Northeast Capitals

This work began after a conversation with a realtor and a concerned citizen, both from Trenton, on what makes an older, post-industrial city vibrant. As I have lived and/or worked in three capitals in the Northeast part of the country where industry was once thriving, I thought it might be interesting and useful to look at Trenton next to other state capitals in the Northeast region that had an active manufacturing industry in the mid-1900’s only to find themselves in a decline in the last three decades of the 1900’s.  I look at a wide range of factors and although they are not exhaustive, I believe this initial review contains those factors that provide economic vitality to cities similar to Trenton, NJ.  In addition to the typical factors such as population, median income, poverty and civilians in workforce, I added factors that indicate and potentially predict economic activity in the cities.  They would be change in population, total retail sales/capita and construction permit/1000 people (when available).  These factors for the cities of Trenton, NJ, Albany, NY, Harrisburg, PA and Hartford, CT are captured in the table below.

I then wanted to know the difference between the cities as a function of businesses, workplaces, higher educational facilities and medical complexes.  Although these last two are not revenue streams for their cities, they have a high capability of development revenue through adjacent businesses and needs and therefore, extremely attractive for those once industrialized cities who must revitalize their economic diversity. Data shows that all of the cities with the exception of Trenton have a strong presence of medical and higher educational centers; eds and meds as they are colloquially called.  And perhaps the retail sales per capita then makes sense as Trenton has the lowest figure by far of all the capitals indicating that people are not shopping in New Jersey’s capital.

More data needs to be collected with the accompanying analysis, for instance, the policies and partnerships that were developed to implement and retain medical and educational institutions need to be understood as does the city, county and state involvement.  The goals of the Trenton Master Plan250 can be compared to Master Plans of other cities and discussions of planners of Trenton and other cities could have interesting outcomes. The vitality of a community is not the result of a sole factor, rather, the networks between industry, all levels of government and the citizens of the city, county and state are critical components of any type of change.