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Thursday, May 13th, 2010

The Authentic City

There are many different meanings and definitions of the word “brand”. It is used by people in different contexts to mean very different things. Often it is about marketing or tag lines or logos. But ultimately a brand is much more than that and includes two basic components at its core:

• A set of desired internal aspirations, goals, character, culture, competencies, etc. that describe what a product, organization or person is or would like to be.
• A set of external thoughts, feelings, images, and associations that others have of that product, organization or person.

There are two aspects: how you are/see yourself and how others see you. Among the core challenges of executive leadership are understanding and articulating the desired internal brand, making sure that the organization lives up to that brand promise, and synchronizing the external perceptions with that reality. (Of course for cities, there isn’t a unitary brand – each of us who chooses to make our life there gets a say and has a voice).

Marketing is often confused with branding. But marketing is to a great extent a tool a firm uses to raise awareness of its brand and to inspire the desired external perception. It is a means to an end, not the end itself.

The challenge for cities that currently have rather dowdy brand images is that they obsess over how over people see them. (Or even about how they think other people see them. For example, Indianapolis frequently says people used to call it “Naptown” and “India-No-Place”, but I’m extremely skeptical that these ever had wide currency outside of Indy itself until the city started talking about them).

Seeing this negative brand image, they then look at what the cool cities are doing and say, “If we want to be cool too, we’d better be like that.” In short, they think just like high school kids who want to be part of the popular clique. They fail to consider both that this attitude is itself adolescent, and that no matter what they do, they are highly unlikely to get into the club. Cliques are by definition exclusive, so the minute you think you’ve caught up with everyone else, they are on to something else. I think one of the main reasons we’ll see starchitecture start to wane, for example, isn’t just a lack of money, it’s the fact that everyone is doing it, from Milwaukee to the Middle East.

I do recognize that as social creatures, this notion of being part of the tribe never leaves us, even in adulthood. We all engage in actions designed to display our membership in a class, a status, a group, etc. Dress for the job you want, they say. But we move beyond purely thinking of these as the road to success. We recognize them a bit for what they are – part of the game you have to play. More importantly, we grow more comfortable in our skin. We figure out who we are and what we do best. We don’t always just follow the crowd or the trend – at least few people who wants to be truly successful or move up in the ranks – or be happy – do.

Unfortunately, most cities are still stuck in high school. They think it is about having the accouterments of the cool places, not realizing that they are just like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football. What’s worse, they actually seem determined in many cases to downplay or leave behind many of their strongest brand assets in any attempt to be like the cool kids. (For more on this, see my piece, “The Brand Promise of Indianapolis” ).

Some cities go so far as to downplay their very name. Detroit comes to mind. A lot of the marketing and things put out by booster groups now refer to it as “the D” – Model D Media for example. But no one knows or cares about “the D”. In fact, I’ve seen other people in cities like Dallas call their city “the D”. But “Detroit” is a name with international resonance and power. It’s what I call “the power of brand Detroit”, and it is overwhelming. Has Cleveland, Buffalo, or any other struggling city gotten one tenth the national and international media coverage of Detroit? Did Time magazine set up a “Project Toledo”? No. Detroit is simply a city and brand unlike any other, one that has the power to grab the eyes of the world. One small example: when I write posts about Detroit, my traffic goes up 10x. My piece on Detroit as the new American frontier from last summer is still being linked all over the place, including BMW discussion boards in Latvia, forums in Sweden, the New York Times, Facebook shares in Japan and more. If I wanted to maximize traffic, I’d write about nothing but Detroit. Not even my New York City or Chicago posts compete.

Those people are interested in Detroit, not “the D”. They are interested in things that locals would rather forget or not talk about. But while some of it is clearly facile, such as the n-th photo of Michigan Central Station, it shows the roots of what you need to do to revive. How to fashion companies reinvent themselves? Often it starts with a trip to the archives. I was struck by Saskia Sassen’s observation that the re-emergent global cities like Chicago built their new functions out of the expertise and heritage of the old. It wasn’t just some new business that wafted in on the wind. Chicago’s agro-industrial heritage is the basis of much of the high value service work it does today.

To renew our cities, we have to build on what they are, not what they aren’t. The lesson of Portland is not the physical things Portland did. The lesson of Portland is that they went their own way and did what was right for them. Other cities need to find their own paths. That doesn’t mean you can’t do something or aspire to be something you’ve never been. That’s how we grow as people and as cities. But suddenly deciding to just chuck your whole heritage, history, character, etc. and go in a radically different direction is probably not going to work. One reason, for example, the 1970’s era amateur sports strategy for Indianapolis worked is that sports was something that was already compatible with the local culture. It was a reworking of something that was already there, positioned for the future – and it fit the city.

I realize some changes need to be made in many places that aren’t a good fit. That requires strong and courageous leadership (top down and bottom up) to make happen. But it’s a lot more likely to happen if it is alloyed with things that do fit the civic DNA.

