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Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

The Reasons Behind Detroit’s Decline by Pete Saunders

My hometown of Detroit has been studied obsessively for years by writers and researchers of all types to gain insight into the Motor City’s decline. Indeed, it seems to have become a favorite pastime for urbanists of all stripes. How could such an economic powerhouse, a uniquely American city, so utterly collapse?

Most analysis tends to focus on the economic, social and political reasons for the downfall. One of my favorite treatises on Detroit is The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue, who argues that housing and racial discrimination practices put in place after World War II played a primary role in the decline of Motown. I’d argue that it’s closest to the truth of an explanation for Detroit today, but not quite there.

Everyone seems to know the shorthand narrative for Detroit’s fall. Industrial output declines; racial tensions rise. White residents leave; an unapologetic black leadership assumes control. And there’s quite a bit of truth to that narrative. Yes, the auto industry faced stiff competition, moved jobs to the suburbs, moved jobs down south, and later moved jobs out of the country. And all that happened with fewer jobs at each stop. Yes, Detroit does have a regrettably complex racial history and the legacy of two perception-forming riots since World War II (in 1943 and 1967). Yes, Detroit has had its share of political corruption, often tied to the tumultuous mayoral administrations of Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick.

But here’s the thing. Buffalo and Cleveland have suffered the same kind of economic loss, but have not (quite) fallen to the same depths as Detroit. In fact, Pittsburgh suffered as much economically as Detroit, and is now poised for an amazing Rust Belt comeback. Any number of cities has had as troubled a racial legacy as Detroit, without being as adversely impacted. And Detroit certainly hasn’t cornered the market on political corruption, as long as Chicago exists.

So why has Detroit suffered unlike any other major city? Planning, or the lack thereof for more than a century, is why Detroit stands out. While cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles (don’t laugh – Detroit and LA essentially boomed at the same time) put a premium on creating pleasant built environments for their residents, Detroit was unique in putting all its eggs in the corporate caretaker basket. Once the auto industry became established in Detroit, political and business leaders abdicated their responsibility on sound urban planning and design, and elected to let the booming economy do the work for them.

Detroit’s decline has been going on far longer than most people realize, because of the city’s lack of attention to creating a pleasant built environment. Evidence? A Time Magazine article entitled “Decline in Detroit” from 1961 – yes, 1961 – had the following to say in its opening paragraph:

If ever a city stood as a symbol of the dynamic U.S. economy, it was Detroit. It was not pretty. It was, in fact, a combination of the grey and the garish: its downtown area was a warren of dingy, twisting streets; the used-car lots along Livernois Avenue raised an aurora of neon. But Detroit cared less about how it looked than about what it did—and it did plenty.

Emphasis added.

So what exactly did Detroit get wrong on the planning side of things? I outline nine direct and indirect planning and land use reasons for the Motor City’s current state. Here they are below.

1. Poor neighborhood identification. Ask a Chicagoan where they’re from, and they will likely give you a neighborhood name – Wrigleyville, Jefferson Park, Chatham. The same is true in other neighborhood-oriented cities like New York, Boston, even Washington, D.C. However, ask a Detroiter where they’re from, and they will likely tell you East Side or West Side; if pressed, they might note a key intersection. While the Motor City does have its share of traditional enclaves (Indian Village and English Village) and emerging hot spots (Midtown), Detroit is notable among large U.S. cities for having very poorly defined neighborhoods.

Neighborhood identification is important because ideally residents live in a neighborhood context. Schools, convenience shopping, social activities and recreational uses, all connected and shared by locals in a defined area, can provide a sense of community ownership. An argument can be made that’s been lacking in Detroit for decades.

2. Poor housing stock. Detroit may be well-known for its so-called ruins, but much of the city is relentlessly covered with small, Cape Cod-style, 3-bedroom and one-bath single family homes on slabs that are not in keeping with contemporary standards for size and quality.

The general national perception of Detroit’s housing might be of a city that resembles the South Bronx in the late 1970’s – long stretches of dense but abandoned walk-up apartment buildings with a smattering of deteriorated single-family homes. The truth, however, is that Detroit may have one of the greatest concentrations of post-World War II tract housing of any major U.S. city. Two random images from Google Earth effectively demonstrate this. Detroit’s residential areas look pretty much like this, from the city’s northeast side:

Or like this, from the northwest side:

Note that these images come from the more intact parts of the city, not the “returning-to-prairie” areas that have brought the city notoriety. True, Detroit has more than its share of abandoned ruins that negatively impact housing prices. But it also has many more homes that simply don’t generate the demand that higher quality housing would. That is a major contributor to the city’s abundance of very cheap housing.

3. A poor public realm. Detroit’s streetscape is unbearable in many places. Major corridors have long stretches of anonymous single-story commercial buildings, with few trees or other landscaping. Signs, banners, awnings and decorative lighting are noticeably lacking. Overhead electrical wires extend for miles, and streets have been rigidly engineered with road signs and markings. The city’s corridors are hardly pedestrian friendly. Again, images from Google Earth can demonstrate this. Here is an area just blocks from where I grew up:

And another corridor a short distance away:

And yet another from the opposite side of town:

Even in a strong economic environment with fully occupied structures the visual appeal would be jarring. But this is Detroit, a city that has lost so much of the income and tax base needed to support the commercial areas and supporting infrastructure. That means empty buildings, broken sidewalks, poor street conditions, and a continuing spiral of decline.

4. A downtown that was allowed to become weak. Detroit did not always have a relatively weak downtown. The city’s core was a strong retail and commercial center through much of the 20th century, with the advertising, legal and financial offices that supported the auto industry. At some point, Detroit’s downtown became secondary as an employment center to the factory locations scattered throughout the city and metro area. Just like homeowners, offices began relocating to the suburbs. By the ‘60s more and more people saw downtown as a retail center as opposed to an office center, and one that could not compete with suburban malls.

5. Freeway expansion. This is something a little more familiar to planners when explaining the decline of central cities, but it’s acutely relevant in Detroit. I have no documentation to support it, but I suspect Detroit has more freeway miles per land area than most cities in the nation. The auto-dominated economy wanted a landscape that supported its values.

6. Lack of/loss of a transit network. Detroit had an elaborate streetcar network that was in existence until the 1950’s, but was largely replaced by buses. The auto industry took special interest in the conversion of the streetcar network to buses. General Motors lobbied the city’s Department of Street Railways (DSR) throughout much of the ‘50s, stressing that diesel-fueled buses were an effective lower-cost alternative to streetcars (no more rail maintenance costs!) and could provide much greater flexibility to meet shifting travel demands. Coincidentally, GM produced exactly the kind of buses that would easily facilitate the transition. By 1953, the DSR began a three-year effort to convert streetcars to buses, and the last streetcar route was completed in April 1956.

The kind of lobbying (coercion?) exhibited by GM happened in many other cities across the country. However, Detroit had no other alternative in place, like subways and elevated systems, in the way that New York, Chicago, Philadelphia or Boston did. Also, Detroit had no history of commuter rail reaching from the outer portions of the metro area to the downtown core, also like the afore-mentioned cities. And lastly, as demonstrated earlier downtown Detroit was already beginning its decline and was unable to be the kind of “pull” that would have supported alternative transportation uses there.

7. Local government organization. Another unique, if indirectly related facet of Detroit is its current local government organization. Like most major American cities of the late 19th century, Detroit elected city council members from districts or wards across the city. And like most of those cities, Detroit experienced its share of graft and corruption in the political arena. But the Progressive Movement that pursued local government reform throughout the nation had perhaps its greatest achievement in Detroit. In 1918, a new city charter was established that led to the reorganization of local government to have Council members elected city-wide, instead of by wards. This governance system has been in place ever since, but is slated to end with the establishment of a new charter in 2013 that will now elect council members from seven districts and two at-large spots.

This has been a double-edged sword for Detroit. While it may have kept a lid on some of the possible corruption that could have happened, it likely created greater distance between residents and city government. I believe this led to two significant impacts. First, it allowed the influence of the auto industry to travel unfettered within local government through the first two-thirds of the 20th century, without the countervailing influence of local residents. Second, without representation and support, neighborhoods were unable to mature in Detroit as they had in other major cities. They never had champions at the local government level, as elected officials had to view the city in its entirety and abstractly, and not represent and develop a unique part of the city.

The seven reasons outlined above would be enough to hurt the future development prospects of most cities. However, the last two reasons I cite, which look at land use actions and policy decisions from more than 100 years ago, are what distinguishes Detroit from any other city in America.

8. An industrial landscape that constrained the city’s core. A unique aspect of land use in Detroit that’s often discussed but rarely explored fully is the huge amount of industrial and manufacturing land in the city. It’s not surprising, really, since the city did give itself over to the industrial gods. Detroit was not only the home of the auto industry, but all the suppliers that made assembly there viable – producing everything from windshields to exhaust pipes.

Most cities across the nation, even most other Rust Belt cities, concentrated industrial lands in certain districts or corridors, often in just one part of a city. Usually the industrial lands followed waterfronts or rail corridors and connected with downtowns, and other parts of the city were spared the negative externalities of industrial use. But Detroit circa 1905 was faced with a critical decision – how could the city expand its industrial lands to capitalize on its emerging role as the Automobile Capital of the World?

To see how Detroit arrived at its solution one must understand the primary transportation system for manufacturing at the time – the railroads. By 1900 a dense network of rail lines had developed around Detroit. The principal lines that moved products in and out of Detroit, the Michigan Central and Grand Trunk Western, entered the city from the southwest and exited to the northeast, all just beyond the growing city’s limits. While numerous other lines existed throughout the city, the MC and Grand Trunk lines were critical because they connected Detroit with the rest of the nation. An article I found from the Railway Age Gazette, from June 1914, stated that:

The unusually rapid growth in the number and size of industrial plants along the main lines of the railways entering the city has caused serious congestion in practically all of the area within the city limits suitable for such development. (M)any railway and business men who had given the subject careful consideration were of the opinion that the only permanent relief was to be secured by building a complete outer belt line outside of the city limits.

