Actually, the headline from yesterday’s New York Times Oped contributor was “Struggling Towns Must Evolve or Die” but it amounts to very much the same thing.<\/p>\n
The Times posed the question “Can New York be Saved?”<\/a> to a number of people, and got a variety of thinking. Mitchell Moss’s response<\/a> caught my eye. It’s pretty short, but here’s the takeaway:<\/p>\n The entire state cannot survive if we continue to act as if all 62 counties can flourish. For the rest, we must accept the inevitable. Across the Midwest and Great Plains, state governments have allowed towns with a proud past but no discernible future to fade away. New York must do the same.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Moss, a professor at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, argues that New York State spends billions propping up communities of the past (he mentions Buffalo, “the city of the future”) while letting the infrastructure vital for growing urban areas (that would be New York City) go begging.<\/p>\n It sounds unnecessarily brutal. But you don’t have to wait for a change in state policy and priorities to see how brutal. Drive anywhere in this region for very long and you’ll find yourself on a formerly thriving Main Street, with vestiges of small city architecture of the 19th century left. And much of that preserved by, well, “preservation” grants and subsidies. <\/p>\n Do communities like Plattsburgh and Potsdam and Saranac Lake have the potential to demonstrate Moss’s “right mix of educational institutions, skilled labor and entrepreneurial know-how?” Is there a place for small towns? I think yes; that’s where we live. So yes. But how to bend the curve away from the trajectory Moss sketches?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Actually, the headline from yesterday’s New York Times Oped contributor was “Struggling Towns Must Evolve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
(snip)
Albany needs to make a strategic decision to invest in a handful of places upstate that are willing to do the serious work of revitalizing their own economies and that have the right mix of educational institutions, skilled labor and entrepreneurial know-how to compete in the 21st century.<\/p>\n