Providence is Sticky

Apparently Providence is sticky. This article in the NYT doesn't paint such a glorious portrait, but it suggests college grads don't want to leave the city-state.

Here's the pertinent excerpt, in case you don't want to spend time registering with the Times:

PROVIDENCE (pop. 175,255)

(BROWN; RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN)

Freshly minted graduates support themselves (and their art projects) with part-time jobs like milling soap, making cheese or working as nannies for professors’ children.

They share cavernous spaces in converted 19th-century textile mills in working-class neighborhoods rapidly rising in value, often to the dismay of longtime residents.

“Providence used to be a place where graduates left immediately, but now it’s gotten to the point where people not affiliated with either university are moving here just to be near a young, creative community,” says Megan Hall, 26, a public radio reporter who graduated from Brown in 2004 and initially lived in a partially converted potato warehouse, where sacks of potatoes were routinely delivered to the building by forklift. “A lot of us can experiment with this really simple lifestyle. We’re not afraid of being poor.”

Ms. Hall still thinks about returning home to Portland, Ore. Most of her friends, she says, talk about leaving but never do. Last year, she and a friend made a radio documentary, “The Break Up Project Performance,” about the city’s incestuous dating pool, which begins with a teary-voiced woman complaining about all the times she runs into her former boyfriend.

“I go to get my morning coffee, and you’re there,” the woman says, sighing. “I see you in line at the grocery store, at the post office, bookstore, the record shop, on the opposite side of the street. Your friends, your flyers, your stupid [expletive] band. It’s all here, and everywhere, and it feels like I’m suffocating.”