Competitive Communities

Project Based Learning in a virtual “Third Place”

2008-07-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

Web2.0 in PBL High School is a blog by Dean Groom. He is building a “Third Place” classroom with Web2.0 technology. Dean describes the importance of a ‘constructavist’ approach to learning as “a set of theories about learning which fall somewhere between cognitive and humanistic views”.

In describing his purpose for this blog Dean makes the following comment:

“There are some differences in constructavist approaches to learning, most commonly described as ‘Inquiry’, ‘Problem’ and ‘Project’ based learning. There are obviously similarities and some cross overs, but in this blog I am looking primarily at Project Based Learning (New Technology Foundation, based on the Buck Institute Model), and Web2.0 - the read/write web.”

You can read more of his explanation here.

He has also posted a video of Clay Shirky talking about his book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”, here.

Among other informative entries is a review of a presentation by Konrad Glogowski on the importance of “third places” that “are ‘anchors’ of community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction.”

Connecting Communities with Schools

2008-06-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

Finding new ways to improve the quality and efficiency of communities is a challenge. Rethinking the relationships between schools, neighborhoods, municipalities and regions is an opportunity to design new models of schools as centers of communities. These new models of schools can become trusted places where civic capacity is raised, facilities are designed for the 21st century learner and the surrounding community is served in innovative ways. This philosophy is a move away from school consolidation toward smaller scaled facilities that are integrally connected to their neighborhoods and where access by walking and bicycling is part of the planning model.

A 2006 report, Model Policies in Support of High Performance School Buildings for all Children, by BEST (Building Educational Success Together) looks at some of the policy changes needed to allow innovation such as shared planning and funding of new models of community schools. The following are excerpts from the report:

“The BEST partners developed a four-part policy agenda:

1. Increase the coordination of school district and municipal planning and ensure there is public participation in the planning process;
2. Create and support schools as centers of community that offer school-based supports to children to eliminate barriers to success and serve the broader community;
3. Improve facilities management, including maintenance and capital improvement programs; and
4. Secure adequate and equitable facilities funding.”

“Schools are needed to anchor changing and stable communities…there are policy and practice barriers to shared use of public schools with non-school entities.”

“The concept of schools as centers of community includes: (a) extensive and innovative community use of the public school facility; (b) schools where community partnerships support high quality education, and contribute to life-long learning; (c) co-location with local government agencies and/or community organizations resulting in creative program service delivery and more efficient utilization of public land and buildings; and (d) opportunities for new and/or additional sources of funds for financing building improvements and program delivery.”

“…establish a process to support joint development between school districts and other public entities such as libraries, parks, senior centers, health clinics and public charter schools, for examples; that supports the planning, design and construction or modification of buildings for the ongoing shared use of public school facilities with other public government entities.”

“Through joint planning efforts the school district and the municipal entity can develop a project to utilize land and funds more efficiently. There are savings to be realized for both entities when there is shared use of a facility and site. These possible savings include site acquisition, design fees, construction or renovation costs, operating expenses, and maintenance costs.”

“…new schools, where necessary, should be built in existing and expanding communities. In dense urban areas, a new or renovated school can mean new life for a neighborhood.”

“Consolidation of small schools is a major threat in rural areas. Consolidation often means that smaller schools or schools located near small populations will be abandoned in favor of larger schools located on large previously undeveloped parcels. In many cases, these schools are far from existing communities. This adversely affects both the community that lost the original school and the students who are required to commute to school.”

“School districts struggle with the books versus bricks tension in all but the most affluent communities. The result of this is often that maintenance is deferred until there is a crisis—no heat, roof collapse, unsafe conditions—or in many schools, a quiet decline that eventually reduces parental and teacher satisfaction with the school, sending parents and staff to other schools or communities to live and work.”