A great city, like a great wine, has to express its terroir. I’m reminded of the Jonathan Glancey quote I gave last week:

What’s wrong with a city being ‘world class’? A great deal is wrong. Why? Because it’s yet another manifestation of ways in which cities are beginning to resemble one another all too closely…The joy of great cities lies in their differences. What’s special about Stockholm is different from what makes London or Vienna attractive. The ‘world class city’, and its gormless sibling, the ‘world class place’, is a political slogan, conjured by globally minded, air-travel addicted wonks, that has been adopted, sadly and dimly, by politicians, quangos and planners around the world.

Find out what it is that’s unique and special about your place, your region. What is the joy of your great city? It all starts with that great Greek proverb: “Know thyself”

PS: Detroit is a fantastic name for a city – wear it with pride!

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Megan Cottrell: Eviction Is to Black Women What Incarceration Is to Black Men

[ Here's another piece from Megan Cottrell's incredible blog on poverty and housing issues, One Story Up. If you saw the article on Matt Desmond's work in the New York Times, just for the record, Megan had the story first - Aaron. ]

Among young black men in America, about 10 percent are currently incarcerated. It’s shocking, but we’ve almost grown used to it.

But while those young men are in prison, what’s happening to their wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters?

Eviction. A new study coming out of Milwaukee shows that eviction is for black women what incarceration is for black men. One in 20 households there are evicted every year. In predominately black communities, that rate doubles to 1 in 10 families.

For those of us who are affluent, with relatively stable incomes, we’ve never even had to think about what it would be like.

Getting the eviction notice in the mail. The knot in your stomach, knowing you can’t pay the rent you owe. The court case, and the eventual knock on the door from the sheriff, telling you it’s time to go.

We’ve been talking about eviction a lot lately, from the near eviction of three orphans and their guardian, to the protested eviction of a Cabrini-Green mother, to the Chicago campaign to stop evictions from happening this winter.

Matt Desmond

When I heard about Matt Desmond’s research out of Milwaukee, I was shocked and intensely interested. It turns out, while many people have studied poverty and poor communities, no one has ever really studied evictions before, at least not the way Matt has.

“Eviction is probably the most under-studied process affecting the lives of the urban poor,” said Matt, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We know nothing about it.”

To figure it out, Matt dove into neighborhoods where evictions are common place. He took up residence in a trailerpark outside of Milwaukee, living there for several months before he moved into an inner-city neighborhood. He talked with people, poured over eviction records, and asked people to record their experiences with eviction through a large survey effort.

What he found, he said, surprised him.

“Eviction isn’t rare. It’s quite common in the lives of poor families,” he said

I asked him about families that he got to know – people he spent hours talking with. Was it hard to see them face these troubles?

It’s always hard to tell over the phone, but I could swear I heard a quiver in his voice as he replied.

“It was difficult,” he said, “It’s a bit hard to talk about, actually.”

It’s not just that eviction happens a lot in poor neighborhoods, but Matt’s was also stunned by who eviction was happening to.

“Eviction is disproportionately experienced by women and black women. It’s the feminine equivalent of incarceration,” he said. “There’s a lot of young black men being locked up and young black women being locked out.”

And eviction has consequences, more consequences than just getting put out on the street. One eviction on your record makes it harder to find your next apartment. Your security deposit might be higher. Your rent might be greater. For families who are already struggling that much, that kind of pressure leads to more trouble, more evictions. Many of the families Matt talked to were paying 80 to 90 percent of their income in rent per month.

It’s just not sustainable, he said. We’ve got to do something about it.

“We’ve reached a breaking point, Megan,” he told me. “We can’t go on like this.”

The solutions, he says, aren’t so easy. Just because eviction is bad, he says, doesn’t mean no one should be evicted. It means we have to pay more attention to this process that’s directly impacting the lives of the poor.

“We know a lot about the consequences of incarceration. That doesn’t mean that no one should be locked up,” he says. “But it probably means that not so many people should. It may be the same for eviction.”

That means anti-poverty programs need to listen up. Free school lunches are nice. But no amount of school lunches make up for not having a home and not being able to get one. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on in our communities and what solutions can help.

We’ve still got a lot to learn. But to begin, I think we need to start seeing eviction – witnessing what’s happening in our city.

Imagine it’s you. You lost your job. The bills are piling up. The rent is three months late. You’ve borrowed money from everyone you can think of, and there’s nothing left. The notice comes, and you pray it won’t happen, but it does. Your stuff – in boxes. Your children don’t have a place to come home to after school. Where will you go? And how will you put your life back together?

Hundreds of families in Chicago are experiencing this right now. We have to listen to their experience, open our eyes and figure out what can be done.

This article originally appeared in One Story Up. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Review: The Great Reset by Richard Florida

Richard Florida takes a lot of heat in certain quarters. As one of the most widely known economics writers, that makes some sense. Pretty much anyone who achieves a certain level of popularity acquires haters along the way.

But most of the criticisms of Florida seem wide of the mark to me. Consider the one that he’s in it for the fame and rock star lifestyle. Well, let’s assume so. What’s your point? Who doesn’t want to be famous, or at least at some level well known in their field? I’ll admit I’d like to be much more widely recognized that I am. Is that a sin? Popularity in and of itself has nothing to do with whether or not your stuff is any good.

