How placemaking meshes with job growth

In early 2011, Kip Bergstrom was part of a group of southwestern Connecticut leaders arguing that with the right planning, 200,000 new residents and 300,000 new jobs could be accommodated on roughly 1,000 acres surrounding a handful of the state’s train stations.

Then, last March, Connecticut’s incoming governor, Democrat Dannel T. Malloy, named Bergstrom to a high position in the Department of Economic and Community Development. And recently Bergstrom laid out a fascinating vision of how the state’s evolving plan for concentrated transit-oriented development (TOD) could capitalize on trends that are currently transforming the nation’s social and economic landscape.

In the process, Bergstrom offered insights into how New Urbanism and smart growth can make the most of the “innovation economy” and the tastes of young people — meshing with them to build a mobile yet strongly urban way of life.

The view offered by Bergstrom — former head of the Stamford Urban Redevelopment Commission and earlier an economic strategist for a policy group in Rhode Island — was presented in a program organized by architect Robert Orr for the Congress for New Urbanism’s New England Chapter.

The roughly 70 people who gathered in Orr’s downtown New Haven “co-working loft,” The Bourse, had come to hear the silver-haired Bergstrom discuss innovation, placemaking, and entrepreneurship. What they got was a more or less unified theory of how several of the most notable trends of our time could be harnessed together.

Those trends: the growing economic power of megaregions; better and faster commuter and passenger rail service; the migration of people in their twenties and thirties to lively urban locales; and the advance of science- and technology-based businesses.

In some respects, Connecticut is unfriendly to some of those trends. Though the 3.5-million-population state ranks first nationally in per capita income, its job growth has languished for two decades. Connecticut’s large, mature companies pay their employees well, but there’s a worrisome scarcity of startups, and there are few small companies that seem to be on the path to sustained growth. It’s an expensive state to live in, and its workforce is graying.

One advantage is a location in the Boston-to-Washington corridor, where one urban area bumps into another. That ought to provide encouragement — the prevailing theory today is that megaregions are going to dominate future economic growth. But according to Bergstrom, the sections of the East Coast corridor that have dominated high-wage job growth, especially in technical fields, have been the Boston region, New York-northern New Jersey, and metropolitan Washington. Connecticut, where all the cities are small (no more than 144,000 residents), seems to lack the heft that comes from a truly large metropolis.

Analyzing the Economy

What should a small, not terribly dense state do? In Bergstrom’s view, it should tie its urban centers to the economic powerhouses of the Boston region and New York-northern New Jersey. Sounding more like a think-tank guy than a public administrator, Bergstrom launched into an analysis of what makes the Boston region’s economy tick; he said it’s the connections between people in various fields or institutions or companies. There are a lot of talented people linked together; the array of connections makes it possible for an economy to innovate and thrive.

What’s especially important, Bergstrom says, are the “gatekeepers” — the key individuals who have various networks of associates, colleagues, and contacts. These networks, he argues, are crucial. Without them, a regional economy is likely to decline.

He argues that Connecticut needs to become connected to the innovators of greater Boston and New York-New Jersey by instituting relatively high-speed commuter rail. One logical goal, he says, is to make it possible to travel from New York City to Hartford (approximately 120 miles) in the time it now takes to ride from New York to Stamford (approximately 40 miles).

He claims that improvements of this magnitude are feasible. Connecticut is planning a $1 billion commuter rail corridor from New Haven to Hartford to Springfield, Massachusetts, which ties into the existing New York-to-New Haven commuter line and into proposed improvements that would provide faster rail travel to Boston.

With rapid, frequent rail service, people could live in Connecticut and reach distant, job-rich destinations quickly, he contends.

In Connecticut itself, many of the jobs and much of the population growth should be concentrated near train stations, Bergstrom says. Young people want to live and work in dynamic urban settings, he says. Within walking distance of several rail stations — including those in Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport — there’s underused land that would accommodate TOD and offer a vitality lacking in the automobile-dependent suburbs.

Drawing on Richard Florida’s thinking about the “creative class,” Bergstrom argues that these urban setting would be great for people aged 25 to 35 Those places need to be clean and safe; Hartford and New Haven would have to bring down their crime rates. Stamford, with 123,000 residents, “already is one of the safest cities” in its population class, according to Bergstrom.

Along with a clean and safe environment, the new urban dwellers will want “hip, green housing construction” and “a sparkling mix of old and new.” He makes a case for new expression in at least some of the buildings, to create an atmosphere that exudes vitality. These urban areas also need “a vibrant public realm with the arts,” he maintains. He sums up this part of the strategy in three brief sentences:

Art makes great places.

Great places attract great talent.

Great talent creates great jobs.

To push things in that direction, the Department of Economic and Community Development, where Bergstrom is deputy commissioner, is increasing its funding for art projects in urban locales. ‘We’re going to get our arts community to help us transform places,” he says. “Art is the cheapest, fastest, most transformative way to bring our cities back.”

The Malloy administration also intends to devote resources to building three “innovation hubs” — places where tech companies would be encouraged — in Stamford, New Haven, and Hartford. Presumably this includes providing space that companies can rent cheaply. Jane Jacobs, Bergstrom points out, recognized the important of having some buildings that are inexpensive enough so that startup enterprises can get started there.