From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS NORTH ADAMS, Mass.--Charles Swabey could be the emblem of this city's recent success. The 39-year-old British-born Swabey left his job at Gillette in Boston, where he was a strategic financial analyst, and his home in Jamaica Plains, Mass., to start a new life and career here as a real-estate developer and landlord. Since 2002, he has bought, renovated and sold one house and is now "smartening up" the 47 rental units in the eight downtown apartment buildings he bought. The rent pays his mortgage and then some, and he is looking to buy more.
All according to plan? Kind of. Since the mid-1980s, North Adams was long an economic blemish on Massachusetts, with high rates of unemployment and bankruptcies, a shrinking manufacturing sector and a hemorrhaging of its young. Berkshire County has a lot of natural beauty, but you can't eat that. Plenty of ideas were floated by political and business leaders: Those that were tried generally failed, and most never got off the ground. Then city officials and a host of private developers during the '70s, '80s and into the '90s, whose schemes included a ski resort, a railroad museum, national crafts center, a prison and casino gambling, came the concept of turning the abandoned 20-building, 13-acre Sprague Electric plant into the world's largest museum of contemporary art, paid for in part by $30 million in state aid. Support for culture, it was hoped, would draw entrepreneurs and tourist dollars, acting as a catalyst for city-wide and regional development. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.
"We tried chasing smokestacks, but manufacturing would never return to North Adams," said John Barrett III, mayor since 1984. "We had to reinvent ourselves."
And so began the city's experiment with the creative economy, a term that refers to entrepreneurial people and businesses that tend to cluster around a cultural center, generating economic activity. New York City, for instance, is an example of a naturally forming creative economy, but some require a jumpstart. Economists and city planners have sought to develop areas of creative economic growth where blight has reigned. In the 1990s, for example, the Spanish city of Bilbao was revitalized by the exotic architecture of a new Guggenheim museum branch. Now, it is North Adams's turn.
"I moved here, because MassMoCA is here," Mr. Swabey said, adding that traffic, the cost of living and even the threat of terrorism had driven him out of Boston. He cites North Adams's "college-y type of atmosphere," describing it as "an artistic area where you can afford to buy space." According to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, the average price of a single-family house in Boston is $396,860, up from $348,071 a year ago. Whereas in North Adams, the average price for a single-family home is $93,640, up from $82,000 a year ago.
That might seem a strange description of a depressed mill town where the mill has left and the bulk of the long-term residents have no college degree and some lack even a high-school diploma. But Mr. Swabey has made friends with other newcomers, including collage artist Debi Pendell, who moved from New Haven, Conn., with her husband in 2004, and Christa Abel, a part-time social worker who left the Boston suburb of Roslindale for North Adams in 2003, where she has bought a house with her fiancé and set up a part-time dog-sitting business ("most of my clientele are transplants from cities," she said).
Longtime residents and newcomers appear to have limited contact with one another--in part, because newcomers and locals take quite different jobs. Nato Thompson came from Chicago to be MassMoCA's assistant curator, while the museum's director of performing arts and film, Jonathan Secor, had been a longtime resident of New York. Amanda Roth, a producer at the computer graphics firm Kleiser-Walczak (one of the 11 for-profit rent-paying businesses within the MassMoCA complex) came from Los Angeles via New York.
A high percentage of the newcomers also are childless--almost none of the 40 artists who have purchased 2,500-square-foot lofts in an abandoned factory building have school-age children--which limits community connections. Some with children speak about the new charter school, as well as the county-wide School Choice program, which would let them send their kids to schools in more-affluent Williamstown.
Unemployment in North Adams, which reached almost 20% in the late 1980s, is down to 5.5%, though much of that decline resulted from the local population of 18-to-40-year-olds simply moving away, according to Heather Bulger, executive director of the Berkshire County Regional Employment Board. To a degree, one population--urban, art-conscious and moneyed--is replacing another.
Job training programs in computer skills, literacy, basic math and "critical thinking," as well as a Workforce Training Fund that pays employers a portion of new hires' salaries for three- or six-month periods of on-the-job training, have helped some of those who remained. Still, what the state's $30 million investment has bought the hard-pressed locals largely is "service sector" employment. For example, the 50-room Porches Inn--six buildings that had once housed mill workers and were turned into a hotel by a San Francisco resident--has 20 "full-time equivalent" jobs, most of them filled by North Adams residents, according to its marketing director, David Durfee. The phrase "full-time equivalent" means that the hotel employs more than 20 people, but some percentage are working part time and not receiving benefits.
Five years may not be enough time to turn around an economy that was in decline for decades. Developing the creative economy may "create inequalities in the short-term, distributing benefits unequally," said Steven Tepper, associate director of Vanderbilt University's Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy. Real progress may not take place until the local work force has the education and skills to move from service to creative jobs. "The jury's still out," he added. "We may have to wait another decade."
In the meantime, the most direct impact on North Adams's economy has been an increase in neighborhood stability--people are staying in their apartments longer--and an increase in residential and commercial property values, according to Stephen Sheppard, a professor of economics at Williams College in Williamstown and director of the new Center for Creative Community Development. "Real-estate entrepreneurs are some of the first to make out well" in economic development zones, said Prof. Sheppard, who has studied MassMoCA's economic impact. Rising property values are a "capitalized version of people's hopes for what will happen."
Higher real-estate prices and assessments have led to greater tax revenues for the city of North Adams, which has enabled Mayor Barrett to hire more teachers, reduce class size, build more schools and update older ones. And tourism has brought in an added $100,000 through the city's hotel-motel occupancy tax. Pride in North Adams has also increased, as new and old residents alike see themselves as living in a tourist destination, rather than somewhere to avoid.
While Mr. Swabey couldn't be happier with the changes, life-long resident Mary Ann DeMarco has somewhat mixed feelings. A computer-lab coordinator for North Adams's elementary schools ("There's one computer for every two students," Mayor Barrett noted) whose father had worked at Sprague Electric and whose daughter is a waitress downtown, she is a renter looking for a house to buy. "The jump in prices was very unexpected," she said. "I don't know if I can afford one now." Inadvertently, the economic development project that is MassMoCA may have ended her American dream.
What MassMoCA Has Wrought
BY DANIEL GRANT
Wednesday, July 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