This is pretty well illustrated in the map below, with the Michigan Central and Grand Trunk Western lines highlighted in red. The city’s boundaries prior to 1915 are highlighted in green (please forgive my simple graphics):

Source: detroittransithistory.info website

Several railroad interests came together, including the Michigan Central and Grand Trunk lines, to address the issue of industrial expansion and congestion in Detroit. They elected to establish a new railroad – the Detroit Terminal Railroad. It was indeed an “outer belt line” that connected the Michigan Central Line with the Grand Trunk Western, arcing from the southwest side to the northeast, but also created a spur on the east side that would link to the Detroit River and allow for the development of additional industrial land. The DTR was constructed between 1904 and 1911. The line is illustrated on the following map with a dotted black line:

Source: detroittransithistory.info website

The land use dynamic changed when Henry Ford constructed his Highland Park assembly plant, which opened in 1908. In 1906 he bought 160 acres of land along Woodward Avenue in the small village north of Detroit, next to the crossing of the DTR at Woodward Avenue (the main roadway that extends through Highland Park in the above image). He was well aware of already-underway efforts to construct the “outer belt line” that industrialists had called for, and Ford put himself in position to benefit from it. Shortly after the opening of his new factory, an almost unbroken arc of industrial land lined the DTR – occasionally split by major arterial roadways that connected the city to its hinterlands, but largely occupied by the industrial supply and small assembly businesses that would serve each other. The DTR encircled and constrained the city’s dense urban core.

While it could not have been envisioned at the time, this led directly to another planning reason for the city’s decline:

9. Ill-timed and unfulfilled annexation policy. The two maps above show (in green) the city’s boundaries as of 1915. Bear in mind that Detroit’s population exploded from 205,000 in 1890 to almost 1 million by 1920, but not much new territory was added to the city during that time. In fact, between 1892 and 1905, the city did not annex any new land, all while rapid growth was happening. With the DTR now wrapped around the city with a wall of industrial land, city leaders began looking for new lands to annex to support the expanding population.

Huge annexations began occurring in the late 1910’s but accelerated during the ‘20s. This is purely my own speculation here, but my guess is that Detroit city leaders wanted to annex areas beyond the DTR arc to establish new neighborhoods for residents working in those very factories. That, I’m sure, was the plan.

Then the Great Depression and World War II hit.

Suddenly all the farmland that was supposed to be developed into new Detroit neighborhoods in the ‘30s and ‘40s was deferred by as much as twenty years. No new neighborhoods meant that the city core that existed in 1915 was essentially the same core that existed in 1945. Sure, a very strong demand for housing developed during that 30-year period, but tensions – race, management vs. union, among others – likely grew at an even faster pace.

The industrial wall and annexation policy had four impacts on Detroit. First, it created the push for suburbanization in Detroit, as residents sought to move away from the noisy, smelly and smoky factories that dotted the landscape. Secondly, the pressure to rapidly meet the pent-up housing demand in the ‘40s and ‘50s led to the vast spread of homes that today lack contemporary appeal. Thirdly, once industrial decline occurred it contributed mightily to the blight of the city as factories became abandoned – that’s largely how the city got its famed “ruins”. A pattern was established – industrial abandonment begat adjacent residential abandonment, which begat commercial abandonment, and begat even more residential abandonment. I would argue that the vast majority of vacant, “return-to-prairie” lands in Detroit are within a two-mile radius of the DTR. And lastly, the sheer amount of industrial land, with all associated cleanup concerns, made the decommission and consolidation of industrial land for other uses extremely difficult. Not that Detroit demonstrated the will to do so. There likely was a period during the ‘70s and ‘80s when the city could have effectively redeveloped industrial land to other uses, but again Detroit doubled down on the prospect of industrial jobs.

There’s an old saying that when you have a hammer, every problem is a nail. Granted, I am a planner, and I see planning problems as key to Detroit’s demise. While this point of view hasn’t been clearly articulated before, it’s clear that given this planning and land use legacy, it’s readily apparent how Detroit got to where it is today. Detroit’s problems began precisely with the rise of the auto industry during the 1900s and 1910s, not from the beginnings of its decline 50 years later or from ill-fated attempts to resuscitate it since. The seeds of Detroit’s decline had been sown long before suburbanization accelerated in the ‘50s, or racial tensions exploded in the ‘60s.

Detroit circa 1890 was a moderately-sized Great Lakes port whose economy revolved around shipbuilding and carriage-building. It was eerily similar in size, scale and character to Milwaukee at that time. But the work of Henry Ford, William C. Durant and the Dodge brothers altered that forever.

The rise of the automobile enriched the corporations and created the template for the expansion of the middle class around the country, but it transformed the city, to its astounding detriment. Left untreated, any improvement in Detroit’s economic, social or political fortunes would still leave the city with a troubled planning legacy.

Pete Saunders is a Detroit native who current works as an urban planner in Chicago.

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

Replay: Louisville – Vice City

[ This one from the archives is the final installment in my Louisville trilogy this week. It's a concept brand positioning idea for the city. Keep in mind, this is supposed to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, while being realistically rooted in the city and showing how places should be thinking about themselves in a crowded, competitive marketplace - Aaron. ]

I am a believer that in a modern era that has witnessed the fragmentation of the great American common culture, and the relatively small in number but broad in reach institutions that served it, it is important for cities that are not blessed with natural amenities or killer low costs to increase their strategic differentiation. They should try to find market segments they can target more effectively than others. And they should try to build a unique local environment rooted in their history and character, but which is also forward looking, that creates a distinct, unique flavor of urbanity.

I’ve also suggested that Louisville should focus on quality over quantity. It already has fantastic neighborhoods many cities would kill for. Strengthening those, making targeted investments in its downtown, riverfront, and other well-chosen areas, and focusing on strengthening its unique assets are the actions I would take.

I’d like to throw out today a further concept positioning strategy for Louisville that I call “Vice City”. It’s not exactly that, but I couldn’t think of a better name for it. It’s not necessarily a serious proposal, and I strongly doubt there would be any local interest in it, but I do think that by studying the idea, it can hopefully generate some interesting thoughts about the city and what it could be. Please view this as a speculative proposal or thought experiment.

In a nutshell, this idea positions Louisville as “New Orleans North”. I can’t help but noticing a few parallels between the two cities.

• New Orleans is a river city – Louisville is a river city
• New Orleans has a French heritage – Louisville is named after a French king at least, and has adopted a lot of French symbology
• New Orleans has great restaurants – Louisville has great restaurants
• New Orleans has Southern, historic, genteel neighborhoods and traditions – Louisville also has Southern influenced, historic, genteel neighborhoods and traditions.
• New Orleans has a huge reputation as a haven of vice and partying – Louisville used to have that reputation.

That last bit is interesting. River towns were always rough places. Louisville’s riverside docks were, like waterfronts the world over, rough and rowdy havens of drunkenness and debauchery. “Lively Shively” was historically home to distilleries and strip clubs. Until quite recently Louisville had any number of blue establishments downtown. Reputedly the reason Green St. was renamed Liberty St. long ago was to help eradicate the reputation Green St. had acquired far and wide as a home of the burlesque. Think about Louisville and Kentucky and what comes to mind? Horse racing (gambling), bourbon (drinking), tobacco (smoking), and coal. We’re talking about a place whose history and brand are already heavily associated with vice.

New Orleans had a similar heritage. The big difference is that New Orleans, probably for cultural reasons, was always proud of its seamy side. Like Las Vegas, it recognized that in a country which is dominated by a strong moral sensitivity, there was an opportunity to carve out a niche – and a highly successful one – catering to, shall we say, a more lax standard. And the party pit in the French Quarter and downtown casinos largely have no ill effect on New Orleans’ neighborhoods, many of which still look like they are fresh from the pages of an Anne Rice novel. Now New Orleans may not be a truly successful metro area for many reasons, but try to imagine it without the tourist industry.

Louisville, by contrast, has long tried to stamp out vice in that city. And today it has largely succeeded. Where long ago you could once have a good time in a burlesque joint on Green St., today your choices in downtown entertainment tend to the extremely generic, such as the heavily subsidized 4th St. Live complex. By stamping out vice, Louisville to a great extent stamped out fun and character from much of its downtown.

One way to envision a successful, unique strategy for Louisville is to do something similar to what New Orleans did, namely creating a great combination out of the best of Mobile and Las Vegas. From Mobile you take the laid back southern charm, aristocratic traditions, gentility, and high culture. From Vegas you take vice, fun, and a certain joie de vivre.

By the way, does this sound familiar? It should, because it is an almost perfect description of the Kentucky Derby. You’ve got the tradition at the pinnacle of horse racing as a sport combined with gambling. You’ve got the fancy dress, fancy hats, and mint juleps of Millionaire’s Row combined with the raucous debauchery of the infield and people sneaking in booze by stuffing vodka down their trousers double-bagged in ziplocks (not that I’ve ever done such a thing…..). A great and winning combination.

Extending this to the city as a whole, we start with the fundamental aristocratic character of the civic culture. I’m not going to say this is unique to Louisville. For some reason, it seems to permeate many of the river cities I’ve studied. Talking to someone about Louisville, he offered this insight, “Louisville is provincial, in all the best and worst ways. Louisville likes itself, is proud of itself, hangs on to its institutions, loves its (private, Catholic) high schools in ways I’ve never seen elsewhere”. This is clearly an example of aristocratic thinking, which is about self-regard, rooted in history and the land. This attitude also shows through in the particular contempt Louisville shows for newer cities, as well as the extreme prickliness of Louisvillians when it comes to outside criticism. In a democratic social state like America, aristocracy has a bit of a bad reputation, and it certainly has its downsides. But it also has its good points. Firstly, it generates a bit of unique local character all its own. Secondly, it gives people the cultural fortitude to say no to trends and hold onto local ways and to embrace an agenda that is different from what other people are doing. (I’m also describing Cincinnati here, you might notice).

