IN PROGRESS: American Locomotive Works (ALCO)

[Garris]

While I sometimes fear the increased moderation actions on my part the new infusion of diversity of opinion on the forum has the potential to create, I actually am really enjoying all the new input, even the people I completely disagree with at times.

I agree. The more diverse opinions, the more interesting debate, the more we all learn and become better informed citizens. In contrast to what some might think, I'd love it if some of the Fox Point and College Hill group members that I so disagree with would post. Lots of great ideas would be exchanged.

Also, I think the forum reorganization has done a great job at focusing the discussion where it should be, and it's much easier to navigate issues.

Very rarely do topics veer off, and when they do, Cotuit always moves them appropriately. Again, the advantage of a moderated environment.

Regarding development news, I'm guessing we're in a lull while the "big boys" get built. But there's exciting stuff on the horizon:

- The 195 bridge floating up

- All the downtown projects starting to build up to height

- Women and Infants large expansion

- Dunk redo

- Eventually, a Grants Block render and a RISD Chase redo render

- etc, etc

Also, with the calendar, topics about local issues and activities of interest (arts, running, food, etc) it's a deep community resource as well.

I certainly hope you wouldn't bolt!

- Garris

[CtownMikey]

After reading like 50 of these posts.. it seems as though the business owners somehow forgot that owning and maintaining their own business is supposed to be HARD WORK. Whats done is done..so get over it, and go look HARD AND LONG for a new spot to relocate.. it IS NOT impossible to find somewhere else in Providence. Also, contact this Struever company and make the effort to see how they can financially help you. I doubt they will come to you.

[pete11]

Wow.. now that all nations have been heard from, the Vitrol for a displaced business owner is amazing.

I have noticed that if you speak of a big box retailer small businesses are important.

but if you speak of a subsidized condo (ahem) mixed use developer, the business people should take it and "life's not fair"

Has anyone else noticed the ideological dichotomy?

[jencoleslaw]

Starting at $300,000??? I figured these would be a lot less, especially considering some of the Strand condos went for $159,000.

What is affordable for a $30,000 a year salary as far as ownership goes?

i'm sure this is already answered, but right now nothing is affordable for 30K a year. Not even most rents in the city.

[jencoleslaw]

Just to be clear, we aren't actually talking about people squatting here. The people being displaced by ALCO have businesses, have leases, pay rent... There are people out there trying to band together to create more affordable spaces that people can have ownership in. I think pressure needs to be brought to bear against the city and state to ensure that they foster and support these endeavors.

exactly. Pawtucket seems to understand that--why doesn't Providence?

[Cotuit]

exactly. Pawtucket seems to understand that--why doesn't Providence?

Well I think it's because Pawtucket really needs these smaller scale investments, like The Grant, whereas Providence is flush with large scale investment and doesn't fully have the time or the staff to deal with the mirade of smaller groups trying to get things done. If Pawtucket didn't hussle to get these smaller developments going, they'd have nothing.

[eltron]

Well I think it's because Pawtucket really needs these smaller scale investments, like The Grant, whereas Providence is flush with large scale investment and doesn't fully have the time or the staff to deal with the mirade of smaller groups trying to get things done. If Pawtucket didn't hussle to get these smaller developments going, they'd have nothing.

But this is an ongoing and getting bigger problem for Providence. One of the things that made it "cool" was its affordability and plethora of cool buildings, both traditional, historic houses, and underutilized mills and commercial buildings.

The energy and creativity created by the small timers taking risks in down and out areas is real. It is tough then to see the big boys come in, make huge amounts of money off of it, and make it impossible for new creative and inventive people come back in. But it happens, they move onto other places, and Providence ultimately will suffer because of it. (granted, it will gain in other ways - thats okay). The powers that be should really look long and hard at this and see if they can accomodate both - the Little Guy and the Big Boy. Right now, they can't. With some creative zoning, permitting, and financial work, maybe they can...

Remember Duany's recommendation that the area of Washington Street adjacent and behind the Public Safety buidling should be parceled and encouraged as an area for a whole bunch of small, creative "developers" to build up funky small single-building live-work spaces? Thats impossible now. THAT would have been PERFECT, but the Armory and SBER and Metrolofts of the world moved in and prevented some real innovation from happening. In my opinion, thats the real problem with these developments...