Linking and Leveraging – Schools, Communities and Local Governments

2008-06-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

Collaboration between engaged citizens, school districts and local governments will improve the quality of our communities. The location, size and use of public schools have tremendous impacts on communities. These impacts include: the economy, the environment and public health, traffic congestion, community cohesion, social equity, quality of education, and school and local government finance. In most communities this collaboration does not exist due to “lack of trust, politics, time constraints, lack of communication and lack of commitment”. The results are evident and not sustainable.

A 2008 report from the Smart Growth Network, Local Governments and Schools – A Community Oriented Approach, written by Megan Sharp, an assistant project manager in ICMA’s Livable Communities Team provides compelling information about the benefits of smaller community schools.

The following are excerpts and information from the report:

“Since the 1950s, average school size (measured by enrollment capacity) has grown and school facilities have become increasingly distant from the neighborhoods they serve. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports that from 1930 to 2001, public school enrollment in the U.S. nearly doubled, from 26 to 48 million, yet the number of public school buildings decreased 60 percent in the same period, from 247,000 to 93,000. These statistics indicate a shift from an average of 105 students per school building to 516 students, across all grades. As average school size has grown, schools have also been built farther from where people actually live. This trend is related not only to the growth in average enrollment size, but also to a variety of policies and practices… that encourage large site sizes and discourage renovation or expansion of existing schools.”

“State and local policies—as well as how local governments and school districts interact with each other—influence decisions about where and how school facilities are built, maintained, and used. The land use and facility planning efforts of local governments and school districts have become increasingly separated in most communities. Their lack of coordination may contribute to the trend toward larger, more distant schools and associated economic, environmental, and social impacts.”

Between 1969 and 2001 the percentage of elementary students walking or biking to school dropped from 48% to less than 15%. Those students arriving by private vehicles increased from 12% to 50% during the same time frame. Those arriving by bus dropped from 38% to 32%.

“The decline in walking and biking to and from school poses two problems: increased vehicle travel and decreased student physical activity. The former, like all congestion, contributes to air and water pollution and carbon emissions that impact climate change. And the latter is thought to be a major contributor to the rapid rise in youth obesity rates.”

This report provides recommendations and case studies from communities that have begun collaborating and moving to community oriented schools. Connecting smaller schools to the communities that surround them is smart and is one of the ingredients for communities to achieve greater prosperity.

Resource: San Diego' s index of regional innovation

2007-08-25T18:51:00.000-07:00

San Diego Connect, a leading edge entrepreneur support organization, has released a new "index of regional innovation". The index measures how many startups have launched in the previous quarter. The index also looks at fluctuations in key technology clusters.

You can learn more about the index here. You can view a presentation on the index here.

Artists and urban regeneration

2007-08-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

Both Detroit and Toledo are focused on improving the opportunities for artists as a leading edge to urban regeneration.

The Executive Director of the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, outlines the role that artists can play in urban revitalization:

"People explore cities through the arts and what others are doing creatively. Then they start to look around and think, hey, I could live here." Learn more about what's happening in Detroit here.

In Toledo, the mayor is promoting a downtown arts district. As he noted when he introduced his plan, "Art is not only about improving the ambience of the city... he is also about economic development." Learn what Toledo is doing here.

Finding Walkable Communities

2007-08-25T16:22:00.000-07:00

Competitive Communities understand the importance of living in walkable neighborhoods. Walkable is one of the characteristics of “smart growth”, “traditional neighborhood design”, “new urbanism”, “transit oriented development” and other similar concepts used to describe more sustainable growth. If you are curious about how walkable your neighborhood is check out
Walk Score , a rating system for walkability. Type in your address if you live in the U.S., Canada or the U.K. and a map will appear showing you what is nearby and a score from 0 to 100. Anything less than 50 is not considered walkable. This site is the inspiration of Sightline Institute , a think tank based in Seattle with a mission to bring about sustainability.