From that, we take away the fierce pride in unique neighborhoods and historic traditions. We can also take the embrace of certain aspects of high culture, including fine dining (of which Louisville has a great tradition), mint juleps and the bourbon culture, the arts, etc. I definitely think this should be looked at as rooted in a very Southern approach. Again, this distinguishes Louisville. Most Southern cities seem to want to ape Atlanta as the next mega-growth story. This leaves the field clear to a major city that wants to adopt a Charleston/Savannah/Mobile type point of view.

One piece of this that must be rejected, however, is the racial baggage that comes with it. Also in common with New Orleans, Louiville has a marginalized African American community. Southern aristocratic culture is rooted in plantation culture, which has its Not Good points to say the least. As with other cities, it is a clear imperative for Louisville to improve race relations and to make sure that its minority communities share in its success.

On the other side, how can Louisville recapture the fun outside of Derby? There are some ways we might imagine. Again, instead of creating a “climate action plan” just like every other city, or banning smoking just like every other city, why not roll with the fact that Kentucky is a major tobacco producer and has the highest percentage of people who smoke to be the most smoking friendly city in America? You’ve got gambling at Churchill Downs, and already across the river at Caesars/Horseshoe, so why not put a couple of casinos downtown? I normally think this is a disaster of a downtown development approach, but if you are organizing around forbidden fun, why not? Loosen up on liquor licenses to create party zones, and also do something to make sure that the best transportation options for people who have been drinking are available so people can get home safely. Figure out how to become the micro-distillery capital of the United States. There are already great local breweries like New Albanian and BBC, try to make sure there are many, many more. Do whatever you can to make Louisville party central, and create a fun, unique environment you can’t get elsewhere. By the way, much like Vegas and New Orleans, this is also good for conventions if that is a business you really want to be a player in.

Louisville is surrounded by hundreds of miles of mostly not very exciting places in the lower Midwest and upper South, places that are very conservative in many respects. Why should someone have to fly to New Orleans or Vegas or where ever to have a good time partying when they can just drive or take a short hop to Louisville?

Here’s a short promo video that sums it up beautifully:

Of course, there is a problem with this. No one in Louisville is likely to want to do it. And the negative consequences might outweigh the positives, I’ll admit. Fortunately, as a blogger, I can put crazy ideas on the table to make people think though. And I think Louisville needs to be thinking indeed about what niche it should carve out for itself. Downtown condos, generic bars, a smallish convention center, sports facilities, etc. are not going to distinguish Louisville from peer competitive cities. Particularly when it is facing the headwinds of being regionally smaller and having low educational attainment.

At a minimum, I do think Louisville ought to be thinking about this notion of Southern aristocratic culture and how it can leverage it to best effect locally. That seems to be a no brainer since there are already extensive elements of it present.

This post originally ran on March 15, 2009.

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Humor: Somebody Really Hates Bicycle Helmet Laws

I’m guessing that by now everybody has seen at least one of the “Hitler Reacts” parodies. In this one, Hitler reacts to the news that Australia has an all-ages mandatory bicycle helmet law:

If the video doesn’t display, click here. H/t Copenhagenize

Not So Pure Michigan

Somebody sent me a link to a video from parody site “Not So Pure Michigan.” This one is a spoof ad for Michigan that brutalizes Wisconsin and Ohio. I should warn you that it contains profanity and might be offensive to some – particularly people from Wisconsin and Ohio!.

If the video doesn’t display, click here.

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Louisville: A Tale of One City by Rollin Stanley

[ One of the Louisville sites I do still read religiously is Broken Sidewalk. Last month I saw there the article below which originally appeared on the blog of Rollin Stanley, Planning Director of Montgomery County, MD. If you'd like to know more about him, check out his blog, or read this piece from Greater Greater Washington called, The Quotable Rollin Stanley. This Louisville piece is very insightful and I am grateful he gave permission to repost it here - Aaron. ]

Downtown Louisville. (Branden Klayko)

[Note from Branden Klayko, Editor of Broken Sidewalk: Rollin Stanley is the Planning Director at the Montgomery County, Maryland Planning Department. I first met him nearly a decade ago shortly after he was named Executive Director of the St. Louis Planning and Urban Design Agency while I was in college. He understands how cities work implicitly and is an outspoken advocate of good urban design and transit-oriented development. Stanley writes the Director's Blog at Montgomery Planning on which this post was originally published.]

For Thanksgiving in 2011, my wife and I drove 900 miles to visit friends and family in St. Louis, Missouri. We drove an extra 50 miles to go the southern route via I-64 past Charleston, West Virginia and Lexington, Kentucky, before stopping over in Louisville for the evening. Despite the rain, it was a great opportunity to visit the city for the first time.

The cities of the Midwest are poised for resurgence. Filled with creative, energetic people and with a low cost of living, a new generation of artists, entrepreneurs and immigrants are seeking to establish themselves. In fact, recent surveys show cities like St. Louis are experiencing a more than 80 percent increase in young residents.

Initial impressions

First impressions are always important when you are pulling into a strange city after dark and in the rain. Louisville is no exception. The Google directions bringing us along the rain soaked I-64 along the Ohio River to our exit on South 9th Street didn’t show off the city’s best side. To a person unfamiliar with center core cities in the U.S., it could feel a bit like Chevy Chase traveling across America in the “Family Truckster” and reinforce the stereotypes held by many people about inner-city America.

The great scourge of industrial cities is the race to create as much parking as possible. Some civic leaders see demolition and paving as a sign of progress and Louisville along with Kansas City, is a prime example. William Whyte in his book City: Rediscovering the Center, says “If you tear down enough of your downtown for parking, pretty soon there won’t be any reason to go there and park.”

Fourth Street Live. (Rollin Stanley)

Sure enough, downtown Louisville has plenty of examples intended to prove this proverb. They have the waterfront development and “Fourth Street Live,” the Cordish downtown entertainment district similar to Kansas City. These developments are intended to draw people back downtown, the place they left kind of because, well, lots of stuff was torn down for parking lots.

And guess what? Nobody parks on those surface parking lots because they are too far away from Fourth Street Live for anyone to park there. And if someone did, they would not feel safe walking across all the vacant lots to get to the entertainment center.

Fourth Street Live mirrors similar downtown developments by the Baltimore-based developer Cordish. While it has many of the chains we are familiar with around the country, there are standouts like the Maker’s Mark Bourbon House and places with great names like “Howl at the Moon.” However, this two-block stretch of South 4th Street is disconnected from the river by several government buildings and the too often repeated downtown convention center.

This aerial of the Louisville Central Business District south of the river highlights the vast areas taken up by surface parking (red) and single-use garages (purple). And then there is the big chunk in the middle, taken up by the convention center, another streetscape paralyzer. (Montage by Erik Weber)

The Louisville parking landscaping really hampers the potential to create depth to the downtown. As you move south away from the river along 4th Avenue, going over one or two blocks to the east or west you arrive at a sea of surface parking. Those parking lots spawn the decline of adjacent properties, the very places the surface parking was intended to help. The lots are vacant at night, so the places next to them begin to decline.

Challenges

Louisville is clearly a place of contrast, just like so many other cities in the Midwest. Pockets of success separated by surface parking lots and questionable decisions about frontages, highlight some of the toughest challenges with the core of the city. The challenge of creating “depth” to the success, linking the positive nodes, is so difficult when growth is first limited, then competing with the unlimited sprawl of the burbs.

The neon sign is a historic resource that captures the history of urban decline. While the sign should be in a museum, the use is a sad reminder of how far the resurgence of Louisville has to go. One block away from some great businesses on South 4th Street, the beginning of the “surface parking district” extends many blocks to the east.

Louisville has some tremendous assets. But it has lost tremendous assets as well.

1. Louisville torn down a lot of stuff.

Downtown Louisville is an old architect’s dream, what remains is shaped like a T square. There are lots of buildings that parallel the waterfront, some good and some bad, and then there is the South 4th Street corridor stretching at right angles back from the river, forming the spine of activity, the “straight edge” of the T square. I love South 4th Street, but only the area south of the convention center.

So many cities tried to revitalize their downtowns by bringing in convention centers. While convention centers bring people into hotels and to patronize local business, almost all create sterile street frontages that mimic big box stores.

From any angle the Kentucky International Convention Center is not a friend of the streetscape of the downtown. It forms a physical barrier between the successful nodes of Louisville Live and the riverfront. It is just like a big box store or a mall. People stay inside, the walls are large, blank spaces, and it produces little pedestrian traffic, the key to the success of any inner city.

Government buildings are also a challenge, creating long expanses of inactivity that work against creating a vibrant neighborhood. They are like parks after dark. Nobody wants to walk past them. I learned a great lesson from an urban pioneer by the name of Joe Edwards in St. Louis. He singlehandedly revitalized the “loop” neighborhood, including bringing trolley lines back to the commercial district.

As Joe rehabbed commercial buildings, he would work to lease space to a variety of retailers. Too many restaurants would mean little happening during the day. Too many shops would leave the street vacant past after 9 p.m. So he would mix the uses, creating variety along the street. Both the convention centers and government buildings work against this principle.

This shot taken on S. 4th Street moving farther away from the central core, shows how many cities tore down buildings like those on the left, and replaced them with long blank frontages of nothing, like on the right. While retail is struggling on the left, there are small pockets of success which will spread to fill the gaps between them. Who knows, maybe the building on the right will be torn down in a few decades and be replaced with buildings with active frontages like those on the right. That would be irony.

