Coming out of the great financial crisis, I did a documentary exploring better ideas for the economy. For a taste of problems looking for solutions, we opened the film — “Fixing the Future” — in a New England mill town littered with closed factories.
An early shot shows me peering into a clothing store that had sat empty for 15 years. The Hathaway shirt and Scott Paper jobs were gone, and big boxes had sucked retail out to near the I-95 interchanges. I knew this because this was my hometown, Waterville, on the Kennebec River in Maine. It was 2010.
A dozen years later, a new $26 million hotel, the Lockwood, stands on the same block. The bar off the lobby looks like it was barged up the river intact from Manhattan. But private hotel chains weren’t spending on this stretch of Main Street that time forgot. Who…
