Neither 'tourism" - which you previously condemned as an insubstantial contributor to economic growth - nor any other single aspect of the economy should be the basket into which we put all our eggs.
We have a good and useful number of tourists here - but we are (thankfully in my opinion) not over-run. I used to live in Stockbridge and can testify that finding a parking space in town in the summer (even to pick up your mail!) was almost impossible, as was getting waited on in a store, finding a table at a restaurant or almost anything else you might want to do there.
Meanwhile, prices jumped in the summer to try to take advantage of the short season of tourist dollars, making the town unaffordable for local residents. The same thing has happened in many tourist destinations, from Martha's Vinyard (where you can rent a lovely 4 BR vacaion cottage for only $9,500/wk) to Key West.
With luck and good leadership, Hudson could still avoid either being over-run and gentrified to death or slumping back into the economic despair into which past administrations led it between 1970-the late 1990s, when a spontaneous renaissance (led by individual business owners and investors and mostly objected to and obstructed by the local political "leaders) set the City on the road to more balanced growth and the possibility of prosperity for the first time in decades.
With the "more-of-the-same" taxing and spending (mostly on themselves) that we are offered by the Scalera/Grandinetti Good-Old-Boy network, the City will not offer such leadership, and it will only require a small change in the national economy to return Hudson to Ghost-town status, or turn it into a gentrified enclave from which locals are all but excluded, like Garrison or Cold Spring.
|
Feedback: 