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The other part about Franklin County is Frankly it faces Vermont and that part of VT pretty much is state and national parks which will never be developed. That's why I say due to having the lowest population of any county in Mass we create it as a special economic zone. Try a program of no income tax and no sales taxes for ten years. The cost to the state should not be much. It would attract those to shop more in light of the rail stop coming in. Those that are working would spend and invest more since they'd have more.
It would also help to just try to move more to western Mass. There are still towns in w. mass without broadband! The costs of doing everything in boston is frankly too much. The west vs east divide needs to end and needs to end now. We cannot afford to treat ourselves economically like a West and East Germany. Western Mass CAN develop. Pioneer Valley and Berkshire County. The state does not "end" west of Worcester.
Some of the problems go well beyond drugs. The metro springfield area has very low high school graduation rates. If you drop out of high school there pretty much are very few options to work. This results in higher amounts of crime, poverty and a cycle that can be hard to stop. But development in all due respects should be looked at due to much better highway access, lower property costs, lower labor costs, lower energy costs, better access to natural gas etc.
About 75,000 people in Franklin County, which makes it about equal in population to Somerville. But what Massaholes don't understand is that while this is rural, sure, it is not REALLY rural like the mythical "real America" is - once you get down to 5,000 people in a county, then we can talk. Greenfield, Turners Falls, and Orange are small towns, but actually pretty densely populated, due to our state's industrial history. You don't actually feel like you're in the woods when you're plopped down there, you feel surrounded by peeling triple-deckers, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy, and Dunkin Donuts, just like you would in a normal semi-urban Massachusetts community. The outlying land in Franklin County faces VT and NH, and as mdovell explains, some towns will probably never even develop to crest 1,000 people (Leyden, Heath, Rowe, Warwick, etc). But a cluster like Greenfield and Turners Falls - 30,000 people surrounded by nothing - makes these towns more "urban" and central to life in the area than some equally populated town outside of Boston, like Milton or something would, which in comparison to Boston or Cambridge or even Quincy is just another everyday bedroom community in the suburban orbit. By ignoring and underserving this area, and others like it, Beacon Hill just perpetuates an attitude that the small cities and rural people outside our 495 beltway are not real people - real people who need services, be it opiate detox facilities, public transit, transportation infrastructure like a four-lane highway (Route 2 was slated to be four lanes out to Greenfield, but the state ran out of money in the 1980s so left it two lanes from Phillipston on -- OOPS, what's a few dozen dead people in Athol accidents?), and economic investment in general. Luckily, affluent folks around Boston are at least willing to pay a massive premium for farm CSA shares grown in places like Hadley, Montague, Sunderland, and Hardwick, and most of MA's locally raised meat is slaughtered at Adams Farm in Athol, so a few farmers are at least doing fairly well out here.
And yes, many towns still don't have real internet. Towns in the immediate Interstate 91 / Connecticut River corridor do, but go just a little east to Shutesbury or Wendell, or a little west to Ashfield or Worthington and you leave the digital age. Places that are still, and will remain, truly rural.
But get to the bigger towns and the region is well-stocked with highly intelligent people who often want to stay in the area, but that pervasive Eastern Massachusetts provincialism that says Boston is the only place to do business, that Worcester is a terrible place suitable only to be giggled at and marginalized as the edge of civilization, and that Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, Westfield, Greenfield, North Adams, and Pittsfield are just doomed druggie hick backwaters, and the pervasive myth that Amherst must only be an educational vehicle for getting a degree and moving back to some semi-horrible and stultifying suburb like Burlington or Hingham (no offense ), makes it hard to build the employment base around Western Mass. Hence you'll find 40-year-old baristas with master's degrees all over Northampton, because it really IS a nice place to live, but it sure is hard to forge a lucrative career in the area.
They may talk about it, but they certainly will not allow places like half-way houses and detox centers from sprouting up in their quaint little town centers or anywhere in their towns. Much better to have these places in other people's neighborhoods! What they will do is to make sure that these social services are available in nearby cities so that their drugged out teenage kids or young adult sons/daughters can get help, but their property values do not decline. So they beggar their neighboring cities by exporting their problems away. Then, some of them look down on their neighboring cities, while others go all out and bring pot lucks for NIMBY benefits to help "local" shelters.....just so long as these shelters are no where in their own towns. Such bs.
I grew up in Milton, and this kind of NIMBY bs was a common theme. I hate their fake liberal compassion that only begins at the border of the town and extended outward. Try doing something good for the actual residents of Milton, and you'd have a riot and complaint about "traffic".