2. Historic assets

Much of downtown Louisville is gone forever. There are pockets of underutilized historic resources where only the ground floor is being used. This is a real shame. These small pockets offer the potential for affordable redevelopment through the use of historic tax credits and other financing tools. With all the creative forces in the city, one has to believe there is a solid constituency for these spaces with rents being offset through the tax credit restoration.

While downtown Louisville has lost much of its historic fabric and lacks a cohesive historic commercial core, it has small pockets of great buildings which largely go unused. While the ground floor the buildings are leased, the upper floors go largely unused, missing a real opportunity to attract young urban pioneers.

The Louisville Slugger Museum is a destination that brings lots of people into an area of the downtown. It could act as a catalyst through restoration and small-scale modern new construction on the parking lots to the south.

The Louisville slugger museum would not be the same if that big bat was leaning against some run-of-the-mill, recently constructed building? Could the small strip of historic buildings nearby has the bones for a terrific neighborhood, where people walk dogs, eat breakfast at the local eatery on Saturday morning, alongside tourists visiting the Slugger Museum or the Muhammad Ali Center just to the north along the river.

Louisville is not alone. In Atlanta, where I did some consulting work about eight years ago, I was shocked that city officials were not using historic tax credits to help revitalize. In St. Louis, we created over 4,000 new units of loft housing in the core of downtown historic tax credits and the like. Building the local capacity in the developer, legal and government sectors to make these things happen is critical.

While it probably would have been great to have the entire historic building left, this is a fun example of how a cool feature has been created on S. 4th Street. And it masks the parking garage located behind, although it is not a bad parking garage.

3. One-Way Streets

Other than saying they serve horse meat, nothing kills a restaurant faster than locating on a one-way street. One-way streets serve one purpose and one purpose only: getting people in and out of the core area as fast as possible. A driver needs to travel 25 mph or less to make eye contact with a pedestrian. So if you are trying to create vibrant pedestrian streets, how does a one way street that pushes cars through as fast as possible work toward that goal?

There are few places on the planet where retail succeeds on a one-way street. And these places have density, something Louisville does not have. Is there really a need for four lane roads running one way in front of the Louisville Slugger Museum?

Show me a city without congestion and I bet it is not a place where people go and members of Gen X and Y live. We want people to slow down, look out the window at the retail environment and have street parking to liven up the sidewalk.

A historic postcard of the downtown Seelbach Hotel on S. 4th Street. It does not look too different today. A wonderful adventure into the past and a real asset to the core. If you stay, get a corner room looking up 4th Street.

Bright spots

In Louisville, I saw pockets of amazing creativity and resiliency. Take the grand old hotels. Louisville has some great ones like the Seelbach (we stayed here) and the Brown. I understand the wedding sequence from the Great Gatsby is modeled after the former. It has a great long wood bar with some real tradition.

And to contrast these great old hotels, there is the fabulous Museum Hotel over by the Slugger Museum. The restaurant/hotel is themed as an art museum and is one of the coolest concepts in North America. A terrific example of the creative energy in this city and the Midwest. Fun, unusual and full of energy, these are the spots that are the nucleus for change. This hotel and museum is the focal point to transform this neighborhood.

The 21c Museum Hotel on West Main St. is one of the great finds in the city. Apart from the red penguins adorning the exterior, the building appears nondescript, yet step inside to find an amazing experience combining food, lodging, and art. These are the experiences that make a city interesting and attracts the potential to build new opportunities for revitalization.

The scale of the streets is another asset. Most are narrow, and where the buildings remain, framed right up to the sidewalk, giving a real urban feel. There are good examples of architecture from many eras and this is really noticeable when you stand along the waterfront and look back towards the downtown. And where the city has invested in those streets, they have created some great urban furniture and property owners created some great small urban spaces.

There are some cool bike racks in the city. Sculpture that really enhances the public spaces. And look behind the lamp pole in the right photo to see one of the entry markers into this part of S. 4th Street. And then there is just some cool sculpture, mixed with the bins on garbage day.

Walking through any city, it is fun to look to discover hidden spaces that really open the potential of a commercial district, creating the intimate spaces that attract people to an area. With sidewalks, these are really the “public spaces” in an urban area that are most frequented.

Two examples of “public space” in the core of the city. The wide open plaza may cater to office workers on a nice warm lunch break, but remains vacant otherwise. The small intimate restaurant courtyard offers a different experience and probably gets more use. Neither space is public in the true sense of the word, but both function as such.

Downtown Louisville is a case study on urban America. It can become one of the cooler places in the Midwest. It has a lot of assets: the obvious creative spirit of so many residents, the great bourbon selections in so many establishments. But it will require baby steps, moving forward one small area at a time. Ignore the quick fix ideas that require more buildings to come down, closing a street, or sterilizing the street activity through long blank walls. If a bank or pharmacy wants in, make them open up the facades, no walls that don’t have doors every 50 or 60 feet.

Explore the myriad of incentives that make downtown projects economically viable and attractive to everyone. Work with property owners and find new ones who have the energy and vision to make these projects work.

And, please, get rid of the one-way streets.

This post originally appeared in the Montgomery County Planning Director Blog on December 9, 2011.

Sunday, February 12th, 2012

Facing Tough Facts in Louisville

Some of you know that I’m originally from Louisville, Kentucky. I grew up in rural Southern Indiana just across the river (inside the Louisville MSA), but also had family in the South End and spent a lot of time as a kid stomping around the neighborhoods near Iroquois Park. I love Louisville and it will always have a special place in my heart. I don’t write about it much these days because as the blog has progressed, I’ve been forced to trim back my reading of local news sites and Louisville web pages were on the cut list. So I’m not as plugged in to what is going on there these days such that I can competently opine upon them.

But researching my four part series on the bridge deal fiasco (see part one, part two, part three, and part four) turned my attention back to the city. So I wanted to do a three part mini-series on Louisville this week.

Today I want to talk about the unpleasant strategic situation Louisville finds itself in in many areas. These are the basic facts on the ground that need to be addressed. Any credible civic development strategy needs to take these into consideration. It’s never easy for local leaders to admit, even privately, when their community is in a tough spot. But in this case we need to highlight three key areas where the data clearly indicates a challenge for Louisville, namely: it is too small, it is in a poor geo-political location, and it has low educational attainment.

Louisville Is Too Small

The first thing we need to address is that the Louisville region is frankly too small to match its aspirations. I normally focus on metro areas in the greater Midwest with more than a million people. With only 1.3 million people, Louisville is by far the smallest. And it lacks the effective population booster enjoyed by some other cities.

Consider some other metro areas on the smaller end of the scale. Say Milwaukee at 1.56 million, Nashville at 1.59 million, and Indianapolis at 1.76 million. These don’t sound that much bigger than Louisville, but consider: Milwaukee is 21% bigger, Nashville is 24% bigger, and Indianapolis is 37% bigger. This makes a lot of difference in terms of supporting region-wide amenities, infrastructure, and initiatives. For example, it explains why Louisville doesn’t have a major league professional sports team while the other cities do.

What’s more, the effective population of those similar cities is sometimes even higher. For example, Indianapolis is ringed by small industrial cities like Muncie, Lafayette, Kokomo, Columbus, etc. that are independent metro areas, but still contribute to Indy in the form of things like Colts fans, airport customers, TV market size, etc. Milwaukee’s metro area population is artificially low because Racine County, with 200,000 people and which actually borders Milwaukee County, is considered its own metro area. Just upriver from Louisville, Cincinnati benefits from being so close to Dayton that in some cases they function as one large metro. Businesses and such that locate in Warren or Butler County can draw from both markets easily.

Louisville, by contrast, is surrounded by mostly very rural, sparsely populated counties. Thus it gets less boost from an extended trade area in terms of population heft. Though in fairness I suppose there is some labor market benefit from this as well. I have read that Louisville has among the highest percentages of exurban commuting. One reason may be that there are so few job opportunities in outlying areas.

Also, while Louisville has healthy population growth and is growing a bit faster than the US average, other similar regional cities are growing too, sometimes faster on a percentage basis and quantity basis. Louisville added 121,000 people in the last decade, But Indianapolis, Columbus, and Nashville all added more than 210,000 people. This means that not only are those cities bigger, but the gap in population grew by more than 100,000 for all of them. That’s the equivalent of a Clark County, Indiana.

Recognizing that you are smaller doesn’t mean you have to mentally classify yourself as some lower tier city. (Debates over tiers of cities seems to be a perennial favorite on message boards). But it does mean you should be careful about trying to play keeping up with the Joneses, especially when it comes to major regional capital investments. Because Louisville simply has fewer bodies to spread the cost across, it needs to be very careful where it chooses to invest. (More on that later). I might also suggest that while growth is good, strategies that are predicated on changing Louisville primarily through quantitative growth are unlikely to ever close the gap versus regional peers, so I would not even have that as a goal.

Louisville Is in a Poor Geo-Political Location

A maximally geo-politically advantaged city might be one that’s centrally located and a clear primate city for the state it is in. Think Minneapolis-St. Paul. It’s as centrally located as you’d want to be in a state like Minnesota. It is the state capital and home to the state’s flagship university. It contains over 50% of the state’s population and is dominant economically. You might say as downsides that it has a twin-city structure, is near a state border, and doesn’t have the Mayo Clinic, but these are minor in comparison to what it has.

But you don’t have to be this dominant to have advantages. Indianapolis, Columbus, and Nashville are centrally located and are state capitals. Columbus has the state’s flagship university and is in an urban-dominated state. Indianapolis is the only large city in the state and thus in a sense has no “domestic” competition.

Louisville by contrast has many geographic disadvantages. It is on the edge of the state of Kentucky, not in the center. It is on a state boundary that is also a major river crossing barrier in an era where water transport is no longer king. It isn’t the state capital. It doesn’t have the state’s flagship university. Kentucky is a rural dominated state that also has a number of severely depressed areas that require significant state investment. Lexington is clearly much smaller and is in a different size class, yet conceives of itself as an equal in some ways (if not superior, especially with the UK presence) and the state often treats it as such. In fact, Lexington can sometimes been seen as a more authentically Kentucky city with its horse farms and whatnot, while Louisville is seen with suspicion.