Then there’s the one that suggests Florida is fleecing the rubes, such as the recent attack piece by Alec MacGillis in the American Prospect. The author suggests that Florida took money from towns in bad faith, knowing their cause was hopeless, then turned around and pronounced them beyond salvation.

MacGillis mentions Florida’s $35,000 speaking fee and $250,000 consulting reports as evidence of how much money he’s acquired, but fails to put these numbers in perspective. While they might sound big to some people, ultimately they are a nit in the world of public expenditures. Consider this: Foundations alone in the state of Indiana spent a staggering $450 million on “brain drain” initiatives in just the last five years. I suspect other states spent similar sums. Cincinnati recently spent about $1 billion to build two new sports stadiums. Again, many other places did likewise. The point is not to criticize these expenditures, but to highlight that hiring Richard Florida to speak isn’t even a rounding error compared to the amounts spent on other development initiatives.

Also, the problems of struggling Rust Belt burgs are daunting. Years of trying to stem decline using every strategy under the sun has largely been ineffective. I don’t think anyone could legitimately believe that they could pay Richard Florida to sprinkle some creative class fairy dust on these places and turn them around over night. It’s just not realistic. If a Florida speech couldn’t turn around Toledo overnight, it’s not like there’s some readily available strategy that could. Turning around the Rust Belt is an effort that will take years of hard work with no guarantee of success. Pittsburgh is getting a lot of press now, but that city’s turnaround was 30-50 years in the making.

I might even suggest that if there is any scamming going on, the arrow is pointing the other direction. Cities go hire a big name like Florida to give a speech or two and do a few flash in the pan arts projects, all for a very small sum of cash. They trumpet that as showing Something Is Being Done and that change will happen Real Soon Now. Then they go back to doing what it is they really want to do – namely spending money on all those other things.

MacGillis also criticizes the apparently circular nature of Florida’s creative class theory, saying:

A tautology lies at the heart of Florida’s theory that has limited its instructive value all along: Creative people seek out places that draw a lot of creative people. Florida has now taken this closed-loop argument to another level by declaring that henceforth, the winners’ club is closed to new entrants.

I posted a piece by Ryan Avent who said that’s really how it works. But rather than a tautology, I prefer to think of this as a positive feedback system. A tautology is something that is true by definition. Mathematical truths like “2 + 2 = 4” are tautologies. A positive feedback system is one where an effect tends to produce more of itself.

Consider college sports teams. Good teams are able to recruit better players. Better players generally mean a better team, which enables you to recruit better players, etc. If you’ve got a good coach, plenty of money, and some good luck, your team can remain a powerhouse for years. That’s why, to the great dismay of all Americans who don’t live in North Carolina, Duke has a good basketball team pretty much every year. Conversely, if your team is not so good, it is harder to get and stay in the top ranks. The door isn’t closed, but you’ve got to work harder to get into the club. This type of effect happens in many different places, and cities are one of them.

This isn’t always good by the way. Positive feedback systems are often unstable and prone to runaway behavior. Growth itself tends to be a positive feedback system, and we saw several metros where housing growth got carried away and crashed hard. The ever increasing upscaling of top tier metros is driving costs through the roof and destroying the economic viability of anything other than high end activities, a phenomenon I explored in a piece called “Migration: Geographies in Conflict”. Negative feedback systems such as the thermostat that controls your furnace and air conditioner, tend to be much more stable.

Lastly, there’s the claim that Florida’s creative class theory is reductivist and radically over-simplifies the truth about cities. This is accurate to some degree but I think misreads what Florida is doing. I don’t think he intended Rise of the Creative Class as his application to the Nobel Prize committee. It was a book targeting a popular audience. In that light it ought not to be compared against dense, nuanced, academic tomes, but rather against other popular press books like Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat.

Indeed, I think of Florida as a lot like Friedman. Both of them have been able to take extremely complicated phenomena like globalization and package them in a way that is accessible to a mass audience. Florida and Friedman have differing paradigms of globalization, but in a sense they are both right in that they illustrate important aspects of the world we live in.

Because Florida is so good at this, he’s been able to radically change the policy discussion in America all the way down to places like MacGillis’ Elmira, NY in a very important way. Strip away the “creative class” packaging and look at the basics of what Florida is saying, and I frankly don’t think it is that controversial. If you think of creative class as merely recognizing the increasing importance and primacy of human capital, I think almost everyone would agree. But I don’t think that’s a notion that was even on the radar of many civic leaders in America until Florida came along. I don’t think any other contemporary author other than Friedman has had a similar impact on the policy discussion. This is a very valuable service.

Or consider the “three T’s”: talent, technology, and tolerance. We already addressed talent. Anyone want to take the position that technology is unimportant today? Anyone want to claim intolerance is a virtue? It’s easy to mock the notion of adding gaydar to the index of leading economic indicators and the like, but guess what? Things like the porosity of social networks and welcoming of newcomers and new ideas are absolutely critical to civic success. This has been demonstrated by the likes of AnnaLee Saxenian, who attributed the triumph of Silicon Valley over Boston’s Route 128 to this.

Surely Florida could have made his books more dense and nuanced, and they might be more robust as a result, but they’d certainly be much less read – and I’m not sure cities would be better off for that.