Must be nice to even have a detox center in the city next door (illustrative map if you click the article). Despite being the dumpy "city next door" and loaded with their own problems that's more than the perpetually marginalized cities and towns of Fitchburg, Leominster, Ayer, Gardner, Winchendon, Southbridge, Athol, Orange, Greenfield, Turners Falls, or North Adams get. But we aren't real people so it's okay. The Mitt administration was totally right to cut the funding for the Franklin County detox, and I wonder if there ever was one in the N. Worcester County cities, which for the record do not have a bus route to Worcester.
I was somewhat amused at the fact that this episode directly followed his visit to Iran, which he thought was one of the friendliest places he'd ever visited. Sorry, but I think I'll still take good old USA, even with all its problems.
I have to give him credit for admitting his prior drug use...probably burst a lot of bubbles about the guy for some viewers.
One way or another, I will be more sympathetic to this problems when towns like Milton and other "nice towns" stop flushing their social ills (read addicts) to rehab and detox centers in bigger places like Quincy and Boston, all the while keeping their own pretty towns clean and "problem free". No amount of their residents "fundraisers" can cover the very NIMBY fact that they don't want to do their part in helping their own residents' drug addiction. It's quite disgusting the attitude of places like Milton when it comes to any social issues. Let's open a drug detox center somewhere in Milton and see how far that proposal gets! Yet tons of Milton do-gooders show up for lunch and other benefits to help keep the homeless shelters and drug rehab centers in Quincy well funded. They just don't want these places in their town, yet their own people are the ones who need the help. Until NIMBY can be overcome, nothing will get solved.
The problem is you're only complaining because you got the short end of the stick (you live in Quincy), not because you are less NIMBY than anyone else. You don't want it in your city either.
At the end of the day, these centers have to be built somewhere that has transit access. Quincy also has over 4 times the population of nearby towns. It's the hub of the South Shore.
And I really don't agree that Milton has more heroin users per capita than Quincy. Driving through West Quincy near Copeland sometimes feels like I'm on a reality TV show for some zombie apocalypse with the number of heroin zombies idling about. And there's no treatment center nearby to explain it.
The problem is you're only complaining because you got the short end of the stick (you live in Quincy), not because you are less NIMBY than anyone else. You don't want it in your city either.
At the end of the day, these centers have to be built somewhere that has transit access. Quincy also has over 4 times the population of nearby towns. It's the hub of the South Shore.
And I really don't agree that Milton has more heroin users per capita than Quincy. Driving through West Quincy near Copeland sometimes feels like I'm on a reality TV show for some zombie apocalypse with the number of heroin zombies idling about. And there's no treatment center nearby to explain it.
Sorry, but I did grow up in Milton, like I stated, and I still co-own my family home with my mother. So, I am in both Quincy and Milton. In the end, nobody likes social ills, and even less other people's social ills. I dont like Milton's fake liberalism. They whine about "traffic" even when the Jews want to open a new temple, for pete's sakes. Forget about drug addicts. I know you like Milton, but face it, it's just as fake as anywhere else, and there are plenty of drugs in town.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
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Quote:
Originally Posted by loveautumn
I was somewhat amused at the fact that this episode directly followed his visit to Iran, which he thought was one of the friendliest places he'd ever visited. Sorry, but I think I'll still take good old USA, even with all its problems.
What is amusing about that? Iran is incredibly friendly and amazing to visit by all accounts.
I've been watching Tony Bourdain's travel shows for years. My favorites by far were the ones on the Travel Channel. They had a sense of humor, & focused way more on food, local restaurants, etc. This one about drug issues would have been great in a TV special about drug issues, alone. But it's bizarre to portray the whole state as being only about P-town, & junkies in Greenfield Mass.
I think it may have been mainly about Bourdain's own issues with his former drug use. Kind of like a "dry drunk" kind of thing maybe, but instead of going to group meetings, he's getting it all out there on CNN.
We saw the CNN version at 8PM Sunday, and I found the show riveting. I know Greenfield and Turner's Falls from my youth, and was shocked by the amount of drug use.
People on this forum have been slamming Greenfield for years as full of drug users. I think Bourdain was doing a service by documenting the problem for a wider audience. I don't mind that he deviated from his usual concentration on food to explore the drug problem.
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), makes it hard to build the employment base around Western Mass. Hence you'll find 40-year-old baristas with master's degrees all over Northampton, because it really IS a nice place to live, but it sure is hard to forge a lucrative career in the area.