So the real question- Can it work? Can the Little Guy and the Big Boy coexist and get the benefits they both bring -energy and creativity, and wealth and capital and increased tax rolls? In the current climate, not a chance, but ultimately, with some bold and creative leadership, it could...

[jencoleslaw]

So the real question- Can it work? Can the Little Guy and the Big Boy coexist and get the benefits they both bring -energy and creativity, and wealth and capital and increased tax rolls? In the current climate, not a chance, but ultimately, with some bold and creative leadership, it could...

not only do i not believe it can work (because creativity and capitalism are far too often at odds with each other) but i don't believe it is possible for Providence, or RI for that matter to have bold and creative leadership. That, my friend, is a pipe dream. Asian flu will have to come through and wipe out much of the populaton in order for us to have a majority of our elected officials be forward thinking.

[Cotuit]

I agree with everything you're saying. The city has so many messes to clean up right now, and what I assume is an overwhelming amount of work for the Planning Deparment, and reems of red tape... There's so much that needs to be done now it's almost paralyzing.

So many issues seem to come down to zoning.

[runawayjim]

So the real question- Can it work? Can the Little Guy and the Big Boy coexist and get the benefits they both bring -energy and creativity, and wealth and capital and increased tax rolls? In the current climate, not a chance, but ultimately, with some bold and creative leadership, it could...

i believe it can work... and i have a feeling it's gonna take some time. before it was the little guy. it's turning into big boy. i think after a lot of the new developments have been around for a few years, things will start to balance out.

i think our current mayor has done a good job at being more bold and creative than certain past mayors, but there's still a lot that needs to change in our city and state governments (especially the state). i also think the RI mentality needs to be changed, and that might be harder than reforming the government.

[lauram]

if only the "big boys" would realize that they really really benefit from the little guys, enough to step in and help with time, money, and innovative thinking.

None of these new developments will be anything great if their neighborhoods lose all flavor, and become boring suburnan-flavored bland housing and boring ugly beige offices, with no interesting neighbors.

Affordability is an absolute and uncontroverted necessity for small businesses, artists, and innovation. If market pressures are forcing it (affordable space) out, it is the job of government to help rebalance, and QUICKLY. Market forces move swiftly, and without direct and immediate action, we could be facing a city with no place for innovation. Is that what we want? Believe me, that is a very different climate from what we have right now.

not only do i not believe it can work (because creativity and capitalism are far too often at odds with each other) but i don't believe it is possible for Providence, or RI for that matter to have bold and creative leadership. That, my friend, is a pipe dream. Asian flu will have to come through and wipe out much of the populaton in order for us to have a majority of our elected officials be forward thinking.

[Cotuit]

I worry because we lack corporate benefactors. We have GTECH and Textron and Citizens and BofA, CVS, Hasbro, and Fidelity in the burbs. We need more offices and corporations not only for the jobs they create but for the money they are able to invest in the city. We have lots of little firms settling in places like Rising Sun and soon ALCO, but they don't have the financing muscle to help fund large initiatives in the city the way larger corporations do. The One Tens and Waterplaces and all are exciting, but they aren't signs of new corporate money entering the city. More people and higher priced housing will help stabilize the property tax situation, but Providence is in such a services hole right now, we'll be lucky to see the years of neglect corrected, there's little money out there for forward thinking social and business programs.

[jencoleslaw]

I worry because we lack corporate benefactors.

I'd be interested in finding out just how much the coporations donate to various entities around the city. I've been tangentially involved in corporate fundraising for the past 6 years and i've definately seen a drop off of corporate giving at the same time when some corporations are giving record bonuses to high level execs. Things that corporations used to fund are just being dropped (like the RI Tree Council Notable Trees Calendar) and i'm not sure i'm seeing new inititatives being picked up...

[Cotuit]

I wonder what SBE&R has done outside of things directly related to their projects. I'm not saying they've done nothing, because I don't know. But if they aren't doing anything outside of things related directly to their projects, it's time for them to pony up some corporate funds for arts programs or something. At the very least a fat check to AS220 or PCIS.

[Garris]

I'd be interested to see some stats on corporate giving here too. In Minneapolis, you had 3M, Target, Medtronics, Best Buy, Northwest Airlines, and several other large companies headquartered there and they all gave heavily to the arts, funds, events, activities, culture, philanthropy, etc in the Twin Cities Metro and were hugely visible benefactors.

