Vice President Al Gore and Andrew Cuomo, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), paid a special visit to Amsterdam, N.Y., Sept. 30 to release a preliminary report on HUD's efforts to jump-start the historic barge canal region's stalled economy. Their findings: economic investments have indeed increased tourism and produced jobs in the economically depressed canal corridor over the past three years, and they have the potential to do much more.

The report was produced by researchers at Cornell's Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP) and was based on a Cornell CRP study that looked at four upstate communities — Fulton, Little Falls, Lockport and Oswego — involved in the HUD-supported Canal Corridor Initiative (CCI) to spur private investment in revenue-generating projects in the region's 32 counties. The researchers also did a regionwide study, employing sophisticated analytic tools.

"HUD's investment in the canal corridor is likely to yield about 17,000 additional jobs in tourism and related industries alone ... retail, hotels, restaurants, recreation services, water and passenger transportation ... and a $447 million increase in state and local revenues," stated the report's authors in their executive summary. Better yet, the researchers discovered that success in tourism can make communities more attractive places for manufacturing, producing or retaining many more jobs than the communities themselves estimated when they initially applied for loan assistance through the CCI.

This is terrific news for upstaters along the canal corridor, which has lost so many jobs in recent years that it caused New York state's job-growth ranking to sink to 49th in the nation by the mid-1990s, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute, prompting Cuomo's comment that, "The engine of economic growth ... [had] stalled in parts of upstate New York."

"This [Cornell report] shows that innovative economic development strategies can work for families in upstate New York," said Gore. "We must continue to build on these efforts to ensure that no community is left behind and that we do all we can to offer hope for troubled communities by creating new jobs and more livable communities for working families."

The turnaround began in 1996, when HUD's CCI began to offer grant and loan resources as well as economic development expertise to small communities along the canal corridor. In 1997 HUD forged a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), strengthening the CCI. In 1996-98, HUD and USDA together provided or leveraged about $800 million for corridor communities, considerably enhancing the state's own plans for developing the region economically. HUD's $237.3 million in grants and loan guarantees was bolstered by USDA's $160.2 million in assistance. Together they stimulated an additional $402.6 million in investment from the private sector and state and local governments. [Note: The researchers studied the impact of the HUD investment and the additional funds it stimulated, but not the USDA investment.]

The Cornell research team chose Fulton, Little Falls, Lockport and Oswego for their case studies because "as a group they illustrate the full range of the strategies used in the 32 counties" supported by the CCI, the report's authors wrote. Although the four canal communities had plans for development, observed the Cornell researchers, "they needed support to turn their plans into reality. With the CCI acting as a catalyst," they emphasized, "local officials were able to think broadly about their development agenda, including how to utilize improvements in public facilities and services to attract and retain manufacturing jobs."

One city official, in Fulton, reported: "If CCI had not come along this [development] would not have happened. We would have lost Sealright" [a Fulton manufacturer]. "You would have had to turn off the lights. CCI helped us pull together a package that saved manufacturing jobs and led to downtown revitalization!"

Susan Christopherson, a Cornell Department of City and Regional Planning professor, was the project coordinator for the study and report. The team included CRP professors Pierre Clavel and Sid Saltzman, visiting associate professor Kenneth Reardon and a group of CRP graduate students: Todd Alexander, Jeffrey Lawhead, Rainer vom Hofe, Karen Westmont and Eric Wilson. To determine their findings, they employed the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), an internationally recognized tool to trace how expenditures move through various sectors of the economy.

With the Canal Corridor Initiative slated to continue through 1999 and with the bulk of the monetary investments just going in now, the planners are hopeful that the "multiplier effect" predicted through SAM will ensure greater economic prosperity for the region well into the first decade of the millennium. By February 2000 the researchers expect to complete a second, more-comprehensive report analyzing CCI's effectiveness over time throughout the region. For a copy of the initial report, contact Cornell's Department of City and Regional Planning, (607) 255-8772.