Report Examines Untapped Potential in America's Northeast

With America's extraordinary economic expansion comes an opportunity to extend the Nation's prosperity to people and places still left behind. A special supplement to HUD's report, Now Is the Time: Places Left Behind in the New Economy—America's Northeast, examines the economic challenges and the untapped potential of America's Northeast, focusing on its central cities.

Many communities in the Northeast are struggling to recover from the sweeping changes of deindustrialization that began decades ago and trying to find their competitive niche in a changing global economy. This study focuses on communities in the nine states of this region—Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont—that continue to experience economic distress. The study suggests ways in which new markets in these areas can be tapped to contribute to growth in the region and in the Nation.

The study has seven key findings:

• Tracking the Nation's overall success on the economic front, most cities in the Northeast are doing well, and unemployment is down in all central cities.
  
  
• The Northeast has undergone significant economic changes over the previous generation, with major shifts of jobs away from manufacturing and other traditional strengths of the economy.
  
  
• Along with important challenges, the Northeast boasts vital assets for organizing a comeback—an economic renewal that taps important traditions and leaves no community behind.
  
  
• Despite the significant overall drop in unemployment in America's Northeast during the economic expansion of the past 6 years, unacceptably high unemployment remains in nearly 1 in 5 central cities in the region.
  
  
• Steady population loss affects 4 in 10 central cities in the Northeast.
  
  
• By the mid-1990s, persistently high poverty rates plagued nearly 4 in 10 Northeastern central cities, reflecting structural challenges that tend to keep poverty at unacceptably high levels even during a strong economic recovery.
  
  
• One in six central cities in the Northeast faces "double trouble," burdened with two or more indicators of distress, such as significant population loss, high unemployment, and high poverty rates.

The report concludes with descriptions of the Administration's initiatives that will help stimulate investment in distressed areas and reinvigorate communities that continue to struggle. These initiatives include urban and rural Empowerment Zones (and Enterprise Communities), America's Private Investment Companies, brownfields redevelopment, the Economic Development Initiative, Section 108 Loan Guarantees, Community Development Block Grants, and landmark legislation to expand and preserve affordable housing. The Administration focuses on existing assets, including significant untapped markets of land, labor, and buying power—believing that the government can act as a facilitator as the Nation enters a new century.

Now Is the Time: Places Left Behind in the New Economy—America's Northeast is available free of charge from HUD USER. Please use the order form to order online.