By comparison, all of the companies Cotuit mentioned here in RI are nearly invisble. If CVS didn't sponsor the year 5K downtown (whooptie-do), you'd never know they were an RI company.

- Garris

[jencoleslaw]

I wonder what SBE&R has done outside of things directly related to their projects. I'm not saying they've done nothing, because I don't know. But if they aren't doing anything outside of things related directly to their projects, it's time for them to pony up some corporate funds for arts programs or something. At the very least a fat check to AS220 or PCIS.

they sponsor a clean up day in Donigian park i think, and they paid for a bunch of trees to be planted on Valley Street. Oh, wait. Those are all things that would not be considered "outside of things directly relating to their projects."

and i'd like to call dibs on corporate money for some environmental stuff like community gardens, park improvements, trees etc.

[runawayjim]

they sponsor a clean up day in Donigian park i think, and they paid for a bunch of trees to be planted on Valley Street. Oh, wait. Those are all things that would not be considered "outside of things directly relating to their projects."

and i'd like to call dibs on corporate money for some environmental stuff like community gardens, park improvements, trees etc.

then we can have textron park and CVS park... it's a good idea, but would they be willing to give money without putting their name on it?

[CtownMikey]

I worry because we lack corporate benefactors. We have GTECH and Textron and Citizens and BofA, CVS, Hasbro, and Fidelity in the burbs. We need more offices and corporations not only for the jobs they create but for the money they are able to invest in the city. We have lots of little firms settling in places like Rising Sun and soon ALCO, but they don't have the financing muscle to help fund large initiatives in the city the way larger corporations do. The One Tens and Waterplaces and all are exciting, but they aren't signs of new corporate money entering the city. More people and higher priced housing will help stabilize the property tax situation, but Providence is in such a services hole right now, we'll be lucky to see the years of neglect corrected, there's little money out there for forward thinking social and business programs.

Isn't the basic plan for Providence like this "If you build the condos, the educated and wealthy will come, and when they are here, the corporations may follow"? or something to that extent?

[runawayjim]

Isn't the basic plan for Providence like this "If you build the condos, the educated and wealthy will come, and when they are here, the corporations may follow"? or something to that extent?

the wealthy are coming... i don't know if that means that they're educated as well or not... but yeah, that's what we're hoping for.

[eltron]

the wealthy are coming... i don't know if that means that they're educated as well or not... but yeah, that's what we're hoping for.

see though, all this talk about big corporations is the problem I was trying to point out. There is a tremendous amount of wealth, energy, and good that can be done on a smaller scale with a whole lot of entrepreneurial, creative folk.

THESE are the people that are being forced out, or if not forced out, nudged out. And they are going on to other places, leaving the city worse off.

Corporate giving is all and good, but the real strength and energy may be those little guys. at least a good portion of it. And I'm not saying these big projects are inherently bad, or that big corporations are bad...just that BALANCE is key, and I'm not seeing it right now...

[magoldbe]

Isn't the basic plan for Providence like this "If you build the condos, the educated and wealthy will come, and when they are here, the corporations may follow"? or something to that extent?

yeah, but it might backfire. see this article from last month's projo:

http://www.projo.com/business/johnkostrzew...9x.2f04f19.html

apparantly companies are having a hard time luring talent because people from other parts of the country find that the quality-to-price ratio of RI homes is waay subpar.

from John Kostrzewa's article:

William Hatfield, president of Bank of America in Rhode Island, ran

into the housing affordability crunch when he tried to fill 900 call

center jobs in East Providence.

He said the bank recruited in other parts of the country, including

the company's offices in Tampa, Fla., and Richmond, Va. Those who

responded were "shocked about what they could afford," he said. "The

quality was not what they were accustomed to." He said the bank had to

offer special benefits packages to hire some managers and workers.

"These [recruits] could add tremendous value to the community but they

can't afford to live here," Hatfield told about 150 people at a

Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce breakfast last week.

[Cotuit]

see though, all this talk about big corporations is the problem I was trying to point out. There is a tremendous amount of wealth, energy, and good that can be done on a smaller scale with a whole lot of entrepreneurial, creative folk.

THESE are the people that are being forced out, or if not forced out, nudged out. And they are going on to other places, leaving the city worse off.

