Small Cities USA: Growth, Diversity, and Inequality

3 Putting Out the Welcome Mat

71 Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is one of the few colleges in the United States where students can major in Portuguese. While Brown is known for having a highly varied and particular undergraduate curriculum, Portuguese is a strong department there because of student interest and because Rhode Island is home to a large number of people from Portugal (including the Azores) and Brazil. Indeed, the existence of a doctoral program in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies indicates just how entrenched the Portuguese-speaking community is in Rhode Island and nearby southern Massachusetts. Yet Portuguese-speaking countries are only several of a multitude of nations whose citizens have moved to Providence and its surrounds. Although in 2000 only about 4 percent of the population claimed Portuguese descent (and another several percent Brazilian ancestry), over 40 percent of the population spoke a language other than English at home. This included new Latino immigrants (about 30 percent of all households that speak a language other than English) as well as a smaller group of immigrants from Asian or Pacific Island nations (about 6 percent of such households). About 25 percent of Providence’s population was born outside the United States;11percent had come to the United States since1990. By 2006, about 29 percent of the city was foreign born. And while the city is known for its Portuguese and Italian neighborhoods , particularly Federal Hill with its La Pigna sculpture, a symbol of welcome and abundance, hanging over the main street, over one-third 3 Putting Out the Welcome Mat How People Affect Small Cities 72 CHAPTER 3 of residents identified as Hispanic/Latino by 2006. This change in the demographic composition of Providence has changed the local landscape. Where there used to be Italian groceries there are now bodegas. In addition to the slightly unusual ethnic composition of the metro area, Providence is home to a large number of institutions of higher education . While all of the small cities in this book have at least one four-year college or university, Providence boasts ten. The most famous are Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, each of which is influential in the city. Both institutions bring in speakers, offer extension courses, have renowned museums and library collections, and sponsor ongoing projects in collaboration with local communities. Other nearby schools fill the needs of a variety of student groups: the land grant school of the University of Rhode Island offers a much less expensive education and Providence College and others offer private alternatives. Like many smaller cities, Providence’s leaders have embraced the idea of cultivating the “creative class” and the “creative sectors.” In the city’s June 2009 publication Creative Providence: A Cultural Plan for the Creative Sector, city leaders outline their strategies for encouraging the growth of this group (City of Providence 2009). Key goals for the city include “mobiliz[ing] the creative sector by positioning the [city’s] department of art, culture and tourism as a leader in creative economic development” and “creat[ing] conditions for creative workers to thrive in Providence” (ibid., 9, 29). Providence has implemented the theories Richard Florida only partially; it seeks to attract and provide support for people involved in the arts instead of trying to stimulate all sorts of creativity as Florida advises in his book The Creative Class. However, Providence has largely succeeded in fostering the creative class. According to census estimates, as of 2005, a little over 40 percent of the city’s work force was employed in jobs related to arts and entertainment , education, health care, or social services. (Of course, the data do not reveal how many of those are low-level jobs with low wages and few bene fits, compared to high-level ones with better compensation and benefits.) If we add the census category of “professional and scientific management,” the percentage of workers in Providence in the creative class exceeds 50 percent. Providence epitomizes the “new economy” of the United States; it is focused on services, many of which are in the creative sector. PUTTING OUT THE WELCOME MAT 73 Introduction As Providence illustrates, smaller cities are destinations for a wide variety of people. Smaller cities draw people just as big cities do, and for surprisingly similar reasons. In this chapter, I assess how the characteristics of the people who live in a smaller metro area affect how well that...