This puts Louisville in a very tough spot. All major cities are likely net tax exporters to their state, but Louisville sends a truly staggering amount to Frankfort that it never gets back. I think it’s something like $700 million per year out of Jefferson County. The state’s priorities are generally in the rural areas. While I wouldn’t call the state legislature hostile to Louisville exactly, it isn’t really focused on pro-urban policy. As is often the case in bi-state metros, Indiana and Kentucky love to engage in “economic development” by encouraging companies to move back and forth across the Ohio River. Discussion about building bridges across the river takes up lots of leadership time and attention that could be focused on other things.

To me this makes me think that Louisville ought to plan on having to go it alone with its own resources in a lot of areas and not count on too much help from others (though obviously it should look for it where it can). We are already seeing this in the bridges project, which it appears will be mostly toll financed by local motorists. But Louisville should work hard to try to close some of the gaps that are clearly addressable. For example, better cooperation between Louisville and Southern Indiana is critical. Also,Louisville should be working to build connections and goodwill throughout the rest of Kentucky where ever possible.

Louisville Is Poorly Educated

As I’ve noted many times, college degree attainment is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining urban success. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser crunched the numbers and found that their historic college degree attainment explained nearly everything about why some Frost Belt cities succeeded and others failed. CEOs for Cities has also quantified a lot this in their Talent Dividend research.

Louisville fares very poorly here. Louisville’s college degree attainment is only 25.8%. This puts it 5th lowest among all 51 metro areas in the United States with over one million people. College town Lexington sits at 31.2% Louisville trails the overall US average of 28.2%. To be blunt, that’s not good.

I’ve always said that Louisville is a quality over quantity town. The core of Louisville has great neighborhoods. Louisville clearly punches above its weight in areas like quality restaurants. And it has had a number of notable cultural successes: the important early recordings of the Louisville Orchestra, many important indie rock performers (e.g., Will Oldham, Slint, Rodan), and items like Actor’s Theater’s Festival of New American Plays. This immediately suggests to me going for a more Madison, Wisconsin type of feel than rather than trying to ape Indy or Nashville. Unfortunately, Madison is the state capital and home to a major Big Ten School, and is smaller such that those make a huge impact there. Louisville lacks those drivers and has such low education attainment that a high end strategy would be tough to pull off except in just a small portion of the old city.

This is really going to inhibit Louisville on the economic development and there isn’t a lot you can do other than focus on blue collar industries in the short term (their huge UPS hub being a prime example of this), with a more selective and focused strategy around high end sectors, while working to boost educational attainment over the longer term. There’s some good news here in that Louisville grew its educational attainment rate by nearly five percentage points in the last decade, 16th among large cities.

Good and Bad Applications

I’d like to highlight a couple examples quickly of how Louisville has excellently and poorly handled its strategic situation.

Let’s start with the good. Mayor Greg Fischer decided to make as one of his initiatives seeking to find better ways to collaborate with Lexington, which is only about 75 miles away. As the Courier-Journal noted, “he envisions Kentucky’s two biggest cities adding jobs as a ’super region,’ rather than competing over companies, private investment and state money.” I had a previous post on this very topic that includes a video interview with Fisher called “Super-Regionalism in Kentucky.” This is an example of Louisville recognizing that it is too small to go it alone in the marketplace and it would be better to have a partner, plus trying to build bridges to a historic rival. We’ll see how this turn out.

A not so good example is the Ohio River Bridges Project I mentioned earlier and linked to my series about. Here we have a region taking on a huge $2.5 billion capital project that is going to be paid for mostly with local money through tolls. A smallish region like Louisville that isn’t even growing particularly fast does not need to be building this type of gargantuan and expensive infrastructure. That’s why in my series I suggested significantly scaling back the project even further.

Better Benchmarking

On another but related note, I’d also like to highlight how Louisville benchmarks and measures itself against the wrong cities. In the popular press, Louisville is generally compared against Indianapolis and Nashville, and those other cities are often trotted out as a rationale for pursuing some policy. For example, local leaders said that Indy and Nashville had city-county mergers. Indy and Nashville were growing much faster than Louisville. Ergo, Louisville needed to merge city and county government if it wanted to catch up.

I’m not saying merger was necessarily wrong. The problem is that Indianapolis and Nashville are nothing like Louisville. They are in the same rough size category (though bigger as I noted) and nearby, but that’s about it. I’m not sure there’s a whole lot Louisville can learn from looking to those places.

On the other hand, a city like Cincinnati is much more similar to Louisville. It’s also a historic major river city in a multi-state metro, on the edge of the state, not the state capital, with rival cities inside Ohio, etc. It also shares the same type of insular culture (maybe even moreso). Yes, it’s bigger, more educated, and home to many corporations in a way Louisville isn’t. But it seems like there’s a lot that could be learned from comparisons there. If I were Louisville, I’d be looking to benchmark against other river cities, not places that are so different. When you look at how many of the historic river cities have fared, you see that most of them have struggled demographically and economically. Comparatively, Louisville actually looks quite good.

However, you rarely see Louisville comparing itself or looking to Cincinnati. Perhaps it’s because Cincy was always the “big city” for people in Louisville. It was perhaps always seen as in a different league than Louisville in a way say Indianapolis was not. Whatever the case, I’d suggest starting with Cincy and expanding to other older river cities.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, just check out this article that talks about Indy being the city Louisville should have been through the lens of the Super Bowl. I love this piece because the article itself and the reactions perfectly illustrate Louisville’s bi-polar nature, vacillating between self-flagellation and smug superiority. In any case, while I appreciate that Louisville being on the border between Indiana and Kentucky spawns some understandable rivalries between states, the comparison to Indy is flawed. I don’t believe Louisville could ever have done with sports what Indy did, even if it tried. That’s not a path for Louisville to regret going down. Nor is the type of downtown-centric development approach of Indianapolis a particularly good fit for Louisville IMO. (I’d tell Indy similarly that they aren’t likely to ever be able to replicate Louisville’s best qualities). I see articles like that one periodically, but rarely any similar articles featuring Cincinnati or another similarly situated city. Louisville needs to take stock of its situation and look for comparison places that more match its own situation.

Next up, a guest poster will take a visit to downtown Louisville. And I’ll revisit an old idea I had for the city.

More Louisville
Louisville: An Identity Crisis
The Case for 8664
An Examination of City-County Consolidation

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Replay: Role Reversal

[ I was doing some housekeeping work in the archives when I stumbled across this. I thought it might make a nice mid-week diversion for us - Aaron. ]

Gay Talese releaesd his masterwork on the history, culture, and inner workings of the New York Times, The Kingdom and the Power, in 1969. It’s the story of a bygone era in journalism, but also more than that. I found this passage particularly curious.

And so what worked in Mississippi worked as well in Manhattan, although the reverse was not so true. The impersonal pushing of the North was out of step with the South; Southerners could not easily accept it: the South was deep-rooted and fixed in its way, as Federal lawmakers would later learn. The South set its own pace and style and stamped its people for a lifetime, and when Northerners went South to live, it stamped them, too. Northerners who settled in the South adopted the regional accent; Southerners who settled in the North did not. [emphasis added]

I found this an interesting observation because it is so contrary to what I see in the present day. It strikes me that people – or at least young people – who move north today do everything in their power to lose their southern accent as quickly as possible. My ex-wife is from Alabama (where Talese attended college, incidentally). Having visited there many times, I can tell you southern accents are alive and well in the South. I grew up in rural Southern Indiana with an accent myself. Today, neither of us sounds at all like people with southern roots. I’ve seen this story many times.

And also, when people from the north move south, I see a major effort undertaken to preserve a flat accent in the children. Indeed, we are seeing in places like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Nashville significant upscale districts where large numbers of people have no southern accent. An intern at work a year or so ago was born and raised in Brentwood, Tennessee outside of Nashville, and didn’t have a trace of a southern accent.

We’ve certainly seen since the 1960’s a massive change in the fortunes of the South. The civil rights struggles were still ongoing when Talese wrote his book. Today the South, or at least parts of it, are re-energized and feel confident meeting and competing with the rest of America on its terms.

But perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into the south. It seems to me that there has been a significant decline in regional accents and dialects generally in the United States. Perhaps some of this is due to the interstate highway system, which enabled significant mobility around the country and homogenized things a bit. I don’t know. But even within the last 15 years I’ve noticed, for example, a significant decline in the number of people with Hoosier accents on the north side of Indianapolis, especially among younger people.

It is interesting to see the changes in American culture in even a relatively short term. Of course, some things haven’t changed. The Southern style can still be very effective in the north. Let me just say this, do not underestimate someone just because they talk like a good ol’ boy. You might well end up regretting it.

This post originally ran on December 1, 2009.

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Keeping Up With the Urbanophile

Since there are a lot of new readers here at the Urbanophile, I wanted to share a few ways you can more easily keep up with everything that’s going on.

By far the easiest way to read the Urbanophile is simply to subscribe by email. Then whenever new posts roll off the presses here at Urbanophile HQ, they’ll end up in your inbox. No having to come back and check. I’ll send at most one email per day. Just click here to subscribe by email. After signing up, the system will send you an email with a confirmation link you’ll need to click to activate your subscription. If you don’t see it, look in your Spam/Bulk folder.

For those who’d rather read in Google Reader or similar program, you can click here to subscribe by RSS. I provide a full RSS feed – no teasers.

I also maintain an active Twitter feed where I send out the most interesting urban related links and news I come across each day. My 9,000+ followers can’t be wrong on the value of this, so follow me at @urbanophile today.

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Thanks so much for your readership, and now back to your regularly scheduled content.