Corporate giving is all and good, but the real strength and energy may be those little guys. at least a good portion of it. And I'm not saying these big projects are inherently bad, or that big corporations are bad...just that BALANCE is key, and I'm not seeing it right now...

I'm sort of mergering two or three or ten issues in my head when I talk about the corporate presense. I agree, there are lots of creative people with various degrees of their own funding who can get things done. One thing we need though is more corporations to donate more money to programs that these small groups can benefit from.

The other issue is the even smaller groups with little or no money, things like New Urban Arts as an example. There's a small pool of corporate funds for these little groups to beg from (or a small pool of corporations that are willing to divert funds from excutive payraises to this and other types of programs).

Then there's quality of life things like parks. We need not put a backlit CVS sign under the Roger Williams statue at Prospect Park to get corporate money for parks. My wish for a non-profit parks corporation to take over places like Waterplace and Burnside can't happen if we don't have big corporate money to underwrite these programs.

[Garris]

"These [recruits] could add tremendous value to the community but they

can't afford to live here," Hatfield told about 150 people at a

Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce breakfast last week.

All undoubtedly true. But this is hardly an issue RI can legislate away. It's a Northeast problem, some of which we can't alter (we're built out) and some of which we can.

Here was my reply to that same article that I posted here in a different forum recently:

"To a large degree, this is a regional issue and to an ever larger degree a Northeastern issue. While RI government could and should do more to help, there are much larger forces here in which we're only a bit player.

A lot of our runup wouldn't have happened without Boston's more amazing runup, and we've almost certainly benefited economically from individuals and companies being priced out of that market.

Think Boston is rediculous, try the New York Metro... The median home price in Westchester County, NY is 850,000 dollars, and that's including the traditionally depressed areas of Yonkers and New Rochelle. To afford the cheapest home in Westchester, a household income would have to be about $160,000... The average apartment price in Manhattan is well over a million dollars. Amazing stuff...

The Northeast in general has to do something about its costs. Forget RI... This entire region of the nation is being killed by legacy costs (infrastructure, schools, energy, bloated and inefficient governments). Some of it we can't do anything about. If the Midwest needs more housing, they just sprawl it over cheaper land. We're built out and have far greater environmental regulation (as we should), but that carries some costs with it. And there's no incentive for those sprawling communities to put the brakes on it and kill their competitive advantage (and trust me, they know its a huge advantage...).

For example, I'm in medicine. In medicine, actually, the Northeast actually has some of the lowest salaries in the nation and often some of the highest malpractice costs and rates (RI is #2, I believe, in the US). I've watched for years as physicians have left the Northeast, where their income buys them a nice 3-4 bedroom home in Barrington, Newton, or Fairfield County, CT, and go to the South, Midwest, or Southwest, where their salaries can be 30%-100% greater at a minimum and their same Northeast income can buy them a 10 acre compound plus a summer home elsewhere.

Where I trained in Minnesota, it wasn't unusual for a two income family making $80,000 to have a new 4 bedroom colonial with 3 car garage, a boat, and a cabin "up North on a lake" for the weekends. That'd be unheard of here.

As Cotuit is fond of saying, this is one of those issues that the representatives from Pennsylvania to Maine need to sit down together and work through together, because its killing us."

- Garris

[Cotuit]

I started a thread in the Baltimore-Washington section asking Baltimoreans what they think of SBE&R. The Balt-Wash section is a bit slow, so I'm not sure how much response it will get, but I thought people in Providence would be interested to hear what people in Baltimore think, especially since they have more projects there that are done.

[magoldbe]

I'm no economist or anything, so this is all pretty baffling to me. If houses are priced at what the market can support, but almost no people in the region can afford these prices, who is driving the market? Is it the tiny proportion of people who make tons of money? Is it the property developers and real estate investors?

I am really honestly completely baffled and more than a little bit exasperated (as you can probably see from my previous posts.) Many of my friends are beginning to leave for less expensive cities like philly, baltimore and pittsburgh.

Someone mentioned AS220 in a previous post -- I was talking to three AS220 employees two nights ago and they were all saying that they're looking to move to other towns where they can afford to buy. They, like myself, have been moving apartments every couple of years as houses get sold, rents get hiked, and for whatever reason, our wages stay the same.

Oh well. I'm pretty much over it at this point. I had a good run here and I learned an important lesson -- buy when you can otherwise you'll get kicked out. So I'm going someplace where I can buy.