If you need convincing that walkable communities are important for a better future read the following excerpts from the Walk Score web site:

“Walkable neighborhoods offer surprising benefits to our health, the environment, and our communities:

Better health: A study in Washington State found that the average resident of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood weighs 7 pounds less than someone who lives in a sprawling neighborhood. Residents of walkable neighborhoods drive less and suffer fewer car accidents, a leading cause of death between the ages of 15 - 45.
Reduction in greenhouse gas: Cars are a leading cause of global warming. Your feet are zero pollution transportation machines.
More transportation options: Compact neighborhoods tend to have higher population density, which leads to more public transportation options and bicycle infrastructure. Not only is taking the bus cheaper than driving, but riding a bus is ten times safer than driving a car!
Increased social capital: Walking increases social capital by promoting face-to-face interaction with your neighbors. Studies have shown that for each 10 minutes a person spends in a daily car commute, time spent in community activities falls by 10 percent.
Stronger local businesses: Dense, walkable neighborhoods provide local businesses with the foot traffic they need to thrive. It's easier for pedestrians to shop at many stores on one trip, since they don't need to drive between destinations.”

“Walkable communities tend to have the following characteristics:

A center: Walkable neighborhoods have a discernable center, whether it's a shopping district, a main street, or a public space.
Density: The neighborhood is dense enough for local businesses to flourish and for public transportation to be cost effective.
Mixed income, mixed use: Housing is provided for everyone who works in the neighborhood: young and old, singles and families, rich and poor. Businesses and residences are located near each other.
Parks and public space: There are plenty of public places to gather and play.
Accessibility: The neighborhood is accessible to everyone and has wheelchair access, plenty of benches with shade, sidewalks on all streets, etc.
Well-connected, speed controlled streets: Streets form a connected grid that improves traffic by providing many routes to any destination. Streets are narrow to control speed, and shaded by trees to protect pedestrians.
Pedestrian-centric design: Buildings are placed close to the street to cater to foot traffic, with parking lots relegated to the back.
Close schools and workplaces: Schools and workplaces are close enough that most residents can walk from their homes.”

Sightline has also developed a progress index, The Cascadia Scorecard that uses seven indicator trends to measure progress toward sustainability: Health, Economy, Population, Energy, Sprawl, Forests and Pollution.

If you are interested in shaping a walkable community in your neighborhood you can find additional information at Walkable Communities, Inc.

If you are interested in walkable neighborhood design examples check out MHSM neighborhood plans here.

“Regional Competitiveness” – The Evolving Era of ED

2007-03-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

A May 2005 report, A Review of the Federal Role in Regional Economic Development by Mark Drabenstott of the Center for the Study of Rural America, presents an insightful look at the role of government in Economic Development. This study shares some ED history and explains how the federal government is organized to support economic development.

“The current federal hand in economic development is not easy to characterize. Programs have grown up in nearly every corner of government over the past 50 years or more. Nine federal departments and another four agencies all get involved in one form of economic development or another. This effort is largely unfocused—there is no overriding goal focusing the effort. In that sense, it is far easier to list the 180 programs involved in economic development than to describe the policy driving them. However, what can be said is that many of the programs assume that regional economic development is largely homogeneous across the nation, and is driven by an industrial economic engine.”

Drivers of regional economic development have evolved over time. The 50’s thru the early 80’s were the age of industrial recruiting, deregulation in the 80’s brought on cost competition, and accelerated globalization of markets in the 90’s led us to a currently developing age of Regional Competitiveness. The main drivers of this current trend are innovation and entrepreneurship. Human capital and higher education are critical assets in our current understanding of this new era. The following are additional excerpts from the study:

…”critical distinction between today and the earlier eras is that economic development is no longer a matter of one economic development strategy applied to all regions—what some might call a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Industrial recruitment was universal. Indeed, the remnants of this strategy still run far and wide. Competing on cost was a similarly far-flung approach. Regional competitiveness, by contrast, is highly idiosyncratic. Every region has a different set of economic assets, a unique capacity to innovate, its own crop of entrepreneurs, and its own opportunities in global markets.”