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

A Visit to Youngstown by Joe Baur

[ Joe Baur is a 20-something resident of downtown Cleveland. He also puts out series of video shorts of political comedy called Mildly Relevant News that you might want to check out. Some of them include musing on various urbanists topics. He recently paid a visit to much-maligned Youngtown, Ohio and was kind enough to file this report for us here - Aaron. ]

Hard up for a depressing, Rust Belt story? Come to Youngstown, Ohio, where the steel mills packed up and left years ago, taking much of their population and quality of life with them. At least, that’s the theme national media has clutched onto ever since Bruce Springsteen acknowledged its sad reality with his morose ballad, “Youngstown.” But rumors of redevelopment and pockets of young professionals determined to rebuild this once great steel empire reached me up in Cleveland. As a Rust Belt junkie myself, I had to check it out.

“A dangerous shithole,” is how David Jason, a former Youngstown area resident, described the city. “Wish I could say something nicer.” To be fair, he had been car jacked there. Twice. The freakin’ Dalai Lama himself would struggle to look back fondly on a city after a couple of brushes with death. And it’s not just David. Crime and poverty are tremendous problems in Youngstown. The steel industry was the city’s golden goose. Without it, the city has struggled to find itself and adapt to the new economy. But before I continue this 20/20, gloom and doom exposé, there was a time when Youngstown was booming. And there’s no better place for a glimpse at its once prosperous hour than The Museum of Labor and Industry located downtown in the Youngstown Historical Center.

My Aunt Barb, a fellow Northeast Ohioan who will travel to just about anywhere with me, drove us straight to the museum after a quick breakfast in Cleveland. We were both legitimately excited to take a walk through steel history. But first we were greeted with the harsh realities of the steel mills of today, an appropriate mix with the day’s cold temperatures and gray skies. Shortly after passing the “Welcome to Youngstown” sign on I-680, we were surrounded by ruins of the city’s former economic powerhouses. There were a plethora of dilapidated buildings that make the Coliseum look in business.

Shortly after our haunting ride around the mills of yore, we made it to the museum. Sadly, locked doors met us and a taped sign that read, “CLOSED.” I had the hours right, but apparently missed the bit about being closed the week between Christmas and New Years. Crap.

Barb went to warm up in the car while I wandered around for a bit, snapping a few photos of what looked to be downtown Youngstown down the hill. I also stumbled upon an Ohio Historical Marker statue recognizing the Little Steel Strike. It was through their efforts that gave their union recognition and the right to collectively bargain with steel companies.

While I was busy impersonating Ansel Adams, a white van pulled up in front of the museum. Campus security for nearby Youngstown State University, perhaps? Getting cold, I hopped back into the car and we slowly pulled away, stopping briefly to wave down the woman in the van and explain why we were the lone vehicle in the parking lot.

We gave a brief sob story about how we came out from Cleveland to see this museum and were sad to see it closed. Well good thing we stopped, because turns out this lovely lady was waiting for security to let her in and finish a painting project she had been working on as a volunteer. “I’d be happy to let you in,” she said. Score! Labor and industry was a go.

Shortly thereafter, security arrived and let us all in. I quickly began making my way around the museum. Wow, to put it lightly. Granted I’m a nerd for history and particularly Rust Belt lore, but even the most jaded field trip traveler would have to admit the museum was put together beautifully. Relics of the steel industry were positioned perfectly, with actual equipment left in tact to give you a vague sense of what it was like to work in those Hellish conditions.

The displays described life as a worker in the steel mills before and after unionization. They shared stories of racism experienced by black folks who moved up from the South for work and the prejudices immigrants had to deal with on a daily basis from so-called “natives.” Evidently natives weren’t too keen about folks moving in to work thankless jobs for less money. Sound familiar?

It’s odd how a museum can take something so unromantic and romanticize the lifestyle and time period to the point where you wish you could live the life for just one day. When in reality, there’s not a chance in Hell I’d last a day in those mills. And neither would you. Hell, I’d love to send Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump to their reality TV show death down there. Suffice it to say, The Museum of Labor and Industry is must stop for any history and/or Rust Belt buffs.

As we approached the final room, we stopped to chat with Doreen Moore, the incredibly kind painter who made our museum visit possible. We were lucky enough to hear her version of a mid-life crisis – a story worthy of its own documentary or feature article. Surprisingly enough, Doreen hails from Northern California near the Oregon border. She described her corner of the Golden State as a foggy area that never gets colder than 40 or warmer than 70-degrees. Like most Americans, Doreen was stuck in a job that simply wasn’t for her in a state she didn’t feel she belonged in. “I never felt like a Californian,” she told us.

Years before her eventual move from California, Doreen found a program at a small Voc-Tech in St. Clairsville (Belmont Technical College) that offered degrees in Building Preservation/Restoration. After years of being looked down on because she didn’t have a college degree, she decided enough was enough and put her house on the market. It sold it for over $250K in just four hours. Not a bad profit, considering what she paid for it. Within two years, she was ready to move onward and upward and enrolled at Youngstown State University in a city she had never so much as driven by. With cash in hand, she bought her Victorian dream house, spending about as much as you’d spend on a good used car.

Now Doreen finds herself happier than ever, chasing after her masters and “madly, hopelessly” in love with a man who found Youngstown under similar circumstances from Seattle. With the crap Hollywood continues to churn out, her story is one that at least deserves some consideration from the studio bigwigs.

Our next stop was the Lemon Grove Café, a spot I had heard of from Youngstown transplants as the heart of their rebuilding downtown on West Federal Street. They advertise themselves as a “café, art gallery and organization devoted to the economic and cultural Renaissance of Youngstown, OH.” Admirable aspirations, but I honestly expected a tiny café with some basic drink selections and a few pastries to choose from. I was wrong. So wrong, it’s laughable.

This was not just some café that would be lost in a sea of yuppie joints in New York City. This was an establishment like nothing I had seen before in any city I’ve lived in or throughout all of my travels. And anyone was welcomed! Young and old mixed with different ethnicities, giving the place an incredibly welcoming feel. Surrounded by what I imagine was local art, Lemon Grove is the mecca for any creative type or simply anyone who enjoys the fruits of creativity. And the place is open until 2am, seven days a week! They serve breakfast, lunch and dinner throughout the day and are always hosting live musical acts for their late night patrons. Did I mention they also sell booze? Yes. Yes they do. It’s a place you never have to leave. Have breakfast, work on your computer throughout the day, have lunch and dinner, then stay for drinks with friends and rocking out with local tunes. I dare call this place… Heaven. And that’s no hyperbole, my friend.

After leaving the Lemon Grove, I paused to look around Federal Street. No, it’s not currently a street that would rival a thriving big city or a successful small town, like Traverse City. But the pieces are there. Studying the surroundings, I had what I’m going to call A Beautiful Mind moment. It wasn’t difficult to see what this place can become in the foreseeable future, thanks in large part to the success of the Lemon Grove. And they weren’t just voices in my head. Local business owners and investors are working hand-in-hand to make the dream a reality. In fact, the latest addition to downtown will be the partial demolition and restoration of the Liberty-Paramount Theater. Closed in 1976, the building quickly fell into disrepair, but was saved when the property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. The restored building will be a music venue with a restaurant and cabaret bar in the basement and two movie theaters in the balcony. Clearly the city is making an effort to save the unique architecture featured in their buildings and restore them for the 21st Century. It’s hard to find a city whose suffered tremendous population losses willing to reinvent their past. My beloved Cleveland has fallen into the trap of demolishing history in favor of something new and shiny (Columbia Building, anyone?). Hats off to the leaders making it happen in Youngstown.

Less than a mile from downtown and over the Mahoning River is Rust Belt Brewing Company. Usually when I travel (okay, not usually), the first thing I do is look for local breweries. This is Youngstown’s.

Rust Belt is a small operation catering to nearby Rust Belt towns, most notably Pittsburgh, although I’ve seen and enjoyed their brew in Cleveland, too. The crew was busy bottling when we popped in and were nice enough to give me generous samples of all their brews before making a final decision on a purchase. While tasting, they explained they’re a young brewery, but continue to see 40% growth on a yearly basis with grand aspirations for the future. But in Youngstown, success comes with frustration.

You see, Youngstown, like most cities in Ohio, has been pulverized by suburban sprawl. With that suburban sprawl comes a more often than not irrational fear of the city. So much so, Rust Belt’s brew crew laments the cold reception nearby suburbs have given their humble operation. They simply refuse to come out and work with them, hiding behind their preconceptions of the city from the comfort of their big-box home. There’s no doubt Youngstown has its problems with crime and poverty. I don’t think I met anyone who has tried to hide that. But refusing to work with the urban core that made the suburbs successful in the first place is pretty damn criminal if you ask me. It’s heartless at the very least and a problem all Rust Belt cities are faced with. I can’t tell you how many times I personally have been told, “Hope you don’t get shot” for living in downtown Cleveland, an arguably safer area statistically than many suburbs. Hell, someone told me they hope I don’t get shot when I said I was going to Youngstown. The sooner Youngstown’s suburbs wise up and work with the city, the better for all parties involved.

After a nice conversation and tasty samples that left me with a bit of a buzz, I ordered a growler of the Rusted River Irish Red Ale. But I honestly couldn’t have gone wrong with any of the beers. Great stuff all around. I then went outside to take in the view of the Mahoning River, accidently scaring the crap out of a flock of ducks in the process. It’s a sight I’m sure Rust Belt’s brewers wish they could show suburban leaders as they talk distributing their beer. I guarantee it’s a view they wouldn’t expect to see in the heart of the city. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the Alps or anything, but it’s a peaceful sight in its own right.

We then hopped back into the car, onto Mahoning Ave. and on our way out of town. On the way out, we swung through Idora neighborhood along Mill Creek Park – a sprawling beauty many say rivals some of the nation’s national parks. But driving through Idora, it was clear how much the neighborhoods were struggling. Abandoned, dilapidated homes were as prevalent as foreclosure signs. A few gems stuck out, though, along the park which is how Barb remembered the area from when she went to Idora Park as a kid for family get-togethers.

