Today is the ONE-year anniversary for the DaytonCreate program! Congrats on a fantastic and productive year!
Dayton’s community engagement and enthusiasm is refreshing and exciting to witness. To learn more about DaytonCreate’s successes, check out the website: daytoncreate.org.
Here’s my paper with Charlotta Mellander and Kevin Stolarick on regional development in Canada.
The City of Roanoke announced today that 30 local individuals have been selected to participate in a year-long Creative Communities Leadership Project, which will kick-off with a two-day workshop session with the Creative Class Group on March 30-31. The selection committee, made up of regional business and community leaders, received more than 90 applications for the 30 Creative Connector positions. Additionally, more than 20 inquiries were received after the application deadline. Selected participants represent the diversity and talent of the Roanoke region. The following individuals will serve as Roanoke’s Creative Connectors:
Launched by the Creative Class Group, a world renowned advisory services firm associated with leading academic Richard Florida, the Creative Communities Leadership Program is designed to use local volunteers to work with the community to build a more authentic and prosperous region through the creation of sustainable projects. Furthermore, the Creative Connectors will encourage the entire community to support these projects, which will be aimed at fostering a creative base for Roanoke.
Roanoke City Manager Darlene Burcham said the community’s reaction to the call to serve as Creative Connectors was exciting. “It was fantastic to receive the kind of response and interest we had,” says Burcham. “I am looking forward to working with the Creative Connectors and the community to build a more authentic and prosperous Roanoke region. Our Creative Connectors are a diverse team-by background, industry, age, race, orientation and experience; each team member shares an enthusiasm for the Roanoke community.”
Those not selected as one of the 30 Creative Connectors and the general public are encouraged to attend a presentation on March 31 at 4 p.m. at 22 Kirk Avenue to learn more about the selected initiatives and how they can become involved in the community engagement project.
For more information about the Roanoke Creative Community Leadership Project, visit: www.roanokeva.gov/creative
In the New York Times, Alex Kotlowitz visits my home town of Cleveland, Ohio to find that it is all boarded up. I grew up in Cleveland right in the middle of it just a few miles from the famous Cuyahoga River. Cleveland was a modest town with lots of blue collar workers in scores of industries. The city had a very large and very substantial housing stock. Over the years, as industry declines, the creative class fled, and as technology evolved the city declines. When a city like Cleveland declines it leaves behind something, and that something is an abandoned housing stock. Cleveland now has between 10,000 and 15,000 abandoned and boarded up houses. Of course this is not new. When I was growing up in Cleveland, the whole east side of the city was abandoned, houses were torn down, and the Cleveland Clinic expanded in much of the space, the rest was left abandoned like my old neighborhood.
This is in part a legacy of industrial restructuring, the sub prime mortgage problem, and the long term subsidy to housing dating back to the great depression. Whatever the cause it seems to be well picked up by Richard in his article in the Atlantic. Cities come and go. In an article by Phil McCann and I we show that this has been the case for over 1,000 years and is nothing new. Baghdad 1,000 years ago was the most important city in the world.
The question is how do we deal with the housing abandonment in this country. For a large part of the problem is that we have an overstock of housing that no one will ever use. Should we start the write off of the trillions of dollars worth of old abandoned, or nearly abandoned housing, wipe the slate clean and just move on? Perhaps as Richard suggests we should just abandon the support for home ownership, eliminate the tax subsidy, and use the savings to clean up and abandoned housing mess.
As I walked down my street on Monday, I heard a hauntingly familiar rumble, followed by a flash of red and white. And, just like that, visual confirmation that the nearly 60-day bus strike was over. Part of me was so perturbed about the whole situation that I still wanted to walk, but my feet were begging for the ride, and the ATU was trying to show some beneficence and win back some of their ridership by eliminating the fare for a week, so I hopped on.
As I took my seat and picked up the paper on the seat next to me – an amenity of public transportation that many avail themselves of, and had probably been missing as well – I found an article that really spoke to me and to the root of my exasperation with the strike:
People get the government they deserve. Certainly Ottawa does. If you are prepared to take nearly two months without public transit, without a clear return, and few compensatory measures to soften the cost, that’s what you’ll get.
When Ottawans stoically and heroically organized car pools, walked to work, rearranged their lives, missed classes, lost income or stayed home, they gave politicians no incentive to act.
Astoundingly, the first protests came late in the strike. Until then, some real suffering — particularly among the elderly, the sick, the disabled and others who have no voice — was easily ignored. In Paris and other real cities, they would have been marching on city hall, if not burning it down
…But the transit strike is symptomatic of Ottawa’s larger problem, which lies in its contented people and its feckless politicians.
There are no citizens of Ottawa, as the mayor likes to say. Citizenship implies a sense of belonging. That notion, even if it had a legal standing, is foreign to this city. Ottawans aren’t residents, either. Even those who own homes or are born here have a permanent impermanence. More likely, Ottawans are tenants.
The article goes on to challenge Ottawa, in no minced words, to get serious about itself as a city. As a resident I feel as guilty as the next person. While I did my best to incite some conversation (and ire) around the issue with my radio show, it wasn’t until mid/late January that I got it in me to start trying to organize some of the young entreprenurial community in the city, and by the time I had myself organized, the strike was over. It was exasperation with the complacency and civic deficit that spurred me to act though. I felt that Ottawa was selling itself short. Telling by the wave of responses the article has garnered, I’m not the only one.
It has been said over and over by Richard and a host of others – it’s a shame to waste a good crisis. Initiatives like ChangeCamp have been probing the frontiers of civic engagement through technology. In a city that isn’t organized with density in mind, is this the kind of thing that Ottawa needs? How does Ottawa leverage this one to emerge from it a more responsive and engaged population? What will it take for people to wake up, get involved, and become citizens?
