Shipping up to Boston

The New England Patriots just won their sixth Super Bowl this Century. Their win over the LA Rams on Sunday night was their ninth appearance in the Super Bowl since 2001. In fact there have only been six times this century occurrences when the Patriots haven’t featured in the AFC Championship match. 

What makes the Patriots’ success even more spectacular is that they’re doing it in a league that strives for parity. The NFL isn’t meant to produce dynasties: league rules are supposed to spread talent to other teams and avoid this concentration of power. 

The Patriots’ success is mirrored throughout the broader Boston economy. Boston rivals Silicon Valley as a source of innovation. The City is home to a thriving life sciences sector, an increasing number of startups, and the HQs of global brands like GE and Converse. A university town, Boston is home to 50 higher education institutions (including Harvard and MIT) and some 250 thousand students. A highly productive workforce, the City of Boston estimates that economic output would be $27 billion less, were their population just average. Perhaps the best indicator of its success, is that the number of craft breweries has doubled over the last five years.

The rest of Massachusetts doesn’t fare so well, and problems intensified during the GFC. Massachusetts sat square in the middle of America’s Industrial Revolution. Towns like Lowellused to be the centre of the US textiles industry. Elsewhere, New Bedford used to be the capital of America’s whaling industry; and Holyoke used to be a major paper mill town.

The challenge for the Massachusetts State Government is how to spread the success of Boston to areas that used to matter.

Massachusetts is home to (originally 11, now) 26 Gateway Cities. Gateway Cities are midsized urban centres that anchor regional economies around the state. While they face stubborn social and economic challenges, they retain any assets with unrealised potential.

To give a sense of that hardship, between 1970 and 2005, Greater Boston grew by 51 per cent, adding almost 500 thousand new jobs to the area. Over the same period, the original 11 Gateway Cities contracted in net terms by 3 per cent, shedding 11 thousand jobs (including over 134 thousand jobs in manufacturing). The gap in per capita incomes has grown from about 18 per cent to 28 per cent. 

Hence the need for the Gateway Cities Programme – an ambitious effort seeking neighbourhood stabilisation, economic development and a reversion of declining population growth rates.

The State has been able to leverage off of the state university system and create centres of excellence in these regional towns. UMass Lowell, for example, specialises in advanced manufacturing. UMass Dartmouth in New Bedford, has established itself as a leader in maritime and the blue economy. UMass Amherst near Holyoke, is specialising in agtech and food manufacturing. And with these centres of excellence has come a pipeline of talent.

Industry has followed. One of the criteria used to pick the Gateway Cities was the presence of transport infrastructure. Industry needed to be able to access Boston, without having to pay the high rents. Strategic real estate developments, tax incentives, payments for jobs created also help. 

Have they been successful? The reports are peppered with comments like “it’s a marathon not a sprint”, which gives a flavour of any evaluation. That said, nine of the Gateway Cities submitted bids to be Amazon’s HQ2 (which is admittedly a low bar for success).