Which brings us to his latest book, The Great Reset, based on his Atlantic cover story “How the Crash Will Reshape America”. Again, let’s look at this as trying to communicate a complicated topic to a popular audience. In that light, let’s not get hung up on packaging. You might not buy the framing device of “great resets”, of which this is the third, or the various attributes of them such as “spatial fix”. But that’s almost irrelevant.

There’s something going on out there in the world. We’ve been in the middle of it for a while, and the Great Recession has brought it into stark relief. Its the end of the industrial age in America and the West and the beginning of something else. Some call it the age of globalization, others the information age. Who know what history will judge. But the point is that we are in a transition period from one era to another. It’s a period of uncertainty. We don’t know what the future will hold. Florida admits he doesn’t have a crystal ball either. But he is willing to make some prognostications and talk about what he thinks it means.

The first part of the book is a history lesson that tees up his reset frame. I won’t cover that here. The second part is an overview of how he thinks various cities and regions in the country will fare in the coming years and in the new era. Florida’s basic take is that the crash is going to accelerate the transition from the old world to the new by speeding up trends that were already underway. This is a risky move since if there’s one thing we’ve learned it is that history is wildly unpredictable and extrapolating trends into the future always breaks down at a point sooner than we think it will.

One the other hand, this makes the predictions mostly plausible. For the short term at least, they seem reasonable. My own view is that we are still in the early innings of the new era. Sometimes the cities that seem the best end up falling by the wayside. Cincinnati was the original Porkopolis, but ended up superseded by Chicago during the second half of the 19th century, for example. Chicago itself was a comparatively late bloomer during the industrial revolution. But it was in the right place at the right time. The further into the future we go, the more likely some newcomer will surprise us.

So let’s take a look at some of the predictions. Florida’s first one is that New York will remain on top, despite being the epicenter of the financial world that was at the heart of the crash. Ed Glaeser has made similar claims. This strikes me as likely since New York isn’t just #1 in finance, it’s #1 in lots of things. Florida actually predicts that most US financial centers, ranging from Chicago to Charlotte, will do well. He also predicts big government cities, of which Washington DC is the ultimate example, will thrive, which seems, alas, pretty likely.

I was eager to see what what he’d say of the Rust Belt. There’s been a lot of talk such as that of MacGillis that Florida has said many Rust Belt cities are hopeless, but I hadn’t actually seen him write it anywhere. In this book, Florida clearly recognizes the challenges facing struggling manufacturing towns. And he doesn’t sugar coat the fact that further troubles are likely for many of them, and that turning around places like Detroit will be a generational effort at best. This may sound harsh, but unfortunately it is likely true, especially for smaller cities that don’t have the critical mass of human capital and infrastructure to operate effectively in the knowledge economy.

But he definitely does not say it is hopeless, and in fact talks about some positive examples, such as Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh story is based around investments in educational infrastructure, grass roots neighborhood, initiatives, and a long time frame. The roots of the Pittsburgh turnaround are decades old. He thinks this is the path others will need to take.

Florida’s recipe for cities is to favor grass roots change over big, top down redevelopment initiatives like stadiums, and investing in quality of life and place making. But he, like Glaeser, says that the primary focus of investments ought to be people, not places. This isn’t a matter of writing off cities or not writing off cities, but rather a political or philosophical question about where the focus of our investments ought to be. I don’t think it is either/or and neither does Florida, but you’ve got to make some choice as there aren’t unlimited funds. Where do you give the priority?

I for one am in the camp that we need to look at people first. For one thing, there is no guarantee we can renew every single city, no matter how much money we spend. It’s not like there’s a magic formula out there that we just aren’t following. And any revitalization could be a long time down the road. What do we do about the people who are suffering and lack opportunity in the meantime? And what about the human cost if we fail?

People may not want to move and we shouldn’t force them to in most cases. But leaving people who have no choice stuck where they are isn’t good either. One of the best ways to give people chances to improve their lives is by giving them mobility options. We can do that through better education, which should be unobjectionable. But I might also suggest even going further than Florida and helping people who want to relocate but can’t to do so, such as by helping to extract them from underwater mortgages. In any case, giving people mobility options means they aren’t part of a captive local labor market and that they have a greater universe of opportunity to better their lives.

This is already running long, but I want to highlight three other areas of the book. The first is the idea of upgrading service jobs, similar to how manufacturing jobs were upgraded to good jobs in the post-war era. Florida suggests doing this via making them more creative and fulfilling. I was surprised to see that he did not mention unionization as a possibility. Now, I happen to think old school unions are an anachronism, but if other parts of the economy can reinvent themselves, there’s no reason unions can’t too. After all, unionization was a principal way manufacturing jobs were upgraded.

The second point is about what Florida has taken to calling the “rentership society”. The term is provocative, but Florida actually only suggests pulling back from a peak of around 70% home ownership to 55-60%. He also suggests a pullback from ownership in other areas beyond houses as well.

I think it is very clear that we got carried away with trying to promote homeownership at all costs. The notion of a house as a way to make quick bucks, or as an ATM machine to finance consumption is also clearly past its sell-by date. Many financially marginal people became “owners” who had no business doing so. I wish I rented instead of owned right now. It is clear the dial is going to turn here.

