Illustration by Rich Hauck.
Recently, my wife and I ventured down Route 283, as we do a few times a year, to experience Lancaster’s First Friday.
I say “experience” because that’s what it is. On a beautiful, warm evening, the downtown blocks in and around Prince Street were so crowded that it was difficult to walk, customers and browsers wandering in and out of the shops along the city’s Gallery Row.
And I thought (as I have before): This is what a historic downtown should look like—shops and restored storefronts oozing character and commerce. And, as usual, I thought of how far Harrisburg, with few shops and much of its historic downtown leveled, is from this small-city charm.
Therefore, I was pretty surprised when, just a couple of weeks later, I read about a new study from Franklin & Marshall College’s Floyd Institute for Public Policy that said that, basically, I was a sucker. I had fallen for—well, maybe not quite a mirage, but certainly a distortion of what Lancaster really was.
The report, titled “Lancaster Prospers?” gave a devastating assessment of the state of the city, saying that downtown was an island of prosperity surrounded by a sea of poverty. In fact, outside the downtown core, per-capita income had fallen in each of the city’s other 13 neighborhoods, many by double-digits, from 2000 to 2013.
“The intensification of disparities between and within areas of the city has the potential to fray the fabric of social life,” warned the report.
A defensive Mayor Rick Gray later wrote an op-ed that called the Floyd Institute’s report “shallow” and “simplistic” and said his city, in addition to investing downtown, had poured “tens of millions of dollars” into impoverished neighborhoods.
“We can only wonder what the city would look like today without the economic development and investment Lancaster has seen over the past 10 years,” Gray said in the Lancaster daily, LNP.
And, again, I thought of Harrisburg.
Lancaster and Harrisburg are very different cities with very different recent histories. From 2000 to 2013, Lancaster tried to elevate itself into a regional hub for the arts, tourism and young professionals, while Harrisburg suffered an historic financial meltdown and state receivership. Yet, during this time, both cities had almost identical increases in their rates of poverty (about 8 percentage points), with nearly one-third of their populations now living below the poverty line.
What gives?
The fact is that fighting poverty is a monumental task, its causes varied and complex and its solutions largely beyond the control of local officials. “Tens of millions of dollars” may be a lot of money for small cities like Lancaster and Harrisburg, but it’s a trickle compared to the magnitude of the problem.
The Floyd Institute doesn’t seem to have any answers either. Its report includes some vague language about improving housing affordability and employment opportunities in the neighborhoods. However, it lacks concrete ideas on how to do that, other than advocating the ultimate recipe for inaction—another poverty study.
That’s not a surprise. If there were a magic bullet for alleviating poverty, everyone would be doing it. Instead, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction.
The fact is that we don’t live in a command economy. A local government can’t, at will, create jobs for low-skilled workers or force landlords to reduce their rents. Most of the economy is in private hands, a fact that many academic studies gloss over or dismiss. In cities, even small cities, thousands of people own the rental housing, the stores, the hospitals, the eateries and the other places where lower-income people live and work. It’s the broad, diffuse, tough-to-control private sector, not the concentrated public sector, which has the greatest impact on the economies and lives of people.
So, as the Floyd Institute calls for action from the public sector, I call for action from the private sector. Here in the Harrisburg area, that can take many forms—from working with school kids to greater job training to seeding entrepreneurship to targeting impoverished areas for small-scale manufacturing to helping workers put down roots in the city, which feeds economic activity. The need is tremendous, as are the options for action.
An excellent start would be for private landowners in Harrisburg who’ve long neglected their properties to begin to take responsibility for them. As I’ve said in a previous column, if you buy a dilapidated building or empty lot and, within a year or so, don’t begin to improve it, you’ve become part of the problem, no matter how well intentioned you may be. You’re now contributing to the blight in that neighborhood, discouraging redevelopment and economic progress.
I especially call upon the owners of property along the 3rd Street corridor to take action. With anchors like H*MAC, Midtown Scholar, the Broad Street Market, the Susquehanna Art Museum, Campus Square and Midtown Cinema, that stretch has tremendous promise. The coming redevelopment of the old Moose Lodge temple at 3rd and Boas streets is another critical piece in stitching downtown and Midtown back together.
However, the corridor will never reach its full potential until other buildings there are renovated and occupied by responsible tenants. Unlike downtown, 3rd Street retains enough of its 19th-century building stock that, if restored, it could do for Harrisburg what Gallery Row has done for Lancaster.
Harrisburg’s municipal government is stressed simply picking up trash, fixing streetlights, policing streets and providing other core services. Expecting it, or any local government, to solve a 30-percent poverty rate is fantasy.
Therefore, the private sector must take greater responsibility. To date, a handful of people have stepped up to start good companies and to improve dilapidated buildings, but they can’t carry the entire burden. Others must join this effort—companies and individuals that have the means to do so—if we’re ever going to create an attractive, more prosperous city that will encourage people to visit, spend money, contribute taxes and generate employment.
In my view, that’s the part of the social contract that’s most missing.
Lawrance Binda is editor-in-chief of TheBurg.
