Those interested in a resilient economy in Rhode Island should celebrate developers like Pat Conley who ignore the straitjackets that government places as the price of admission for doing business.
Flouting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the R.I. Department of Environmental Management and city fathers to create an exceptionally renovated social club, host the high-speed ferry terminal (all the while holding our noses to the subsidies that keep that fun but fuel-gulping carnival ride going) and present summer carnivals, Conley has added immeasurably to Providence city life.
But if zoning ought not to be used as a pre-textual weapon against creative entrepreneurship, it has no business being employed against existing businesses either. This is where Conley should be hoist on his own petard. His efforts to co-opt Providence zoning ordinances as a weapon against his industrial neighbors are hypocrisy on a scale that makes Moliere’s Tartuffe out to be genuine.
Conley’s determined pursuit of zoning changes that would label longstanding industrial facilities nonconforming has made enemies of the very constituency with whom he could forge common interest in the long-term economic stability of that neighborhood. Unfortunately his vision is not really one of mixed use, but rather of his use.
The city doesn’t really believe in mixed use either when it comes to industrial concerns. By mixed use, they really mean a few shops downstairs from condominiums, maybe a doctor’s office or two, perhaps a software firm – definitely not any kind of gritty business where they actually make something.
When the American Locomotive Works (Alco) project steamrolled into Providence’s West Side, the attitude was not how to meld with existing industry, but how to get rid of it. And for all the handwringing about the workers at industrial businesses displaced by that renewal project, the city did nothing to offset the significant loss of 20-plus acres of land inhabited by diverse small businesses. This hodgepodge of manufacturing, artisans, artists and below-the-radar residential use is unlikely to ever be duplicated to the same extent under the city’s ill-conceived regulatory umbrella.
Accommodations made for this preferred use of the moment, tax favoritism in their case, have amounted to prohibitions on the less chichi status quo. Such will be the grim “either/or” economic fate of maritime industry if the City of Providence should weigh in on this waterfront dispute with its “planning expertise.”
The Met Café, after all, began life as a bar that served those leaving the first shift in the Jewelry District as well as those preparing for the second. Its makeover by a few upstart youth wasn’t an attempt to displace existing industry or lead a vanguard of gentrification. It was an investment in the community that valued the existing clientele while eventually making space for the creative exercise of a younger generation.
Likewise, the Providence waterfront may look different several generations from now. But this ought to be a matter of the market, not of the government dictating the course of development there.
Indeed, it was the imperial attitude of Mayor Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci’s administration that already precipitated the departure of good businesses from the Providence waterfront. Cianci’s vision was a virtual carbon copy of Pat Conley’s. The mayor described the scene in one of his inaugural addresses as an “old industrial waterfront – a sea of petroleum tanks, asphalt plants and other unsightly uses, stretching more than a mile along Allens Avenue.”
Seaboat, a waterborne transportation service that builds some of its own tug and barge fleet, employed a dozen people on Providence’s docks a dozen years ago when Buddy set his sights on the waterfront. CEO Don Church got the message loud and clear, and wasted no time moving to Fall River, where employment is now greater than 100.
So cheers for the legacy Pat Conley has built on the Providence waterfront, and jeers if he can’t maintain and improve it without undercutting the business pursuits of his neighbors. •
Brian Bishop is director of communications for the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, a public policy and research group “focused on crafting sound public policy based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, and traditional American value.” Additional information, visit www.OceanStatePolicy.org.
