A Gateway Cities guru

MassInc.'s Schneider bullish on communities like Lowell

LOWELL -- John Schneider spent his summers growing up playing pickup baseball in the Pittsfield city parks and evenings at the minor league baseball stadium watching future stars of the game.

He remembers "a terrific mix of blue- and white-collar" families, who like his father depended on General Electric for employment.

"It was a time when Pittsfield was really at its peak," Schneider said, recalling a prosperous downtown and vibrant civic community.

General Electric is gone. His father still lives on a GE pension. And Pittsfield, like Lowell, Lawrence and other cities that rose to prominence during the manufacturing boom, are facing new challenges.

Schneider is optimistic they will succeed.

Schneider, 50, now serves as executive vice president of the Boston-based MassInc., the organization responsible for research that explores the future of Massachusetts' so-called "Gateway Cities," 11 urban centers outside Boston that Schneider and others believe are crucial to the state's health.

The report found that since 1970, these 11 cities lost more than 3 percent of their job base, while Greater Boston experienced a 51 percent job growth buoyed by advances in the biomedical, education and finance industries.

Once a "gateway" for newcomers to this country, these 11 cities, including Lowell, Fitchburg and Pittsfield, also are now home to 30 percent of all Massachusetts residents living in poverty, despite accounting for only 15 percent of the state's population.

The project has taken on special meaning for a man who has a soft spot for the Gateway Cities.

Schneider graduated from Northeastern University with an education degree, moved to Chicago where he received a graduate degree from Loyola University and eventually worked in student affairs there.

He returned to Massachusetts 12 years later, lured by a job at Bradford College in Haverhill.

Soon after he resumed his studies at Northeastern, where he became former Gov. Michael Dukakis' first graduate assistant, forming a friendship that still lasts today.

He now lives in Lowell's Highlands neighborhood with his wife, Mary Gaynor. Schneider has three children: stepdaughter Wendy Albert, a Boston teacher; stepson Jeff Albert, a recent UMass Lowell graduate; and Rosey Gaynor Schneider, 14, the couple's adopted daughter.

Schneider moved to Lowell in 1996. He recalls that on a warm night in June 2004, he watched the funeral service for former President Ronald Reagan as his Cambodian neighbors celebrated the first day of a three-day Cambodian wedding festival, an elaborate ritual rich with tradition and ceremony.

On his television was the face of man who had risen to the highest office in the United States. Out his window was a family just beginning their journey.

"I thought, 'This is what it's all about. This is the American Dream,'" said Schneider. It's what smaller cities represent for so many residents, he said.

The Gateway Cities project was born out of a memo from Schneider to then-MassInc. President Trip Jones suggesting the think tank look into how the former mill cities and industrial hubs were being ignored by current economic policies as the state's wealth and business concentrated around Greater Boston.

"Massachusetts needs to be many things to be prosperous. It needs a strong Boston, to be sure, but it needs stronger regional cities, or Gateway Cities, to be places of opportunity and social mobility," Schneider said.

MassInc. typically lets its research stand and avoids the messy politics of public-policy advocacy. But the think tank will soon publish a set of policy recommendations related to the economic prosperity of Gateway Cities, and recently brought together Lt. Gov. Tim Murray and the mayors of all 11 cities to sign a pact uniting them.

"John gets it viscerally," MassInc. President Greg Torres said. "It's not something he understands just in his mind, but in his gut. He realizes if we don't do better for the mill cities we are taking a rung out of the ladder."

Schneider counts Boarding House Park, LeLacheur Park and the Tsongas Arena among his favorite places in Lowell. He's become quite of fan of the new Merrimack Street hot dog restaurant Bad Dawgs.

Since moving to the city, he said he has seen tremendous progress from the construction of the ballpark, arena and the mill-to-condo conversions, but now feels the city might be running in place.

Schneider said he is excited about the Hamilton Canal District project, and would like to see the city diversify its leadership. He wants the city to rally about its new school superintendent, Chris Augusta Scott, and create one of the best urban school districts in the country.

He also is optimistic about Pittsfield, now that leaders appear ready to develop arts and culture, rather than hope a new major corporation moves in.

Schneider is the first to say change doesn't happen over night. But for all the energy and passion he has devoted to these cities, he knows it won't happen by accident either.

This story appeared in the Lowell Sun on Sunday, June 30, 2008