“The theory that a region’s growth depends on exploiting its indigenous assets is the critical foundation to regional competitiveness…how regions grow has developed in three distinct strands of economic research. Some economists are focusing on the importance of clusters, suggesting that a concentration of similar firms creates synergies that can fuel growth. Others describe a new economic geography, in which local amenities are critical determinants in creating a pool of skills and capital that can spawn new ideas and businesses and grow a region’s economy. Still others focus more on entrepreneurs and innovation, arguing that fresh technologies and the right climate can lead to a rich seedbed of businesses, spurring economic gains. While each strand has merit in its own right, together they form a strong consensus that regional competitiveness is becoming the accepted model for regional economic growth.”

This research supports the competitive communities model of brainpower, quality place and innovation. Uncovering assets that bring entrepreneurs and higher education to the table of creative collaboration will lead to unique regional ED strategies.

Our current work includes a regional ED strategy built on the music history of the Louisiana Hayride and its neighborhood, where the cultures of south and west collided with the blending of country, blues, gospel and jazz leading to rock-a-billy. The Foundation for Arts Music & Entertainment (FAME) is working with a regional higher education consortium of 12 institutions (CERT) to implement a regional ED plan network of rural and urban communities branded as the “Magic Circle”. To learn more you can download the plan, Shreveport’s Historic Music Village .

The Urban Age of the 21st Century:Economic Prosperity? Environmental Sustainability? Social Inclusivity?

2006-12-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

The competitive communities model and open economic networks are innovative strategies to advance an urban agenda for the 21st century. Collaboration and issue connections lead to more comprehensive approaches to building communities – actions that are more broadly supported and more sustainable. MHSM is currently working on a specific area redevelopment plan initiative to organize community discussion and action around – housing, education, meaningful work, safety, health, leadership and culture. “People tend to move in the direction of their conversations.” Focusing these conversations on a specific area of the inner city, beginning first with the neighborhood and expanding to the broader community, could be a beginning of change to advance an entire city toward the 21st century agenda presented by Bruce Katz in November. The idea for this plan organization comes from the work of a non-profit organization, SBCR, that incorporates these 7 elements as part of a village structure model with mutually enhancing relationships as the foundation and basis for meaningful dialogue.

The following excerpts are from a speech given by Bruce Katz, An Urban Agenda for an Urban Age, presentation prepared by Bruce Katz, Andy Altman, and Julie Wagner for the Urban Age Conference in Berlin, Germany on November 10, 2006. The challenges presented are consistent with the work of our firm and network of partners.

…”we call for an Urban Agenda that matches the pace and intensity of the Urban Age. This Urban Agenda will embrace the goals of competitive, sustainable, and inclusive cities and, equally important, commit to pursuing and delivering these objectives in tandem. That will require wholesale change in how people— practitioners, policymakers, and researchers—do their business. It will necessitate programs and policies that drive integrative, multi-dimensional thinking and action. It will extol the role of the physical, emphasizing the importance of building cities that are adaptive and resilient and advance broader objectives. It will reinvent urban politics to advance the new urban paradigm. And it will require multinational corporations to be grounded in “place” and become strong partners for change.

Make no mistake, the stakes are high: the path of development in many cities around the world is simply not sustainable socially or environmentally or politically – nor, ultimately, economically.

Not only is our world increasingly urban, this urbanity is increasing at a scale…at a speed…fuelled by mobility and diversity… arranged in a complexity…and tied together with a level of connectivity…never before seen or experienced.

So, where do we go from here? How do we design and implement an Urban Agenda that matches the pace and intensity of the Urban Age?

The goals of the Urban Agenda—competitive cities, sustainable cities, inclusive cities—are not at issue. The trinity of economy, environment and equity is substantively warranted, morally imperative and widely accepted.