But I believe there are several challenges to significantly increasing rentership rates. First, rental property in the United States is designed for younger people or lower income people and not generally for middle class families. Also, people with any degree of discretionary income are going to want to customize their space. That’s generally not possible with renting, plus how would you recover the value of, say, redoing the kitchen or a bathroom? Paint colors I can see, but not a lot beyond that. In order to really get people to buy into the renting idea, I think we’d need a vastly different definition of what it means to rent in America. The market would have to supply a very different product. Florida had some ideas about companies that supplied new types of rental properties, but what he discussed didn’t sound compelling to me. Also, there is a benefit in financially diversifying into real estate assets, and, like 401(k) contributions, the monthly mortgage payment enforces a sort of savings discipline it might be hard to replicate for renters. This is something that would also need looking at.

And are Americans culturally inclined to way to rent? The desire to own your own piece of land seems deeply engrained in the American pysche. I can see more renters than today, for sure. But how many is that? I can certainly see it appealing on a discretionary basis to Florida’s “super-creative core”, or however you want to think of people who are a part of global labor markets and for whom mobility is key. But I wonder if this is something average Americans will embrace?

One last thing, and one I completely agree with Florida on, is that we’ve got to make major adjustments in where we are making our civic investments. Virtually all of the stimulus, TARP, etc. went towards bailing out and attempting to reflate the old economy. If there’s one thing that should be clear by now, it is that attempting to prop up the past only delays the day of reckoning. Economist Michael Hicks said of the painful budget cuts that Muncie, Indiana is going through now something to the effect of, “What if we’d made these painful choices 25 years ago in better days, and used the money saved to invest in our future?” Maybe we just can’t let everything collapse, and we do need some sort of orderly transition, but there has been a huge opportunity lost here. Rahm Emmanuel said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Florida put it this way:

Education and infrastructure, creativity, and connectivity – these are the things we can address…Government has its most important and legitimate role to play in establishing the enabling framework for a new era of shared prosperity, and it squanders precious resources that could support such future-oriented, prosperity-boosting efforts when it chooses to bail out old industries, breath life back into outmoded institutions, or place Band-Aids on problems. Such approaches may or may not stop the bleeding, but they won’t keep us from failing again. And they will do little to set us on the path to a better future.

It’s time to make a 180 here, folks.

The Great Reset is definitely a worthwhile read. Again, any way you look at it there’s a major shift going on. Florida’s book gives the broader public the opportunity to step back from the detailed events of the day and look at the broader macro picture. We all ought to be thinking through for ourselves the implication of the new world we live in, and this accessible work highlights some of the key considerations.

Richard Florida discussed his book this week on Smart City Radio. You can listen to the show below (click here if the embedded player doesn’t display for you).

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Midwest Miscellany

HR Examiner just ranked fellow blogger Jim Russell #11 in their top 25 online influencers in talent management survey. I’m a huge fan of Jim whose thinking on this topic is a must-read over at Burgh Diaspora. Congratulations, Jim!

Top Stories

1. Jonathan Glancey: ‘World Class’ just means banal – “What’s wrong with a city being ‘world class’? A great deal is wrong. Why? Because it’s yet another manifestation of ways in which cities are beginning to resemble one another all too closely…The joy of great cities lies in their differences. What’s special about Stockholm is different from what makes London or Vienna attractive. The ‘world class city’, and its gormless sibling, the ‘world class place’, is a political slogan, conjured by globally minded, air-travel addicted wonks, that has been adopted, sadly and dimly, by politicians, quangos and planners around the world.”

2. Tim Bryant @ St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Cities of the past, present, and future discussed in Cambridge. An interesting report from an urbanism conference.

3. Ed Glaeser: Cities Do It Better and Preservation Follies

4. Detroit News: Failed $2B Bloomfield Park Project a Monument to Downturn – An incredible story of a huge suburban development halted and likely to end up being simply demolished down the road.

5. Yonah Freemark: Are pedestrian malls the future or the relic of antiquated thinking?

Shanghai World Expo Pavilions

Totonko has a great photo series of pavilions at the Shanghai World Expo. Here’s a sample photo of the UK pavilion:

How to Save Silicon Valley

NBC Bay Area is starting a series called “How to Save Silicon Valley” that includes some debate about whether the Valley is in trouble, or whether it is simply in one of its period downturns that will lead to renewed period of growth down the road. This 2:30 video presents a bit of both sides. (If the video doesn’t display, click here).

Commuting Time

Business First of Buffalo published a table of commute times by metro. Buffalo was #2 and Rochester #1. Here’s a look at how my Midwest metros fared:

• #5 – Milwaukee (22.16 minutes)
• #7 – Kansas City (22.83)
• #8 – Columbus (22.88)
• #9 – Louisville (22.92)
• #12 – Cincinnati (23.75)
• #13 – Cleveland (23.82)
• #15 – Indianapolis (23.93)
• #16 – Minneapolis (24.13)
• #24 – St. Louis (25.00)
• #26 – Pittsburgh (25.18)
• #35 – Detroit (26.06)
• #50 – Chicago (31.08)

Where to Buy, Where to Rent

Richard Florida has a blog post on the rent vs. buy decision in various markets. Here’s a graphic:

World and National Roundup

The Director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, Adolfo Carrión, has moved over to HUD. No word on a successor.

