WWORCESTER — On a Thursday in March, Jon Weaver, president and CEO of Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, had what he calls “success problems.” He was trying to talk to a visitor over construction noise to figure out how many desks he could squeeze into future new office space.
The building is one of three sites owned by the nonprofit incubator for life sciences companies in Worcester. The building opened in 2020 with 25,000 square feet of office and lab space for companies starting and scaling up. By 2023, it had opened 15,000 square feet of manufacturing space. Now, the building was nearly full, with 44 companies and more about to move in.
“We can’t grow fast enough to keep up with demand out here,” Weaver said.
Such strong economic growth in the Gateway Cities should be music to state lawmakers’ ears. For decades, policy makers have fretted that the state’s economy was too Boston-centric and too focused on the “eds and meds,” leaving it exposed in the event of a downturn. The real perils of that overreliance are now becoming clear as the Trump administration slashes research and education funding, putting thousands of jobs in Eastern Massachusetts at risk, while demographic changes mean there will be fewer students at the city’s colleges and universities.
A century ago, the state had what at the time seemed like a diversified economy. Some cities specialized in manufacturing textiles, some focused on shoes, some on toys or firearms. When the Gateway Cities of today carve out their economic niches, they’re not just rebuilding their own local economies — they’re making the whole state more diverse and economically resilient.
Biotech, to be sure, faces headwinds of its own. Still, even amid a glut of empty lab space around Boston, Worcester’s biomedical scene is booming. Weaver said the biggest problem for successful companies is finding places to move when they leave the incubator. Only around 8 percent of companies started at MBI have stayed in Worcester, which Weaver attributes mainly to a dearth of lab buildings. The next goal he and other city leaders have is attracting funding and private developers to build more lab space.
“For a long time, Worcester was trying to sell potential. Now, we have to figure out ways to scale and grow the market that’s here,” Weaver said.
As many Gateway Cities struggle to develop their economies, Worcester offers a model for how a city can pivot from one industry to another to rediscover lost economic vitality. That requires collaboration between city leaders and institutions, with a focus on becoming a global hub for one industry.
Worcester was, historically, a bustling industrial city. In the 1800s and early 1900s, Worcester-made machinery powered the textile industry, and companies manufactured wires and steel. Worcester was home to traditional tool and die manufacturing and early automotive companies. But in the mid- to late 1900s, amid globalization, companies closed their Worcester factories, shifting manufacturing south or overseas. Residents moved to the suburbs. Worcester’s population peaked at over 200,000 in 1950 before steadily declining to 162,000 in 1980.
Yet over the next four decades, Worcester experienced a renaissance. By 2020, the city’s population again exceeded 200,000, and Worcester today has its largest population in history.
That renaissance was powered not by traditional manufacturing but by biotech. Worcester Polytechnic Institute and UMass Chan Medical School, along with the city’s multiple other colleges, pump out skilled workers, creating a talent pipeline that attracts pharmaceutical, medical device, and life science companies, from small startups to multinational industry. The number of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher increased by 22.5 percent over the past decade, with a particular increase in higher-income residents, according to the city’s 2024 housing needs assessment.
Not every Gateway City has the educational institutions Worcester has. But each community has assets that could turn it into a commercial hub. New Bedford has its port, where the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently received a state grant to work with private companies on developing a hub for testing and commercializing marine technologies. The University of Massachusetts Lowell is working with city officials to develop the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor, attracting defense and engineering companies. A Pittsfield incubator recently received a state grant to develop an advanced optics manufacturing cluster.
Worcester provides a model for how these efforts can advance.
The seed to Worcester’s success was planted in 1965, when the UMass Board of Trustees shocked the Boston establishment by voting to locate the university’s new medical school in Worcester. Worcester capitalized on that win with decades of investment and collaboration between state government, local government, businesses, and nonprofits.
In the 1980s, the Worcester Business Development Corporation acquired part of the former Worcester State Hospital to build what would become the Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Park. In 1984, the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce created what would become MBI. In 1985, Governor Michael Dukakis designated Worcester a “center of excellence” in biotechnology, with the goal of using public investment to help create a cluster of biotech businesses around UMass.
In 1989, the 1-million-square-foot research park attracted the German pharmaceutical company that would become AbbVie, the drugmaker that developed Humira and remains a major Worcester employer.
More recently, in 2015, MBI proposed creating a new biomanufacturing park next to AbbVie. The Worcester Business Development Corporation acquired 46 acres of state-owned land, a site now called the Reactory. Chinese company WuXi Biologics is in the process of building a $300 million, nearly 190,000-square-foot biomanufacturing facility there.
“We’re seeing a transformation from a heavy-industrial type base to a more service economy, and the life sciences helped us diversify a lot more,” said Craig Blais, president of the Worcester Business Development Corporation.
The life sciences ecosystem attracts entrepreneurs like Hannah Sheehan Sauve and Jeff Sauve, cofounders of SauveBio, a company that sells flow cytometry services, a technique to measure cell characteristics that can help pharmaceutical companies identify new drug targets and assess a drug’s efficacy. The couple, who are married and in their 30s, were both working near Boston — she in pharmaceuticals, he in sales — when they decided to start their own company. They left Boston and moved to Connecticut to be closer to family and to nature, deciding to open their company in Worcester because of MBI.
The incubator — which charges around $2,500 a month for the smallest startup lab space — offers mentoring, shared equipment, connections to investors, and a community of scientists. The Sauves have gotten referrals for lawyers, advice on financing, and mentoring from experts who themselves started cytometry businesses. Sheehan Sauve said Worcester feels like a “thriving community” with restaurants, concerts, and comedy shows, with less stress than Boston.
It’s a vibe Worcester officials have worked to cultivate, marketing Worcester as its own hub, but one accessible to Boston. Timothy Murray, president and CEO of the Worcester Chamber of Commerce, said Bostonians no longer see Worcester as a “far-away place” but as “a complementary hub.”
In 2021, Worcester upped its sports scene by attracting the WooSox, the Red Sox’s Triple-A affiliate, from Rhode Island. Worcester’s Union Station was renovated and reopened in 2000 with a handful of commuter trains running between Worcester and Boston. Now, there are more than 20 round-trips daily, though the trip from Worcester to South Station still takes around one hour and 45 minutes, making a daily commute challenging.
To be sure, Worcester still has the challenges that plague other Gateway Cities — including a lagging median income and difficulty building housing. Between 2020 and 2025, Worcester gained around 1,900 units, representing a 2.3 percent growth in its housing stock, according to The Boston Foundation. But the city’s housing production plan estimates that by 2033, Worcester will need around another 11,600 rental units and 850 owner-occupied units to meet growing demand.
Worcester is also competing for businesses with surrounding communities like Devens, Westborough, and Framingham.
And because rents are lower than in Boston and Cambridge but construction costs are high, developers struggle to make projects pencil out. Worcester chief development officer Peter Dunn said it’s taken a mix of public-private partnerships and subsidies to make new housing and commercial projects viable, as it has in many Gateway Cities. That’s also why Weaver said it’s been hard to attract developers to build more lab space, even though the demand is there. Weaver anticipates that eventually, rents will rise enough to make new projects feasible.
It is well worth the investment for the state to help make those developments viable.
Most Gateway Cities are communities that used to anchor their regional economies but fell into disrepair as industries changed. If more of them can regain that status, hosting clusters of the industries of today, it won’t just be those cities that will prosper. The whole state will be better prepared for the future.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.