For grads, all roads lead out of town

As big-city recruiters beckon, Yale and New Haven struggle to compete.

BY DAN FEDER

Scott Healy, TC '96, works in a modern, newly renovated office in the back of a large building on a busy city block. In less than two years, he has gone from being a new hire in his organization to being the boss, and he now commands a small army of employees and interns. He wields a cell phone and a Palm Pilot, and he owns his own house. For most Yale graduates, this is the picture of success, a dream that seems within easy reach as investment bank recruiters from New York and Boston high-tech startups fight tooth and nail to hire Yale's best and brightest each year.

Healy's story, however, did not go the way of recruiters or a move to the big city. Healy is the executive director of the Town Green Special Services District in New Haven, an organization that, according to its mission statement, works "to create and promote an inviting, clean, and safe environment for all residents, employees, and visitors who utilize New Haven's Downtown."

But until Healy took a year off from Yale to work on an environmental conference in New Haven, he "had crossed the Green to come as far as Church Street maybe two or three times." Healy now crosses the Green every day, commuting to his office on Church Street from his home in the Dwight neighborhood, and he insists that New Haven "isn't necessarily just a place that you have to suffer for four years." He speaks glowingly of the work the city government and his own organization have done to make New Haven more attractive to young professionals, and he shares in the pride of residents who value the vibrancy of the city's culture. Most of the factors that drive people away soon after graduation are matters of perception, he says.

"If you are a Yale student and you decide to stay [in New Haven], the first thing people say to you when they see you around is, `Didn't you graduate?' It's always the same question: this appalled, surprised, shocked, `Can't you be doing better than this?' attitude," Healy said. "That's very frustrating. You don't find as many Harvard students shunning Cambridge and Boston after graduation, because it's not perceived as a backwater."

BUT BY MOST OBJECTIVE MEASURES, NEW HAVEN IS MOVING away from its long-standing reputation as a backwater. In August 2001, Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. announced that the city would finish the current fiscal year with a $4 million surplus. The New Haven Police Department boasts that the city's crime rate continues to drop below the national average. According to U.S. Census Bureau projections, New Haven's population will grow by more than 13,000 over the next 20 years. Yet these are not the statistics that make or break a city as a desirable place to live.

Richard Florida, the H. John Heinz III Professor of Regional Economic Development at Carnegie Mellon University, spoke last week before the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce about the need for communities and universities to commit to "technology, talent, and tolerance" in order to attract young people. Florida has studied the relationship between talent, "coolness," and diversity in cities; he has written extensively on the ways cities can make themselves attractive to the "creative class."

"There's a creative class in the United States—40 million people—and what these people want is diversity, not homogeneity," Florida explained, identifying those who graduate from Yale as future members of this demographic. "For New Haven, that means it cannot be two societies, with a perimeter around Yale enclosing wealth and privilege."

Florida's work might be instructive for Yale and New Haven. For many years, universities, including Yale, were unimportant actors in the economic lives of their cities; they churned out talent that had very little impact on their surroundings. With the past decade's move towards a knowledge-based economy, though, institutions have become intertwined with the lives of cities, simply because they were the largest sources of raw talent. Florida points out that Boulder, Colo. and Madison, Wis. are areas that would never have become important contributors to the national economy if they weren't home to major universities. Institutions such as Stanford and MIT have entered the top tier of American academia largely because of their success in developing and promoting their locales. Kendall Square in Boston was a working-class community until MIT made a conscious effort to attract science firms to the area, while Stanford and Silicon Valley fed off each other's success.

"I did notice, in New Haven, that there's really no sense that the fates [of the city and Yale] are intertwined, and that's really the future," Florida said. "To be honest, the burden rests with the university. The university is where the top talent is, and generally it needs to push the community in a positive direction."

BUT FLORIDA IS NOT SO SURE THAT Yale and New Haven know quite what to do in order to make these kinds of changes. "Here's what makes me nervous: universities want to do economic development, and so the universities should be at the cutting-edge of studying the economic development of their cities. But they don't understand the problem they're trying to solve," he said. "We do not know why people make location decisions, and that should be a focus of study for the universities. [In terms of economic development,] universities just do, do, do—they don't think."

Yale and New Haven have made several uncertain steps toward economic development, such as the about-face on the decision to build Long Wharf Mall and the uncertain status of the redevelopment of the Ninth Square district. Currently, the city's economic development plan, supported by the University, centers on the redevelopment of Broadway and Downtown and an effort to attract biotechnology to the Science Park area. But some complain that these initiatives promise little for city residents—including graduates who might choose to remain in New Haven—and will ultimately fail to build any sort of community out of Yale's talent base.

"Biotech is an important component in the economy," said Calvin Nicholson, DC '00, who now works at a biotech firm in New Haven. "To say it's a savior is ludicrous. There's too much emphasis by the mayor on biotech, and there's no real benefit for those who live in New Haven." Florida agrees. "Every university has gone down the technology transfer path," he said. "But when those companies get successful, they're going to move to a city with a higher quality of life or quality of place. New Haven needs an arts and dance and music transfer, not a technology transfer."