And now, as always, some music.
The Creative Class Group is teaming with the City of Roanoke for a Creative Community Leadership Project this spring.
“The City of Roanoke is issuing a call to the community to identify 30 local leaders who hold the key to turning Roanoke into one of the most desirable and sustainable communities in the country”
“The city is asking anyone who is willing to commit the time and skills to take on a leadership position, to put in a formal application,” says City Manager Darlene Burcham. “Even if people do not want to take on the leadership role, we would still encourage them to attend meetings and learn about the program.”
“CCG Director of Communities and Research Steven Pedigo says, “We have led community engagement projects around the world, and we are thrilled with the enthusiasm of Roanoke and look forward to our research and seminar.”
Check out Roanoke’s website and this great interview about the CCLP program with Roanoke Coordinator Stuart Mease.
Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley make the case for extending urban policy to the suburbs, creating a broader metropolitan-oriented policy:
America can’t ensure its leading place in the global economy unless we grapple with the problems and opportunities of our suburbs. Nonprofits, long focused on inner cities, need to reach out to poor families and immigrants in the suburbs. The federal government should support the production and preservation of affordable housing there. Even more important, Washington needs to recognize that suburban governments are being flattened by the housing crisis—they don’t have the experience or the capacity to slow the tide of foreclosures or deal with neighborhoods strafed by vacancies. The Feds need to use some of the billions in recovery funding to help local governments buy up foreclosed properties and put that land to productive use.
Ryan Avent weighs in here.
Sure, some suburbs need help. Sure, there will be a lot of adaptive reuse work to be done there. Sure, we can us regionally oriented metropolitan policy. But in the main, we need to reorient urban policy from social policy to economic competitiveness policy. The cornerstones of that policy must be to enable mobility (which has all but stopped now), encourage scale and density, and dramatically increase speed and velocity of the movement of goods, people, and ideas within urban areas. The scale of the problem is gi-normous and there is precious little indication the U.S. political system is up to it, or even aware it. One thing is for certain, getting this geography right is key to broad U.S. recovery, critical to any stimulus, and essential to long-run competitiveness and proseperity. The historical analog is of course suburbia’s role as the spatial fix for post-World War II capitalism and the spur for Fordist production. So what is the spatial fix for today’s economy? The place that gets this right generate huge first-mover advantages in capitalism’s next phase. For something so important, I’m amazed so few people are even thinking about it.
Check out Dayton’s C Space - spurred by our Creative Class Leadership Program launched last March.
Creative Incubator is energizing the city core by providing venues for street-level culture and arts…
The Dayton Creative Incubator Initiative is conceived as a project to bring life back to one or several vacant downtown spaces by working with building owners to allow local artists to use the spaces for creating and displaying art- as well as providing community spaces where artists, musicians and other creatives can hang out, network and simply exchange creative ideas.
What an amazing transformation! What do you think about Dayton’s C Space?
Luring the latest Hollywood blockbuster is just the latest in a long series of economic development policies based on bribes… er… I mean incentives. Alan Greenblatt of Governing takes a good hard look, and finds lots and lots of waste and opportunity costs (via Planetizen).
During the past fiscal year, according to a recent study, New Mexico granted $38.2 million in tax rebates for TV and movie production, but in return saw only enough increase in economic activity to generate $5.5 million in public revenue. “For every one dollar in rebate,” the study concluded, “the state only received 14.44 cents in return.”
Over the past five years, all but 10 states and some cities have created film-incentive programs. This has spread production around, but no one has come up with a formula that can be shown to provide a net economic benefit for the state or locality itself …
The problem is that there’s not enough production to support ongoing film work everywhere. And, with most states competing to attract such business, it’s going to be doubly hard for many of them to remain viable locations. “States are auctioning off their revenues in order to attract this particular industry,” says Michigan state Senator Nancy Cassis. “As soon as one state outbids another, the film producers will be out of there in a nanosecond.”
Urban designer – and my former Carnegie Mellon colleague – David Lewis has long said that our older suburbs are the greatest urban renewal challenge of modern times. Lacking concentration, density, transit, historic architecture, and highly developed infrastructure like older center cities, he said, the suburbs pose a much greater challenge to redevelop. Over at The New York Times’ By Design blog, Allison Arieff offers some interesting perspective – and possible solutions (h/t: Allison Kemper).
The problem now isn’t really how to better design homes and communities, but rather what are we going to do with all the homes and communities we’re left with … As I learned in artist Julia Christensen’s new book, “Big Box Reuse,” when a big box store like Wal-mart or Kmart outgrows its space, it is shut down. It is, apparently, cheaper to start from scratch than to close for renovation and expansion … The silver lining in Christensen’s study are the communities she’s discovered that have proactively addressed the massive empty shells they’ve been left with, turning structures of anywhere from 20,000 to 280,000 square feet into something useful: a charter school, a health center, a chapel, a library. (And, in Austin, Minn., a new Spam Museum.) …
But exurban communities are a unique challenge. The houses within them are big, but not generally as big as, say, Victorian mansions in San Francisco that can be subdivided into apartments. So they’re not great candidates for transformation into multi-family rental housing. I did visit a housing development last year that offered “quartets,” McMansions subdivided into four units with four separate entrances. These promised potential buyers the status of a McMansion with the convenience of a condominium, but the concept felt like it was created more to preserve the property values of larger neighboring homes than to serve the needs of the community’s residents …
I still dream that some major overhaul can occur: that a self-sufficient mixed-use neighborhood can emerge. That three-car-garaged McMansions can be subdivided into rental units with streetfront cafés, shops and other local businesses.
Wondering what others think, and strategies you may have come across in communities around the world?
