This report—prepared in partnership with MassINC, a non-partisan Boston-based think tank—contends that the future of one of the nation’s most advanced state economies depends in part on revitalizing its “Gateway Cities,” the Commonwealth’s once-humming mill and manufacturing towns. Above all, the 11-city study suggests that although the Massachusetts mill cities continue to lose ground on measures of basic economic performance they nevertheless hold out potential answers to some of the Commonwealth’s thorniest housing, sprawl, and workforce problems. Along the way, the study provides a fresh look at a state economy that is at once spatially uneven and increasingly in need of a new state-local partnership to respond to those divides.
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