New England a region connected, not divided north to south

“You have to understand. There are two separate New Englands.”

Talk to New Englanders and this is what you hear. The south is rich, the north is poor. There’s no common connection.

Sorry, we don’t agree. To be sure, there’s a connected, university-packed, high-technology southern New England. It’s the place of economic buzz, bigger incomes, fed by the bustling Boston economy or spun off from the commercial colossus of New York. It even has high-tech fingers poking northward, in big numbers in southern New Hampshire, plus Maine’s hot-growth belt – Portland and its environs.

And it’s true; northern New England, hit by factory and lumber mill closings, is often seen as rural, remote, unwired, and often withering, even by some residents. As one Maine editor noted: “The northern two-thirds of this state have been in economic transition for 25 years, with no indication of where it will take us. We’re the coastal anchor of a depression belt across the northern tier through New Hampshire, Vermont and across upstate New York.”

Even so, thousands of southern New Englanders prize the north, its mountains and lakes and villages, for vacations, and dream about retiring there. The secret of successful regions isn’t differences, it’s connections. Neither north-versus-south nor east-versus-west thinking helps plan a future. As attorney and civic activist Don Dubendorf of Williamstown, Mass., told us over lunch on a cold, crisp day: “New England uses geography as an excuse for all kinds of decisions – or not making any.”

But the excuse disappears if you see New England as a single region linked south to north rather than separated north versus south. It’s two corridors where the vast majority of New Englanders have chosen to live and work.

Ironically, the southern anchor isn’t even in New England; it’s New York City. The grand division into corridors occurs at New Haven. The coastal corridor, its marker federal Interstate 95 and the Northeast rail corridor, stretches past New London, up to Providence, through metropolitan Boston to coastal Maine, with a significant bump of development focused on I-93 into southern New Hampshire and another through Worcester, Fitchburg and Keene.

At its easternmost extremity, the coastal corridor has fingers probing into Canada’s eastern Maritime Provinces. With an economy reinvented around higher education and technology, biosciences, health care and financial services, plus the much-sought-after tourist and retirement communities that share lobstering activity along the south Maine coast, the coastal corridor is mostly prosperous, though dotted with pockets of serious poverty.

New England’s other major development spine lies more inland, chiefly along I-91’s ribbons of concrete and asphalt. This corridor moves up the Connecticut River valley to Hartford and then Springfield, through Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley including the remarkable constellation of colleges around Northampton, and then directly beside the river as it divides Vermont and New Hampshire. Along the way it passes by the prosperous (and we found forward-looking) “Upper Valley” community focused on Hanover, N.H., and its notable Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. The corridor’s I-89 spur encompasses the lively northern city of Burlington on Lake Champlain, with Montreal not far to the north.

The western corridor has an admittedly less glowing reputation – in part because Springfield has had to struggle economically and Hartford, though a state capital, suffers acutely the New England’s syndrome of centuries-old town borders sealing off poor center cities from their affluent suburbs. Still, if it’s pushed strongly, the bi-state “Knowledge Corridor,” with its focus on academic-scientific assets, has real potential to invigorate this area’s economy.

A two-corridor New England concept doesn’t mean eastern and western New England get disconnected. Instead, it suggests rich varieties of connection that give each corridor a stake in the other’s success. A prime example: supplementing Northeast Corridor rail with high-speed service running west from Boston, through Worcester to Springfield, then down through Hartford to New York – a potentially big shot in the arm for western corridor cities, as their accessibility to Boston and New York soars.

Another potential: “on-shoring,” encouraging Boston area pharmaceutical firms to choose close-by but lower-cost New England labor markets in the Connecticut River Valley for their production facilities, a concept advanced by A.T. Kearney in its regional economic analysis for the New England Council. Otherwise, the manufacturing continues to float off to places like North Carolina, or overseas.

In a globalized, broadband, instant-access century, New England’s ingrained divisions look more myopic and petty than ever. Seen from afar, this is a tiny corner of the United States and the world. Florida alone has more people, California almost 2.5 times as many. Yet opening its eyes to new reality, New England could move confidently to create new connections, geographic corridors and communities of intriguing opportunity.