Cities are complex and interdependent. As such, they require multi-dimensional, integrated and holistic interventions.

This century’s Urban Agenda needs to be about delivery as much as aspiration.

PROSPERITY / SUSTAINABILITY / INCLUSIVITY
Transportation
Education
Economic Development
Environmental Protection
Housing ,sources: The World Bank; Various

It is an agenda that must empower people, with more integrated and transformative programs and policies, through a heightened awareness of the physical “place”, with a realignment of politics, and an infusion of new partners.

We first need to focus on the people who deliver the Urban Agenda. Imagine networks of city builders who cut across disciplines, programs, practices, and professions. These city builders will perfect new ways of “reading” cities, and deploy new metrics and measures to diagnose city assets and ailments and gauge city progress. They will be fluent in multiple city “languages”—architecture, demographics, engineering, economics, and sociology—and be cognizant of theory and practice. Modern society has deified specialists and technicians who diagnose and strive to fix discrete problems, say traffic congestion or slum housing.

If cities are to succeed, we must build a generation of generalists who see the connections between challenges and work to devise and implement policies that advance multiple objectives simultaneously.

If cities are the organizing units of the new global order, then a broad range of policies and practices at the city, national and supra-national levels need to be overhauled, re-ordered, and integrated around new spatial realities and paradigms.

We need to break down the barriers between specialized and self-referential disciplines, professions, and bureaucracies.

We need to link learnings and share innovations across networks of urban researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, across the developing and developed worlds.

We need to build cities that are prosperous, sustainable and inclusive.”

Implementing Smarter Growth

2006-02-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

The Quality Place component of Competitive Communities is aimed at understanding and building value in uniqueness. We are developing Quality Place Measures to establish current position, assess impact / direction of community growth values and assist in charting a course for the future. It is not a device to rank communities against one another. It is simply a measure and value direction scale for charting place characteristics. There are nine categories of measure. Contact us to learn more.

Marketable ideas about growth have passed from one community to another without an understanding of the consequences and without tools to manage good and bad impacts. The result is often a rather uninteresting sameness that adversely impacts unique character that distinguishes a community. The Competitive Communities framework can serve as a simple tool for organizing dialogue about community actions and outcomes as well as beginning to connect quality place strategies with brainpower and innovation strategies.

There are a number of organizations working to increase the body of knowledge about quality place and provide tools to assist communities in growing smarter and in becoming more sustainable. Many of these guidelines are the result of research on negative consequences of growth patterns that are proving unsustainable. More sustainable approaches have now become marketable. These new characteristics are often reminiscent of older inner neighborhoods that have, over time, lost value and show symptoms of disinvestments while prosperity has moved outward. These new / old ideas about planning community are a good fit for inner neighborhoods that have suffered neglect.

However, the new principals are often used to retool outward growth strategies that continue to not fully address the broader issues of competitive communities and regions. It remains easier and more profitable to develop in a green field. Although it is a better growth pattern than low-density sprawl, these efforts could be more aptly branded “new suburbanism”.

If you would like to know about principals of growing smarter the Smart Growth Network and the International City/ County Management Association (ICMA) have produced two documents to assist communities in implementing better growth policies:

·Getting to Smart Growth: 100 policies for implementation

·Getting to Smart Growth II

These two documents provide examples that demonstrate applications of smart growth principals:

1. Mix land uses
2. Take advantage of compact building design
3. Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
4. Create walkable communities
5. Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place
6. Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas
7. Strengthen and direct development toward existing communities
8. Provide a variety of transportation choices
9. Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost-effective
10. Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration

Download a presentation; Making Land Development Regulations Work for Smart Growth , that includes links to resource organizations. Smart Growth America has also re-released a 2004 publication; Smart Growth is Smart Business, Boosting the Bottom Line and Community Prosperity . Smart Growth America has a number of other resource publications that will be helpful in becoming a smarter community.