Our last neighborhood was on the north side, where it was clear old homes were demolished with new properties rising in their ashes. Every little bit helps, but it’s the work being done downtown and with Rust Belt Brewing that proves most inspiring, giving hope to the locals both young and old who have stuck their flag in the ground, dedicating their lives to the economic and cultural Renaissance of Youngstown.

The optimist in me can see a day where Youngstown becomes a cheap, small-city alternative to Cleveland and Pittsburgh much like how Akron has rebuilt its downtown and some nearby neighborhoods as destinations for young professionals. Slowly but surely, the pieces are coming together. Who knows; perhaps one day the Boss will write a follow up song noting the cultural Renaissance of Youngstown, where the people have left the fiery furnaces of Hell and are doing Heaven’s work well.

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

Replay: Brookings’ New Geography of Urban America

[ A couple years back the Brookings Institution issued a study called "The State of Metropolitan America." For those who haven't seen it or don't remember it, this one is worth another look - Aaron. ]

The Brookings Institution just released a gigantic report called “The State of Metropolitan America.” This is a hugely ambitious and important study. Brookings examined changes in the characteristics of the top 100 metro areas in the United States from 2000-2008 across a wide range of domains with all sorts of interesting findings. The report is so overwhelming that I don’t think anyone can claim to have fully digested it yet. So my own comments should be seen as preliminary. Congrats to Brookings for this undertaking.

Increasing Urban Diversity

Among Brookings key findings is something I’ve been stressing for some time, namely how different metro areas are. This diversity only seems to be increasing over times. As they put it:

In some ways, large metropolitan areas actually became more different from each other in the 2000s.
…
The 100 largest metro areas span a wide range of social, demographic, and economic experience. Across the nine subject areas of this report, enormous differences separate the metropolitan areas with the highest and lowest rankings in 2008.

We’ll come back to the policy implications of this.

New Urban Typologies

Among the big splash items in the report – and clearly one Brookings is stressing – is their new typology of American metros. Before I describe that, it’s worth backing up to see the way cities were often grouped together in the past, namely regionally. Brookings did a report back in 2006 called “The Vital Center” which talked about the critical importance of the Great Lakes region. Here’s a graphic showing that study’s geographic construct:

It’s a clearly regional construct. It’s also obvious it is that this report was written by someone from Michigan.

Here’s how Brookings looks at cities today. Pay particular attention the classifications of cities in the Great Lakes area.

Note the many variations of urban areas within the Great Lakes. Before discussing the Brookings typology in detail, it’s worth looking at what they said about this particular matter:

The notion of a unified ‘Rust Belt’ stretching across large portions of the Northeast and Midwest overlooks the important factors that distinguish populations in Rochester, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Chicago from one another.

Amen. Brookings is silent on what this report means for their previous construct, but it is notable that they used the term “Rust Belt” not “Great Lakes”. This particular excerpt makes it sound like they have decided to go in a very different direction.

Brookings characterizes metros into seven types based on three characteristics: population growth, educational attainment, and diversity. Their list is:

• Next Frontier – Scoring high on all three categories, these are the ones Brookings say are the most demographically advantaged. It includes places like Seattle, Denver, and the Texas Triangle, and are mostly in the West.
• New Heartland – Similar to Next Frontier but less diverse, including Portland, Columbus, and Charlotte.
• Diverse Giant – Slow growing, but educated and diverse regions, mostly made up of America’s Tier One cities like New York and Chicago.
• Border Growth – Areas mostly along the Mexican border with strong growth from immigrants, but low educational attainment
• Mid-Sized Magnets – Similar to border growth, but apparently growing from domestic migration, since they are less diverse.
• Skilled Anchor – Cities like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh that are educated, but growing slowly and without much diversity.
• Industrial Core – Classic Rust Belt type cities ranging from Cleveland to Birmingham with low growth, low educational attainment, and low diversity.

Like all classification schemes, this one has its questionable cases, but I think it broadly captures some important differences between cities. It also makes the very important point that cities ought to be viewed by their attributes as much as by their location. Birmingham and Memphis may be in the South, but they are every bit as much Rust Belt cities as their Midwest brethren.

Now as it turns out, most of these classifications are geographically clustered. Only Diverse Giant and New Heartland are really a national phenomenon. Still, the Midwest area does have a diversity of places.

I was particularly struck by how Brookings Midwest classifications matched almost exactly my classification from a year ago into Global Cities, Successful Cities, Stable Cities, and Struggling Cities. Here’s the cross mapping:

As you can see, we only disagree on two cities. And if I must say so myself, I think my classification is more accurate for those two. Unlike Brookings, I used a single variable – population growth – with thresholds for bucketing. But I did cheat by putting Chicago in its own category arbitrarily. So Brookings has me there. Chicago’s population growth would have put it as “Stable” in my schema.

The only difference between Skilled Anchor and Diverse Giant is diversity. But I don’t think that’s what really separates a Chicago or New York from St. Louis or Milwaukee. The real difference is their economic structure. The Diverse Giant group is actually mostly so-called “global cities.” They’ve got a skilled core of very high value services that is going well surrounded by a large zone that is at best hanging in there. Other than perhaps in Miami, the diversity angle seems to be a legacy of their status as port of entry more than anything. If we looked at this economically, you’d probably boot Honolulu (an outlier in any US scheme), and add Boston. But of course, as I said, any classification done by metrics generates border cases.

Local Policy Implications

Let’s turn to the policy implications of this, first on the local side. Does this mean that the idea of traditional regional policy is dead? Jim Russell seems to think so. I’m not so sure.

I think there’s a difference between typologies of cities and how you integrate economically. Places in the New Heartland class, for example, might have much to learn from each other, might benchmark against each other, etc., but it doesn’t necessarily go beyond that. And while cities in a region may be very different, that doesn’t mean they can’t collaborate or economically integrate. Indeed, being different helps there through better enabling specialization.

I’m basically skeptical of the mega-regional concept, but can appreciate the virtues of both approaches. For example, Longworth’s pan-Midwest cooperation approach could be very useful in areas like creating a high speed rail network or promoting better collaboration between Big Ten universities. And it seems reasonable that regional relationships with Chicago would make a lot of sense. But Russell is right that so long as the world sees the Midwest region as a region, as the “Rust Belt”, it cripples these places. The world needs to understand that Columbus isn’t Toledo. Right now only Chicago, because of its longstanding huge size and history as having an independent standing in the world, can punch through the scarlet letter that is the Rust Belt label. Columbus can’t do that easily. In a sense, to start recovering, we have to blow up the idea – externally at least – that everyplace in the Midwest shares the same meta-narrative. We also have to recognize, as Russell stresses, that economic networks are now global in nature, and there are all sorts of diverse circuits in which cities can participate.

Federal Policy Implications

As a DC think tank, Brookings obviously stresses federal policy. In this case, they promote a bifurcated view: a federal policy that deals with common themes and issue, and state and local policy that deals with the different and granular issues.

National policy makers have the unique obligation to address aspects of the five new realities that affect all metropolitan areas, or are simply beyond metropolitan area’s own capacity to tackle. As this report demonstrates, however, different challenges assume varying levels of prominence in different types of metropolitan areas. Leaders at the state, regional, and local levels must now more than ever understand and respond purposefully to the demographic, social, and economic changes most affecting their places.
….
National policy will be necessary, but not sufficient, for addressing the wide range of challenges facing metropolitan areas. Indeed, the increasingly distinct profiles of major metro areas along the key dimensions outlined in this report demand that their own agendas – at the state, regional, and local levels – confront the issues most pressing to their own futures.

The Brookings five new realities are Growth and Outward Expansion, Population Diversification, Aging of the Population, Uneven Higher Educational Attainment, and Income Polarization.

I recently wrote a piece on a federal policy for cities in which I said that federal policy itself must address the increasingly unique needs of metros. I’m not sure that we can just keep the common elements at the national level punt the distinct items to the state and local level. Generally I’m a fan of devolution. However, in this case what we are really talking about is devolving de facto to the states. And as we’ve seen repeatedly, state governments are to varying degrees implicitly or explicitly hostile to cities. There are almost no effective or empowered regional entities in America and municipalities are often hamstrung by state laws that limit their ability to deal with their own problems. In a choice between federal vs. state government, I’m usually a state and local kind of guy, but when it comes to metro policy, I’d probably have to say the feds are more likely to get it right, alas.

Beyond that, the new geography Brookings highlights goes a long way towards explaining why we’re gridlocked on so much policy at the national level and why we’ve got to grasp the nettle of urban/sub-national diversity at the federal level. The problem isn’t just one of partisan gridlock, it is that these different metros and their states really do live in different worlds and as a result have very different policy points of view. Back in the Eisenhower era, pretty much everybody – even big city mayors – wanted freeways. That created policy consensus. Today, there are not only philosophical disagreements, there are also legitimate differences of character and need between these metro areas. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped the implications of this. Along with things like income polarization, what’s happening is that the American commonwealth is tearing apart. Our fortunes are no longer as linked as they once were. A rising tide won’t necessarily lift all boats, and what’s good for thee is not necessarily good for me.

This only promises to get worse over time. One of the incredible stats in this report is that less than 25% of children under 18 in Los Angeles are white. In a generation or so Los Angeles will be a Latin American city in character. This will add an ethnic dimension to the problem. One doesn’t have to scream “racism” to see this. Just look at ultra-politically correct Europe, where national-ethnic undertones are a big part of the debate over the bailout of Greece. The US is becoming like the EU in a way few people talk about, in that it is culturally separating. That’s one reason a federal bailout of California is unlikely outside of some executive fiat. And it is only going to get worse.