CEOs for Cities posted some key insights from their strategy session in New York.

Ed Glaeser: A Tale of Many Cities – An interesting look at Zipf’s Law of city sizes.

Miller-McCune: How urban planning can improve public health

BeyondDC: Who gets the power? – A look at the state-city tug of war

Mnpls Star Tribune: Will government pensions be next to go bust?

Re-Imagine Rural: Do you have mommy bloggers in your marketing plan?

Global Midwest: The Density Debate

LA Times: Tokyo’s Goal: Be the Greenest

WSJ: The new San Francisco suburbs, a plane ride away – A story about how folks from the Bay Area are moving to Portland and Seattle for lower costs and lifestyle, and semi-commuting back.

AJC: Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed seeks massive rollback of city pensions

More Midwest

Chicago
Get to know your CTA chairman (Red Eye) – Unbelievably, the chairman of the CTA board says he hasn’t ridden the system “in a couple of years”
Metra leaves search engine at the station (Tribune) – Metra claims they can’t install wi-fi on trains because it is too hard, despite the fact that Megabus and airlines have done it easily.
Fewer blacks in city could affect politics (NYT)
City needs $600M more per year for pensions (Greg Hinz @ Crain’s) – And that’s for the next 50 years.
Designers’ Mantra – Learn in Chicago, Then Leave (NYT)

Cleveland
No Mistaking It – I Love Cleveland (Dan Shaughnessy @ Boston Globe)
Merger of Continental and United Alarms Business Leaders (Plain Dealer)

Detroit
A city with potential or seizing the day (Time)
bing backs off talk about downsizing Detroit (Free Press)
Fixing Detroit: A Laboratory for Saving America’s Cities (Time)
Southland (Detroit Blog)

Indianapolis
Monument Circle: Is It Ready? (urbanOut)
Major Move Backwards (Ft. Wayne Journal-Gazette) – Indiana’s Major Moves highway program is underfunded by at least $1 billion

Kansas City
Retiring director put KC’s art museum on the map (KC Star)

Louisville
Report suggests tourism expansion ideas for Louisville (C-J)

Milwaukee
Loss of Midwest brand takes chunk out of city’s identify (JS)

St. Louis
Revitalizing the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial: A Vision for Transformative Change (St. Louis Energized)
The History and Possibilities of a St. Louis City-County Reunification (UrbanStl)

Post Script

When the city of Columbus passed Cleveland to become the largest municipality in Ohio some years back, Cleveland didn’t take kindly. Here’s a promo for a TV news series on it that I found linked from the Columbus Dispatch. (If the video doesn’t display, click here).

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Do Cities Need a Creative Director?

Cities that suffer from various brand stigmas or problems often want to give themselves an image makeover. Even cities that are doing well can fret about how their brand is faring versus the global competition. This had led some cities to ask whether or not they need to appoint a creative director, as in the private sector. For example, see this article about Birmingham, UK. Tyler Brûlé, whom I mentioned yesterday, listed appointing a creative director as one of the five things he would do as mayor of a city. As he put it, “All strong brands have a creative director with a strong vision. Cities need them too. And no, they’re not called mayors.”

I think this notion has appeal because a) most cities have no concept of brand or vision, and b) strong creative directors have pulled off miracles in the private sector by reviving fallen brands. Tom Ford at Gucci comes to mind.

Yet while strong branding consciousness is clearly an imperative for cities – and I mean branding in the true sense, not just creating logos or marketing – I wonder if a creative director is the type of person could pull it off.

In the the private sector, a creative director is actually in charge. In the public sector, a wide variety of agencies and private institutions are doing their own thing. What would the creative director for a city actually control? Logos? Signage? Street design? Planning reviews? It strikes me that in almost any case, the creative director would be a classic “czar” – that is, someone with nominal responsibility for something, but no real portfolio. The job of a czar is virtually impossible, as anyone who has held one can attest. If you don’t own bodies or budgets, you are basically reduced to begging people to do what you want. This requires deft salesmanship and relationship skills, but are those what creative director types are known for?

Consider Adolfo Carrión, who recently moved over to HUD from the White House Office of Urban Affairs. He took a lot of flack from certain quarters for not making more of an impact. But consider this poor guy’s position. Unlike Sec. LaHood, he doesn’t own a bureaucracy or a budget. He had a tiny staff. And he was trying to create a cross-functional federal urban policy for the first time ever. The degree of difficulty is overwhelming. It’s hard enough changing a battleship organization even when people actually report to you.

A czar only has influence to the extent that the CEO provides support. In this light, the mayor – or another major power broker such as a local billionaire or business leader – absolutely does need vision and to “get it” on matters of brand. As I wrote previously, CEO responsibilities like strategy and brand very much are the responsibility of the mayor. Maybe he doesn’t need to know every detail, but he has to at least get it at a high level. As Machiavelli put it:

This is an axiom which never fails: that a prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice….Good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels.

