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Berkshire Taconic Reports Regional Economic Status, In Search For Solutions

Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation
The report, “A Closer Look,” highlights five major themes: the area’s job market, regional demographics, youth, inequality and infrastructure.";s:3:

The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, a 30-year-old grant-producing nonprofit, has released its first-ever regional assessment. 

Last June, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation pooled data from 2,300 residents around its four-county region to better understand the most pressing issues today.

The Sheffield, Massachusetts-based nonprofit has awarded roughly $8 million to organizations in northwest Litchfield County, Connecticut, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and Columbia County and northeast Dutchess County, New York.

Peter Taylor is the foundation’s president.

“You know, at a time when so much focus is understandably at the national level, this report is providing a chance for the foundation, and the nonprofit community, donors and residents, to understand the trends and factors that are impacting our lives locally and in this region,” Taylor says.

The report, “A Closer Look,” highlights five major themes: the area’s job market, regional demographics, youth, inequality and infrastructure.

“The predominant issue on people’s minds is jobs and economic development more broadly,” Taylor says. 

Taylor says even as jobs in the creative economy, food-related industries and tourism are on the rise, the region has had slow overall job growth since the recession.

He says the shifting economic base – “from manufacturing and large-scale agriculture to kind of a service economy” – is a primary concern for residents of all ages, incomes and education levels.

“We heard from adults who said jobs that they held as teenagers, that, you know, being a dishwasher, working in retail, important starter jobs, today are held by adults trying to raise families,” Taylor says.

Meanwhile, Taylor says, a majority of the residents reported having trouble accessing job opportunities even though:

“Employers have openings that they can’t fill that the skills that the residents have that are applying for these jobs don’t line up with the requirements of the position,” Taylor says. “And so this mismatch also presents a challenge in terms of residents getting the good jobs and businesses getting the horsepower that they need to be successful.”

Taylor says more than 20 percent of residents are over the age of 65, and with a shrinking share of working age families, the region is losing population.

Nearly half of the residents under 46 reported a willingness to move out of the region to find better, or more realistic, opportunities in the next three years.

“Educational attainment across the continuum from early childhood to adult learning, we need to invest as a society in education,” Taylor says.

Taylor says low public school enrollment, further harmed by the growing opioid crisis, have implications for current and future employers.

Taylor says that leads to greater poverty rates. He says it’s rising in three-quarters of the region’s towns and cities, and incomes have not kept pace with inflation in over half the region.

“Poverty rates are rising. They are still below the national level,” Taylor says. “For instance it’s 12 percent on average, and its 14, 15 percent nationally, but it’s going in the wrong direction.”

Taylor says housing has become largely unaffordable for many renters – not to mention buying a home. Also, the number of housing units used as second or vacation homes has grown by 28 percent since 2000.

“Our research showed that nearly half – 47 percent – of Berkshire County residents in this case are cost-burdened renters. That means that 30 percent of their income is used for rent, and that’s high – that 25 percent are considered severely cost burdened, that means they have to pay up to 50 percent,” Taylor says.

And while the region has various state and federal historical and cultural protections, Taylor says, services such as transportation and broadband are underdeveloped.

“Our proximity to two of the largest markets in this country. You know, we are two and half hours away from New York and Boston, and that creates opportunities now, as it did in the past, as it will in the future for goods and services that are produced here to be marketed and purchased in those markets,” Taylor says. “Additionally, with connectivity and ease of transportation more, increasingly more and more people are able to live and work in a place and do business elsewhere.”

Taylor says Berkshire Taconic will hold community forums across the region in the fall for civic leaders, lawmakers and residents to discuss a strategy for the future.

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