I won’t pretend I’ve got the answers, but bigtime thinking needs to go into how we find a framework to deal with this increasing diversity – and I’m not just talking about ethnic diversity. That’s one of the keys to breaking the gridlock on things like transport policy. Yes there are partisan differences, but it is more than just that.

Perhaps some of the answers are buried in our antebellum history, when there was much more state and regional than national allegiance. I don’t know. Perhaps the dominance of slavery as an issue in that era makes it less useful. Or maybe we can learn from the EU itself, though that model has been heavily criticized as undemocratic and it isn’t working too well at present. In any case, I do believe we need a federal policy around cities that addresses areas where there is divergence, and I believe we’ve got to find policy frameworks to make it actionable.

Lest I overstate the case on Brookings policy split, I should note that they did also write, “National policy responses must recognize the diverse starting points of metropolitan areas and, where necessary, ensure that interventions are tailored to those differing on-the-ground realities.” I would love to see them do a lot more research and thinking along those lines.

Highlights of the Report

I would like to highlight a few of the interesting facts that come out of the report. Again, this doesn’t even scratch the surface.

I wrote previously about how immigrants are revitalizing inner suburban areas, even in the Heartland. This report provides more evidence of that. Indianapolis was the #6 city in the entire US for both increase in Hispanic population and increase in Asian population. Columbus was #9 on both metrics. Now that’s on a low base to be sure, but there are tons of other places with low bases that didn’t see this growth. Cleveland, for example, ranked 95 out of 100 in its change in percentage of foreign born population and the percentage of foreign born residents in the city itself actually went down. This also demonstrates that some heartland cities aren’t just seeing the nearly ubiquitous Mexican immigration, but immigration from many different places.

It gets even better. Pittsburgh and Indianapolis both increased their college degree attainment by a robust 5.3 percentage points. That made them the #3 and #4 metros in the entire country for growth in the degreed. Just for the record, that’s called “brain gain.”

Another interesting metric was the change in under 18 population. This to me is a huge measure of demographic health. Those children are your city’s future. If you don’t have them, you’re having a going out of business sale. Alas, many Rust Belt cities experienced large declines in children.

That’s serious. Some have claimed that the Pittsburgh demographics are skewed by a high elderly population. Perhaps that’s true, but the decline in children shows that Pittsburgh is far from demographically healthy. Again, there is quite the regional contrast. Some regional cities had the opposite situation. Indy’s child count grew by 12% compared with a national average of only 2.5%. Interestingly, Chicago became the only Midwest city to become “majority minority” in its population under age 18. Here’s a broader national view of the percentage of households who are families with children:

Reversing the Great Migration, blacks continued to move to the South. Atlanta added 445,578 blacks, reinforcing its position as the capital of black America. The next nearest competitors were Dallas and Houston who both added in the 100,000’s. That shows the overwhelming locational preference for Atlanta, which passed Chicago to have the nation’s second largest black population after New York City.

Lastly, Minneapolis-St. Paul was #7 in America in the worsening of income inequality. Holy Scandinavian scandal, Batman!

There are tons more interesting facts where these came from. You’d be well served to read the report for yourself, and look at the fact sheets on your city available for download from the Brookings website.

This post originally ran on May 16, 2010.

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

From Naptown to Super City

I have long touted the sports strategy that Indianapolis used to revitalize its downtown as a model for cities to follow in terms of strategy led economic and community development. I really think it sets the benchmark in terms of how to do it, and it has been very successful.

Indy is hosting the Super Bowl on Sunday, something that is locally seen as a sort of crowning achievement of the 40 year sports journey. As part of that, the Indianapolis Star and public TV station WFYI produced an hour long documentary on the journey called “Naptown to Super City.” I think it’s a must watch for anyone who is trying to figure out to revitalize their own downtown. An hour isn’t short, but given the billions of dollars cities pour into this, I think it’s worth doing some homework. It tells the story of how Indy went from a deserted downtown where local Jaycees were licensed to take their shotguns and kill pigeons to one where the Super Bowl is being hosted today.

I’ll talk more about the Indy strategy in a bit, but first the show. If you are in Google Reader this won’t display for you, so click here to watch.

One thing this brought home for me is the true magnitude of the change. Perhaps I’m being a bit uncharitable, but Indianapolis almost literally started with nothing. It was never a major, important American city. It had no brand in the market. And it had a downtown that was all but dead. Everything they have today was built almost from scratch.

Why do I think the Indy sports strategy was such a good one? Two reason: it was a good strategic area to go after, and it was backed up with very intelligent execution.

First, five reasons this was a good strategic goal to pursue:

1. It just fits the character of the city. Hoosiers love sports. The Indianapolis 500 and high school basketball were long established. It’s something they could behind in a way that they would never have gotten behind being the “vegetarian capital of the world” or something like there. It was authentic to the city. If you watch the video, you’ll note how locals embraced the events that were held that. That goes a long way towards explaining the success of the strategy. You have to be authentic to a place in your development efforts.
2. It was a whitespace opportunity where Indy could get first mover advantage. Today every city thinks they can make money off sports, but Indy really pioneered the notion that you could use sports as an economic development tool. There were a lot of firsts along the path, and that’s one reason Indy was able to take out a leadership position. Just as one example, Indy was first to do the “build it and they will come” model of building a stadium before having a team. As a result, they were able to grab the Colts, and do it in an era when you didn’t have to mortgage your whole city to make a team relocation happen.
3. Being America’s top city for sports events was a realistically achievable goal. I know this because the city achieved it. This is in great contrast to the umpteen cities who all claim they’ll be the “best cycling city in America” or some such.
4. There were huge collateral benefits to sports beyond the direct economic impact of the events and the jobs they support. They bring people to the city to show it off to people who might not otherwise come. They enliven downtown and create events that locals might actually want to attend. They also have been an amazing brand opportunity. Just think of the Colts. How many times a week during football season does the word “Indianapolis” get said on TV? Probably hundreds if not thousands. Imagine if the city had to pay advertising dollars for that exposure? Yes, sports is expensive, but I think it could be justified just as cost-efficient marketing alone. Think about how much companies pay just to put their name on the stadium. How much more is it worth to put your city’s name on the team or the event? Think about how much advertisers will be paying for a 30 second commercial in the Super Bowl? What’s it worth for all those mentions of your city during the Super Bowl again?
5. It was an initiative that had the possibility of being truly transformative for the city. Again, I know this is true because it was.

I’m not going to claim these were actually the thoughts going through people’s minds as the sports strategy developed or that it was this calculated. But all of these things were implicitly true all along, and I think clearly the people pushing sports must have gotten it on that at some level. So sports meets the first test of a great strategy in that it set out after a good strategic goal.

It was also something where there was a level of execution detail that far exceeded what most cities do. In business, it’s one thing to have an idea. It’s another thing to execute on it and achieve market leadership. It’s still another to generate sustainable competitive advantage that keeps you there over the long haul. Indianapolis has managed to do all of these with sports. I’ll highlight eight examples of how it did this:

1. It invested in world class facilities. A lot of these have remained top rated even long after they opened, like Conseco Fieldhouse, which is still ranked every year as the best arena in the United States.
2. Two, it laid out an entire district downtown around events hosting, with everything you need in close proximity – venues, the convention center, hotels, shopping, and entertainment. This is something that’s already been widely commented on by Super Bowl visitors who are amazed you don’t have to get shuttled around all over the place and that you can actually walk directly from the media hotel to the hotels where the teams are staying.
3. Three, because of this Indy is able to effectively “saturation rebrand” downtown for an event and otherwise cater to events in a way that few other cities can or will. In effect, the city has converted its downtown into a giant sound stage. Take a look at the pictures of the city. The whole downtown as been rebranded after the Super Bowl, including, for example, plastering a huge Lombardi Trophy images on the side of the city’s premier hotel. You can debate the value of this to the city, but there’s no denying its value to the NFL. How many cities are willing to do this to the extent Indianapolis is?
4. Indy created the Indiana Sports Corp. as the first ever non-profit management company for events. Today, everybody has adopted that model.
5. The city cultivated a large, experienced volunteer base for putting on events that is much more powerful than what others cities have.
6. Indy has been willing to take calculated risks in support of the strategy. Building the Hoosier Dome with no team to play in it – big risk.
7. It not only went after the events, it went after the sanctioning bodies that determined where the events would be held. The most important is of course the NCAA, but there are others too. This has resulted in Indy having a “cluster” of these organizations and direct access to the people making decisions that pays incalculable dividends. This is one area where the “face to face” discussions that occur in Indy gives the city a big leg up. It’s not just better for selling, it gives Indy critical advanced intelligence about how these organizations are conceiving of their future events needs.
8. Last but certainly not least, this has been a sustained, 35 year commitment. It wasn’t a party politics thing. It was a single project thing. It wasn’t a flash in the pan idea. It was something that has been relentlessly pursued over the long haul.

Add all this up and it is easy to see why still today, three or four decades after it first started and after pretty much every city decided to go after these types of events, Indianapolis is still the best place in America to host a sports event.

I hope this gives you a flavor why the Indy sports strategy was so good and so successful. It’s certainly something that’s not without its failures and downsides. The fact that sports has consumed disproportionate civic resources is one of them, and one highlighted by the documentary. But on the whole, most people seem very happy with the results.

Something the video highlights at the end is one essential attribute for success that you can’t plan for or make happen – luck. They ask questions like, what if the “Save the Pacers” telethon had failed back in the 70’s? What if the seats in the Hoosier Dome had been the originally planned variegated colors instead of the Colts blue and white colors when Bob Irsay walked in to check it out? There were many critical turning points where without a lucky break, who knows if the future of downtown Indy might have been radically different in some way. It should give us some humility about the limits of our ability to simply will things into being. On the other hand, it reminds us that if you aren’t in the game, if you aren’t swinging the bat, you don’t have any chance at all of hitting that home run. You have to play if you want to win.

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