So what happened to Holyoke? (Boston, Worcester: vacation home, buying, tenant)

[redplum33]

Originally Posted by handy99

Because 3 Billion plus and a couple decades and amazing settings in the hills and rivers of CT beat less than a billion in DT Springfield.

It's common knowledge that it takes about 2+ Billion to create any kind of a destination Casino (Vegas Style).

I mean - Foxwoods has massive shopping areas, factory outlets and much more.

I'll be visiting but looking at even the lists of eateries it seems that it won't appeal to us as much.

When Foxwoods opened in the early 90s, it didn't have any of that stuff. It was gradually built up from profits.

[mdovell]

Yeah and those outlets just had three stabbings. Granted they caught the guy but still. It takes time to develop and frankly I think MGM looked at springfield largely because of the access to rail, highways and to a point airports (Bradly is close by). The costs were cheap and near a convention center and symphony hall. There's a rumor that MGM offered to buy out the mass mutual center from the convention center authority to build it further up but it was denied.

It can be argued that any casino is really not for locals but more for tourists. With that in mind there's a fair amount of attractions here and there and the usual PR of sponsoring events. Will it work? Depends but it has to start somewhere.

Retail can be an iffy thing as frankly mall redevelopment can be hard to define, just look at the Berkshires, Eastfield Mall and Enfield. Once your anchors go it's mostly just movie theaters left. I really don't think retail can be argued to support significant amounts of people anymore. Specialty can survive but even then how many work at a Nordstrom vs a Lechmere or Jordan Marsh back in the day or Sears for that matter. How many at an Apple store?

[hmmebody]

I have driven through a few times recently, It looks better than Hartford.....

[HolyokeM4chine]

How Holyoke got this way--
-City was overbuilt, some schools torn down 20 years after they were built because people thought 1900-1920 was going forever
-Cheap housing attracted new immigrants, Puerto Rican, who have citizenship, but didn't speak English at one time and came from poor farmer stock due to the Fed worker program (rumor is the city also had deals with the island gov't w/Mayor Resnic, he travelled there A LOT)
-70s/80s, racist French-Canadian mayors come in, try to push out the PR population, don't support integration, scare off investment with these tactics

Here's how Holyoke could change-
-Vote out the council, the mayor. Every last one, D or R be damned. Find people with relevant experience, who don't own businesses and don't know contractors. Vote them in. Get someone who will make working traffic signals a priority. Get bare minimum services working.
-Consolidate city gov. There's no reason HFD is doing the DPW's job with traffic lights, Water Works doesn't need to be separate. The rolls are full of people with jobs because their dads drank beer when the mills closed, now the gov is lopsided.
-Get the power utility to open up the fiber lines. Someone's passing around a map of the cables here, it's inexcusable how much of the taxes they've spent on this and no residents can use it. Sure Holyoke is poor, but everyone pays Comcast for **** service. This would help most.
-Put the brakes on a poverty economy that just shuffles money around and doesn't lift up people. Reach out to manufacturing industry groups. Yes. Really. Find the new. Find the money. Diversify. Weed won't solve anything when cheaper states start legalizing.

That's about all.

[Lincolnian]

I suggest reading "Our Towns". It is very inspiring and shows a pattern of characteristics present in the rebirth of communities across America. Three factors stand out, immigrants, artists, and microbreweries. Holyoke, like many of the communities highlighted in the book as well as throughout the northeast, has the potential to be reborn.

[missionhill]

Originally Posted by HolyokeM4chine

How Holyoke got this way--
-City was overbuilt, some schools torn down 20 years after they were built because people thought 1900-1920 was going forever
-Cheap housing attracted new immigrants, Puerto Rican, who have citizenship, but didn't speak English at one time and came from poor farmer stock due to the Fed worker program (rumor is the city also had deals with the island gov't w/Mayor Resnic, he travelled there A LOT).

Samuel Resnic-- It's only been 50 years or so since I last heard that name! Interesting notion that Mayor Resnic had some deal going in PR.

City overbuilt? I don't know why; it's more that the city was built quickly in response to prodigious economic growth which plateaued for a decade or two before Depression, war and postwar suburbanization eroded the industrial economy. I will say that, in contrast to Lowell, Lawrence and other planned industrial towns, Holyoke had an awful lot of these 4-story, 5-story brick tenements--the flats in the Flats--which are much more susceptible to arson, abandonment, landlord malfeasance, whatever, than the typical wood-frame two-family/three decker privately owned house. Those houses are still standing in Lowell, Lawrence, not to mention Dorchester, Worcester, New Bedford, etc. Whereas a huge proportion of Holyoke's brick walkup buildings have vanished from the scene, often replaced by cheap looking wooden houses that look out of place in what was once a densely packed urban hive.

[mdovell]

Overbuilt? Well any community that loses about 33% of it's population is going to "feel" overbuilt. They've recently reduced the number of city councilors.

The flats..yes about that. When Morse became mayor he wanted to tear it down...until they said it was "historic" public housing.

[HolyokeM4chine]

Overbuilt in the sense that if you go back in the books, they made some of their infrastructure with the idea that it would continue its trajectory. Only two quick examples I can think of are the Ingleside School which was mostly built in anticipation of more students (and then pretty quickly torn down), and the Holyoke Water Works, as there was always some expectation the backup reservoirs would come on line to support further expanded industry.

Funny thing about the councilors, there were more than twice as many (21 on a "common council", then 7 aldermen) when the city was about half this size in 1890. The last 100 years have also seen the representation go down down down, while mayoral terms went from 1 year to 2, and now 4.

Yeah, not a fan of Morse whatsoever. If he moved on the Mary Jane years ago, maybe it'd have been worthwhile. Now they're still pushing for it and they're so late to the party by the time that moves, cheaper places will have legalized it and any advantage to having it here will be nonexistent, but that's another can of spam.

[BostonBornMassMade]

Just for the record...Holyoke won’t gentrify: due to lack of population growth in western ma, a RAPIDLY DECLINING youth population in the Northeast, poor schools, increasingly weak incomes and savings of young people, and the racial dynamics....but marijuana will help it.

Folks haven’t come to understand the oldest millennials are 38 years old now. The rush of ‘young people’ into the city has begun to slow ever so slightly and will be much less in the 2020s and 2030s. The MAJOR cities can still attract rich twenty somethings and 30 somethings but the incoming generation z is MUCH smaller, more diverse, and lower income than millennials.

Holyoje is a tier 4/5 city that would only gentrify with tremendous population growth and demand in the local area. Not everywhere can be a success story. No one is moving to Holyoke because it is next to Easthampton MA..I’m really done with this too.

[missionhill]

Originally Posted by mdovell

The flats..yes about that. When Morse became mayor he wanted to tear it down...until they said it was "historic" public housing.

Are you referring to Lyman Terrace in particular? (public housing built in the '30s...) Lots of pressure to redevelop public housing sites around the country, including several redos in Boston: D Street, Mission Main, Columbia Point, Fidelis Way, and soon Whittier Street and Bunker Hill.

Lyman Terrace would be an easy target cuz housing authorities are strapped for funds to maintain the units. But Lyman Terrace is a perfectly workable design after 80 years, not like the elevator high rises that were so disastrous in many places, e.g., Pruitt-Igoe, Robert Taylor Homes, etc.