Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This article and report are half distressing and half encouraging to me. Rhode Island obviously needs economic help -- everybody knows that -- and it's upsetting to see it finish dead last. But I learned some things here that I didn't previously know -- namely that the state is taking concerted and serious steps to remedy the situation. The article notes that the legislative action hasn't moved the needle, but that's meaningless -- laws meant to spur economic growth take years to show an effect. So this news does come with some hope for the future. I suppose it's unrealistic that legislators would be sitting on their hands about this, but that's sort of what I'd assumed.
Like Alfie, I do think quality of life is the most important metric. You know why I moved here, really? Because there are few states that the survey reports offer a higher quality of life where I'd be willing or able to live. Hawaii, sorry, I'd like to see the mainland occasionally. Vermont, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, too cold (and in the latter case, boring) for me. I could go on, but of the states with higher QoL than Rhode Island, I'd probably only live in Washington and Massachusetts. Rhode Island is a better deal than both, so here I am. (The survey says Washington is cheaper, but here's a telling reason why Rhody sometimes ranks low with these things: Like low-ranking New Jersey, this whole state is essentially the city and the suburbs, which is where I'm always going to be. Washington has vast, sparsely populated rural areas, which I'm sure brings the average cost down significantly.)
I do think surveys like this are worth paying attention to, but this one kind of lost me when the accompanying article quoted an analysis by George Mason University's right-wing Mercatus Center as saying, "Rhode Island is one of the least free states in the country." That actually comes close to making me angry. Here CNBC is taking completely at face value the word "free" as redefined by libertarian interests for propaganda purposes. We grow up learning that freedom is the ultimate virtue, and to reorient freedom in terms of how close policies hew to Tea Party principles is a hateful, cynical ploy intended to intellectually bully the gullible and uneducated into reflexively supporting policies that go against their interest. I have a major aversion to propaganda in general, from both sides of the aisle -- which is why I don't consume liberal media despite being quite liberal myself -- so to see people involved in this survey unquestioningly swallowing that raises a major red flag for me.
To me, Rhode Island is a state with a major amount of potential, and that's another reason why I'm here. I scoured the United States and couldn't find a place that was a better value. I really think the ace in the hole is the proximity to Boston, and if I were involved in state government, I'd do all I could to milk that. Here you have one of the most desirable cities in America, less than an hour away by car and commuter rail. Providence is basically an exurb of Boston. Everyone wants to live in Boston, and that's why it's ridiculously unaffordable. Let's say you're in your twenties, single, getting your career started, interested in all the things that reasonably with-it urban twentysomethings are interested in. You're not flush with cash at this point in your life. You could get a one-bedroom in Framingham or something, but yuck, you don't want to do that. Why not live in Providence instead? It's got the urban amenities you want, it's got that gritty city feel, and you can skip off to Boston whenever you want.
There must be some way to leverage that to bring in jobs. I haven't figured that out, and clearly nobody else has, either, but it can be done. Maybe this legislative action will be a good start. Philadelphia has benefited from its proximity to New York, and it's much farther away than Providence to New York. An even better analogue is Baltimore, which has grown and gentrified in part because it's so close to DC. It is, in fact, about the same distance as Providence to Boston -- and by the way, I'd much rather live in Providence.
Great post, boulevardofdef. You're so right about Boston. 20 years ago when moderate income people could hope to live anywhere near Boston, it wasn't such a big deal, but now? You're not living anywhere halfway decent near Boston unless you're sitting on a pile of cash waist-high. But you can have Providence, and still visit Boston all you want. It seems like we should be able to make this work for us, somehow.
I also bristled at the definition of "free" being, apparently, "low tax rates for businesses." I've lived in a number of different states as an adult, and I'll be the first to agree that RI's bureaucracy is onerous - my DMV experience when I moved to RI was worse than any other state, hands down - but certainly I am free to live my daily life here no more impeded than I was in Virginia or Nebraska, or anywhere else. Freedom is a more meaningful concept than implied here by the folks at Mercatus.
And I may have said this here before, but I have several RI small business owners in my family, and none of them have been driven to closure or to other states over taxes or regulations. Yeah, they complain, and I would too, no doubt - but attracting customers who have disposable income in a state with sluggish employment is a much, much bigger problem for them than taxes or paperwork.
The article cites RI's abysmal infrastructure as one of the major issues. We have more people than jobs, at the moment. I'd love to see a day when we could put two and two together on that.
Absolutely agree that RI's only real hope is to work as part of broader regional economy, with Boston as an anchor.
The problem is that it's hard even to pull that off. Providence is just one of a ring of old manufacturing cities around Boston that are all "close to Boston", and yet are now heavily poor and depressed. Lowell, Worcester, Fall River, New Bedford all share being within commuting distance to Boston along with Providence, and they don't have RI state government holding them back. Yet they are even worse off than PVD. Similar story in other metro areas: Bridgeport and New Haven, CT; Tacoma, WA; Baltimore; Milwaukee; etc.
Where old and declining manufacturing centers are far enough away from a metro hub, some of them are re-emerging as regional hubs for medicine, big box retail, etc, filling in the gap were dozens of small town business fade away. Places like Sioux City, Iowa. I think that's some of why Portland, Maine has done better at transitioning than the blue collar towns closer to Boston. But the mid-size old blue collar towns fairly close what high-tech metro hubs have really struggled. Sometimes they even declined _more_ as the area around them booms, since they become sinks for the low-income residents displaced by rising property values in the metro center and newer suburbs, and end up in a tax-and-service death spiral.
The good news is RI's problems are far from entirely the fault of our own politicians or some uniquely bad Rhody culture. The bad news is that even the best leadership you could imagine would find our situation very hard to change.
To me, Rhode Island is a state with a major amount of potential, and that's another reason why I'm here. I scoured the United States and couldn't find a place that was a better value. I really think the ace in the hole is the proximity to Boston, and if I were involved in state government, I'd do all I could to milk that. Here you have one of the most desirable cities in America, less than an hour away by car and commuter rail. Providence is basically an exurb of Boston. Everyone wants to live in Boston, and that's why it's ridiculously unaffordable. Let's say you're in your twenties, single, getting your career started, interested in all the things that reasonably with-it urban twentysomethings are interested in. You're not flush with cash at this point in your life. You could get a one-bedroom in Framingham or something, but yuck, you don't want to do that. Why not live in Providence instead? It's got the urban amenities you want, it's got that gritty city feel, and you can skip off to Boston whenever you want.
I really have to wonder that if the above wasn't true, people would be complaining even more if plentiful jobs brought more of a housing shortage and an even higher cost of living.
I say to those people, be careful what you wish for. Development and plentiful jobs can rapidly raise the cost of living in an area. It's happened to other cities and they have have become completely unaffordable. There's got to be a happy medium somewhere.
I really have to wonder that if the above wasn't true, people would be complaining even more if plentiful jobs brought more of a housing shortage and an even higher cost of living.
I say to those people, be careful what you wish for. Development and plentiful jobs can rapidly raise the cost of living in an area. It's happened to other cities and they have have become completely unaffordable. There's got to be a happy medium somewhere.
Oh, yeah--cuz the RI economy is at such a "happy medium" at the moment...
Oh, yeah--cuz the RI economy is at such a "happy medium" at the moment...
You're drawing unwarranted conclusions. I never said we were at a happy medium- I said there must be one.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