The input of the best creative director in the world would be wasted if the leadership doesn’t get it. Before seeking the best creative input, what is first needed is to cultivate an understanding of the importance of brand, strategy, and vision in municipal leaders. The new 21st century competitive landscape demands more from leaders than ever before, and they have to grow beyond operational excellence and prudent financial management to having the skills such as brand vision that have traditionally been the hallmarks of the private sector. Only with that prerequisite in place does hiring a creative director or other expert make sense.

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

London and the Power of Place

Tyler Brûlé is the über-hip founder of Wallpaper magazine, founder and editor of the excellent Monocle magazine, and owner of a design agency. He also writes a weekly column for the Financial Times in which he frequently takes London to task for its poor quality of life. This week featured another installment – “London: Not As Livable As I’d Like” – in which he extols the virtues of Seoul in comparison to London.

But guess what? Brûlé lives in London and bases all of his businesses there. Despite his complaints, there must be something about the place that keeps him from packing it up for Seoul or Tokyo.

Anyone who has ever been to London can attest to its miserable transport conditions, generally unattractive streets (in contrast to, say, Paris or Amsterdam), and high costs, among other annoyances. Yet for some people, the value of being in London is so high none of that matters.

People talk about quality of life and amenities as drawing people. That’s a strategy many cities are pursuing. Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon said of his city:

My goal in the changing of the face of Seoul is all related to enhancing its attractiveness. If the city is attractive, people, information and capital flow in. This in turn creates economic re-vitality and it also creates a lot of jobs.

But once you’ve reached a certain level, that stuff almost doesn’t matter anymore. London’s power of place is so high, it trumps all other considerations, including quality of life, for those who can take advantage of it. That shows the magic isn’t per se in the amenities, it’s in the people and the value of them being together in a place like London.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t focus on amenities or quality of life, especially if you aren’t yet in the London league. You’ve got to prime the pump somehow. Just remember why you are doing it. And I’d suggest not losing sight of the bottom line on costs either.

By the way, a couple years ago I was privileged to spend quite a bit of time working in London. There’s definitely something about the city. It’s got an energy and edge that is just incredible. You know just walking down the streets that this is a place where important things are happening. Whatever my long list of complaints about Heathrow and such, London is still by far my favorite city outside the United States – and I’m not just saying that because they speak English.

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

Failure to Communicate: Beyond Starbucks Urbanism

This post is not about policies per se, but about how they are marketed. Progressive urban policies such as improved transit, density, quality of space, excellence in design, and green friendliness often run into significant resistance in cities where there is not a long history of urbanism. This is because too often they are poorly positioned, packaged, and sold to the public. Advocates for these policies attempt to lift and drop a solution such as a Portland-style streetcar into a very different environment. Getting a transit line approved in Portland is like shooting a layup – degree of difficulty low. Getting one approved in the Heartland is a very different matter. Advocates have generally ignored the salient facts on the ground in their cities and failed to make a robust case for forward looking policies beyond a narrow base. Let’s look at some examples.

Cincinnati Streetcar

Cincinnati narrowly beat back a citizen-led ballot initiative to derail a streetcar system last fall, but it remains controversial and unfunded. The Cincinnati Enquirer recently published a skeptical editorial and the project is far from guaranteed.

While proponents have upped their game a bit lately, they were doing a generally poor case of selling the streetcar to Cincinnati, using arguments that among other things made a case based on a narrow appeal to gentrification. Here’s a video the city released featuring the mayor and city manager discussing the streetcar (if the video doesn’t appear, click here):

At 1:00 into the video, here is how the mayor describes the economic development benefit of the streetcar:

If you make the investment of putting rails in the ground, and people know there’s going to be a train, we’re talking a about a modern train that comes every day, developers and investors now look at the streetcar line and say, “Well there’s a vacant building. I’m going to buy that building. I’m going to put a Starbucks in the first floor and I’m going to put condos above it.” [emphasis added]

Starbucks and condos. I wonder if the mayor has ever considered this key figure: the median household income in the city of Cincinnati is $33,524. Keep in mind, that’s household income, and by definition half of all households earn less than that amount. Think they care about whether Cincinnati has a few more Starbucks or condos? Or do they have other bread and butter concerns that might weigh more heavily?

Too many urban advocates have an impoverished vision of city life that amounts to little more than “Starbucks urbanism.” I believe we need reinvestment in our cities. I believe we need to attract “choice” consumers, people who have options about where to live. Focusing exclusively on helping the poor only ensures your city will stay poor as everybody else wises up that they are the chumps serving as the city’s ATM machine and head for the hills. But we’ve got to make sure projects are conceived and marketed in ways that appeal to the broader community, not in ways that might actually seem threatening to them. This example is particularly unfortunate since it wasn’t necessary. The mayor could easily have said put a “store” on the ground floor and “residences” or “apartments” above.

Imagine Kansas City

Here’s another example, this one from Kansas City. It’s a video that was run as part of a public television series on the future on Kansas City. I’ve actually highlighted this video several times as an example of good transit advocacy. One of the most important things you need to do in pushing for something new and different is to create a vision of how life in the city will be better and different when the plan is carried out. This video does a great job of that. (If it doesn’t display, click here).

