This article is part of the State of Chicago. Chicago is a tale of two cities when it comes to the business climate. If you are a high profile Loop business, things are great. The city will move mountains for you, permits won't be an issue, and a healthy heaping portion of TIF dollars might even be coming your way. If you are a small business or someone without connections, it's a different story. Improving business conditions, especially for small business and especially in the neighborhoods, is critical to the city's economic future. I'll … [Read more...]
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Building Suburbs That Last #4 – Supporting Home Based Businesses
This is another installment in my periodic series "Buildings Suburbs That Last". Rather than restate the intro yet again, I'll just encourage you to read the setup to this series, as well any any earlier installments you care to. The Setup: Review: Retrofitting Suburbia Part One: Strategy Part Two: New Urbanism and Parcelization Part Three: The Mother of All Impact Fees Extra: End Property Tax Collection in Arrears A lot of the discussion of sustainability in the suburbs revolves around New Urbanism. I think this can have a role … [Read more...]
Why State Economic Development Strategies Should Be Metro-Centric
Globalization, technology, productivity improvements, and the resulting restructuring of the world economy have led to fundamental changes that have destroyed the old paradigms of doing business. Whether these changes are on the whole good or bad, or who or what is responsible for bringing them into being, they simply are. Most cities, regions, and US states have extremely limited leverage in this marketplace and thus to a great extent are market takers more than market makers. They have to adapt to new realities, but a lack of willingness to … [Read more...]
Making the Link Between Quality of Life and Economic Development
A rather prosaic economic development announcement in Indianapolis provides an opportunity to hammer home in a concrete way the connection between quality of life investments and economic development. This is something I've long argued we urbanists do a poor job of. We tend to adopt a "build it and they will come" marketing approach to quality of life initiatives where the connection between cause and effect is tenuous. Additionally, these tend to focus almost entirely on and tell stories about "the best and brightest" which in a country dying … [Read more...]
State of Chicago: Lacking a Calling Card Industry
This article is part of The State of Chicago. I now want to transition from a look at historical and current conditions in Chicago to a defense of a couple of my more controversial diagnoses that attepted to explain the problems behind Chicago's weakness in recent years. These were my observation that Chicago lacks a "calling card" industry, and my claim that Chicago, while a global city, is weak enough in this dimension that it cannot rely on that alone to sustain it. Today I'll look at the former. In some rankings I've seen, Chicago has … [Read more...]
Detroit: Do the Collapse
I enjoy swapping "war stories" about work as much as the next guy. I've heard a lot, but some of the most incredulous came from a college buddy who used to work for General Motors. He was a manager level employee in field operations, but was often called in to work auto shows and the like. What was his job at the auto show you might ask? Well, at one Chicago Auto Show, his first responsibility was to make sure the hotel room for the executive was prepped correctly. This exec had very specific detailed requirements as to the brands of soft … [Read more...]
Heartland Intelligence
There have been some big changes for me. We relocated from New York to Indianapolis, where I'm doing consulting work for the Indy Chamber. I'm no longer full time with the Manhattan Institute but am still a contributing editor at City Journal and still have multiple projects in the works there. I'll continue to write for other publications too, as with my recent Atlantic piece on J. Irwin Miller and Columbus, Indiana. More on my move below. For several years I've published a monthly newsletters on cities that was mostly a roundup of the … [Read more...]
Detroit’s New Streetlights Show Service Rebuilding in Action
I've been arguing that one thing struggling post-industrial cities need to do is take care of their own business, doing things like addressing legacy liabilities and rebuilding of core public services. Last week I write about Buffalo doing just this by completely re-writing its zoning code and creating a new land use map of the city to bring its planning ordinances up to date for the 21st century. Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, recently wrote a feature on another good example: the replacement of Detroit's … [Read more...]
William H. Whyte’s Original Plan to Save Bryant Park
William H. "Holly" Whyte, the former Fortune magazine editor best known in urban circles for his classic book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, famously did a report on Bryant Park in the 1970s that was ultimately used as a basis for transforming what was then known as "Needle Park." Andrew Manshel used to work for Bryant Park Corporation, the entity that actually did transform and still runs the park. (If you get a chance to see Bryant Park Corp. CEO Dan Biederman give a talk, be sure to take it). He now runs an excellent web site on … [Read more...]
Thoughts On My Neighborhood Post-Ferguson
Some folks asked me to comment on Ferguson, MO. I don't have anything to add to the massive amount that has already been written, but it did get me thinking about my own neighborhood and the racial dynamics that exist in America. I live in a mixed race neighborhood on the North Side of Indianapolis called various names, including South of Broad Ripple (SoBro) and Keystone-Monon. It's a racially diverse area, mostly featuring wood frame 2-3br/1-ba worker cottages built around wartime. It's likely always been working class or starter home … [Read more...]