President Richard Levin, GRD '74, defends Yale and New Haven's investment in biotech, even as companies like Cellular Genomics, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, and Curagen have recently moved their operations out of New Haven. "We have pushed a number of different areas with less success than we've had in the biotech area," he said. "We spent a number of years trying to push financial service organizations to locate here. We didn't have a lot of success. We had maybe one or two alumni firms open in New Haven. We've talked to law firms and venture capital firms and have had some success, mostly in convincing New York or Boston groups to open offices here. Biotech seems most likely to succeed."

As for Broadway redevelopment, there is conflict over whose needs the project serves. Nicholson, who grew up in New Haven, says that Broadway is essentially where Yale students shop; New Haven residents stay in the downtown commercial area, so new retailers on Broadway only reinforce the division between Yale and the city.

THIS DIVISION FALLS IN LINE with Florida's measure of "coolness." Talented people in the creative class are attracted to cities with a thriving popular and classical music scene, opportunities for recreation, an exciting and vibrant cultural life, and an active nightlife.

Florida points to the development of a unique musical sound as a factor that makes areas like North Carolina's research triangle and the Pacific Northwest attractive places for the creative class to live and places that have therefore become bastions of the new knowledge-based economy. Austin, Tex. combined its famous South-by-Southwest film and music festivals, storied nightlife, and a strong university into one of the fastest-growing technology centers in the country. Companies are actually moving there to hire people.

The elements of "coolness"—factors like nightlife and an artistic community—exist to some extent on and around Yale's campus. But they are not marketed or geared towards the New Haven community, which reinforces, in Healy's words, the idea that "what is good about New Haven is Yale and what's not so good about New Haven is what's outside of the Yale campus."

IN TRYING TO BRIDGE THIS DIVIDE, YALE ADMINIStrators point to a number of different programs. "We want people to see New Haven as a vibrant community where one can pursue a career," Michael Morand, SY '87, associate vice president for New Haven and State Affairs, said. "We're trying to communicate New Haven's aspects in a more positive way, and the best way to do that is to expose people to New Haven and to continue to increase its strengths."

He specifically mentioned the work of Dwight Hall and the Yale President's Public Service Fellowship (a program that pays students to stay in New Haven over the summer to work for non-profit and public-sector organizations), as well as one-time programs like FOCUS and Cityscape, as initiatives that make students feel more familiar and comfortable with the city.

These programs have been around for some time, and they have not produced a noticeable difference in most Yale students' attitudes toward New Haven. Seventy-five percent of undergraduates are involved in community service, and the Office of New Haven and State Affairs constantly advertises programs that work to make the city better. But it seems these well-intentioned efforts only serve to highlight the city's problems.

"I love that Dwight Hall exists, and it does very important work," Healy said. "But I also know that some students begin to suffer the `Dwight Hall syndrome,' that everything about New Haven is a problem and everything about New Haven needs to be solved, where the reality is that every city in America has its challenges and its problems." Nicholson sees the same problems. "If the city seems [to students] to be crumbling around the University, no matter what the University does, students aren't going to want to stay," he said.

Even programs specifically designed to give students a taste of New Haven have their faults. FOCUS on New Haven, a weeklong service-oriented program for rising sophomores, and Cityscape, a tour that takes students to "visit parks, neighborhoods, historic sites, and other attractions" around New Haven, highlight the city's strengths and weaknesses. But these one-time programs are open only to a limited number of students early in their Yale careers, and are thus removed from the career and location decisions seniors make as they contemplate life after graduation.

In all of this, there seems to be a sense of complacency among Yale administrators. "The programs we support are a mix—the internships are a pretty healthy mix of helping the disadvantaged and promoting the city's strengths," Levin said. But these initiatives are more traditional, exemplifying the "Dwight Hall syndrome," and do not necessarily have the attractive effects that Florida cites as being important for New Haven.

NEVERTHELESS, HEALY THINKS YALE HAS COME a long way in terms of presenting New Haven to its students, especially compared to when he was a freshman 10 years ago. "Back then, Yale's only student orientation to New Haven occurred more or less at the campus security talks, where New Haven became for me not so much a city as a place to walk carefully with someone else at night," he recalled. "The student who led the admissions information session before I applied said that Yale's only major downfall was its location in New Haven. Since that time, perspectives among students have changed incredibly."

Healy has several suggestions for making students aware of job and career opportunities in New Haven, including "having a more effective dialogue with corporate leaders, the Chamber of Commerce, City Hall, and the Yale population." He also thinks that there should be fellows in colleges whose job it is to let people know about companies and organizations in New Haven looking to hire graduates.

Florida, for his part, emphasizes that the kinds of opportunities Healy wants to publicize don't yet exist. "Yale needs to be balanced and understand community building," he said. "Not in the urban renewal sense, but in creating wealth and new businesses and in contributing to diversity." The way to attract new, knowledge-based businesses is to increase diversity, which Florida found is the top reason talented people decide to move into an area.

"New Haven didn't look as bad as I had expected," he said. "[But] New Haven doesn't feel like a creative place." And with the Yale admissions office still advertising New Haven as "70 miles north of New York City and 120 miles south of Boston," Yale's hometown does not seem to be going anywhere fast.

Graphics by Erin I. Lewis and Rebecca Rosenthal. Cover photos by Claire Conly and Steve Ybarra.

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