Good as this video is, it has the major weakness that it too is selling transit as a generator of Starbucks urbanism. Did you notice the types of businesses? Coffee shops, fitness clubs, sushi bars in what appears to be an upscale neighborhood. Also, considering our obsessively politically correct climate (far too politically correct in my view), it is notable that the people in this video were almost entirely white and upscale.

Again, consider who this is being marketed to. In cities like Chicago or New York where working class and poor neighborhoods have reasonable quality transit and at least semi-walkable neighborhoods, selling them on investments in urbanism is generally not a challenge. Indeed, the usual debate is around them clamoring for more transit type investments and demanding equity in spending on them. But in places like Kansas City, where bus service for the poor has often lagged and the city isn’t nearly as walkable, marketing to yuppies misses the broader audience. Perhaps that’s why it was voted down last time.

It should come as no surprised that poor and minority communities who are stuck with pathetic bus systems that don’t meet their needs today are often skeptical of rail transit that appears to be for rich people. It isn’t just anti-tax people who often fight it. The NAACP in Cincinnati opposes the streetcar. And a organizations representing a majority black neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota are very skeptical of a light rail plan there, which they are afraid will only lead to displacement in their community. (Here’s a related article which shows that proponents didn’t do their homework).

The person who created this video – which again I think is among the best in many ways – made some changes for his next iteration for Indianapolis that created an even more effective story in my view by addressing some of these points.

What About Everybody Else?

My other favorite example besides transit and neighborhood redevelopment is talent attraction. It’s accepted by virtually everyone that having a critical mass of the right talent is key to success in the 21st century economy. Boosting college degree attainment is critical. But in most states the majority of adults don’t have college degrees. So why would they be interested in this? Trying to make the case for investments in luring the college degreed can seem like investing in people who are already privileged. People seldom explain why it is good for the average person in the community.

I addressed this matter in a recent blog post excerpting my keynote address at the IndyPartnership annual meeting, so I’ll include a clip here again:

There’s one other narrative that needs to be created. This one is for local consumption and it is one that almost every city overlooks. Since the benefits of attracting the college degreed are so high, cities tend to focus on that. But what about the people without degrees? Less than 20% of adults in Indiana have a college degree. What about the other 80%? What’s it in for them in these progressive urban policies? Many of them are hurting right now, and I think they have a right to be skeptical about policies that seem to be focused on the most privileged in society. So we have to show the benefit to them and answer the questions.

Why should we be investing millions of dollars in Conexus and Biocrossroads? Why does it matter that corporate executives can have a steak dinner and a good time downtown? Why should we be investing millions of dollars in pharmacy education at Butler and Purdue, to produce graduates who will earn six figures the minute they walk out the door? Well, if you are a single mother in Clinton County with a high school diploma who can get a good job as a technician at Medco [a mail order pharmacy company] it matters to you, that’s why.

That’s the type of story we need to be able to tell. To make it real to people why these forward looking policies are good for all Hoosiers. These stories have to be told, told loudly, and told often.

What stories are you telling about how investments in talent and the new economy boost everyone?

A Broader Urban Vision

When I was part of a panel at Rail~Volution with Ryan Avent, he made a really great observation that we used to have this notion in an era of urban abandonment that riding the bus, or other hallmarks of urban living, were a second class choice, something you did if you didn’t have better options. Now now we’ve gone to the other extreme where that’s considered the luxury option. But we forgot that there’s this entire spectrum in the middle where we can have more middle class oriented urbanism.

Designing for and marketing to people outside of the Starbucks urbanism crowd requires taking the time to understand their lives, aspirations, and point of view, and making sure you take their perspective seriously. Legendary leftist radical Saul Alinksy made this point clearly back in 1971:

To bring out this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 percent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose incomes range from $5,000-$10,000 per year. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat.
….
Many of the lower middle classes are members of labor unions, churches, fraternal, service and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one with work with any other part of our population – with respect, understanding, and sympathy. To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream but they are here and will be.

Doing It Right: John Robert Smith and Reconnecting America

We have to go beyond Starbucks urbanism. We have to find a way to build broad coalitions for forward looking policies. We have to get serious and start marking the case in a better and much more effective way by making sure to reach out to the whole community.

To see one great example of how to get it right, watch the video below I shot with John Robert Smith, CEO of Reconnecting America, at Rail~Volution in Boston. (If the video doesn’t display, click here).

(FYI: I’d like to stress that I shot that video myself with a Flip camera during a busy conference – it’s not an official video. A real marketing video would of course have real production behind it)

Smith is running an organization that is heavily pushing transit oriented development, but understands the importance of both bi-partisanship and building bridges to smaller towns and rural communities about creating a transportation bill that works for everybody. People should take lessons from this approach. John Robert Smith gets it.

The sales job on better urban policies has frankly been wanting. For those who don’t live in low degree of difficulty communities, it’s time to seriously raise the game on the marketing plan and execution.

I’ll have another installment in my “Failure to Communicate” series at a future date.

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