Knowledge Clusters + Entrepreneurs = Competitive Regional Community

2006-02-11T06:53:00.000-08:00

What are the programmatic requirements that can establish the criteria for planning and designing communities and regions that attract creative and entrepreneurial people to build a knowledge economy?

What is a knowledge economy? How does the knowledge economy impact both high level emerging technology and added value to more traditional business? How might that change thinking of how we envision our future communities?

How can the entire state, urban and rural, north and south, participate in the knowledge economy? What are the assets to build on throughout the state? How can these assets be connected or linked to form local and regional knowledge clusters?

Collaboration is a virtue of the knowledge economy. How can this concept change the way we develop communities? How should communities be organized or function to support the concepts of collaboration?

Innovation / Entrepreneurs, Brainpower / Education, Quality Place / Uniqueness Values and Open Dialogue / Diversity are characteristics of Competitive Communities in a Knowledge Economy. How will we develop growth models and policies that shape these knowledge communities?

The following are excerpts from Knowledge Clusters and Entrepreneurship as Keys to Regional Economic Development, a conference report published by the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs. This conference gathered many researchers and professionals to discuss current conditions, challenges, opportunities and nature of the knowledge economy:

“Because of economic integration, what happens in one region affects what happens in another. The movement of information, capital, services, and products presents new competitors and customers for companies and regions. “

“As large business enterprises threaten to shift their operations and jobs to lower cost locations, cities and regions grow anxious about losing what in many cases may be their main employer. Yet, with the emergence of India, China, and other low wage economies, it is clear that regions in Western Europe and North America cannot expect, nor should they wish, to compete on cost alone, as this will only result in a downward spiral of wages and standard of living. “

“Faced with these new economic realities, regional developers…are aware of the need to assess and build upon the social and human capital assets that already exist in their region, rather than relying on attracting mobile investment from elsewhere (sometimes called smokestack chasing). One promising model combines a focus on entrepreneurship with the strengthening of knowledge-based networks or clusters. With knowledge now the fundamental basis of competitive advantage, regional economic development agencies are looking for ways to grow and attract clusters of innovative, knowledge-based activity. Because the creativity and innovation of individual entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial teams often generate and sustain these clusters, strategies that focus on both entrepreneurship promotion and cluster development are worth a closer look. “

“Research suggests that entrepreneurial activity is largely place-based, a product of the local culture, institutional arrangements, business environment, and the unique skills and knowledge base in a particular area…successful entrepreneurs “do what they know,” but in innovative and marketable ways. Despite the mobility of business, knowledge tends to remain localized; therefore, regional economic developers must focus on improving the competitiveness of their “place.” They should have a strategic approach to building the local knowledge base, which will make their area attractive to entrepreneurs positioned to exploit it.” (David Audretsch)

A knowledge cluster strategy recognizes that local businesses, which share a common knowledge base, can promote regional growth, partly by providing a dynamic environment for entrepreneurship. Knowledge clusters and entrepreneurship alike revolve around creative people, so in the knowledge economy, the differentiating factor for both people and places is talent.“

“…regional developers should specifically focus on attracting the 25- to 34-year-old population, because they constitute the core of this talented class. They also are the most mobile and therefore, to some extent, “up for grabs.” The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research presented by Fitzsimons showed this age group to have the highest entrepreneurship rates in almost every country covered by the survey…rural or urban, regions should build on their own distinctive assets and use their uniqueness to attract this valuable population cohort.”

“An open culture is one that supports risk taking and gives people freedom to fail in an endeavor and try again... The demonstration effect that is evident in successful clusters can play an important role in encouraging both the acceptance and practice of risk taking. When one person undertakes successful entrepreneurial activity, others observe this activity and begin to feel that they too can do it (Audretsch, Fitzsimons).

As global integration shifted U.S. comparative advantage toward knowledge-based economic activity and value-added niche markets, entrepreneurship and small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) began to play an increasingly vital role. Global integration and technological change set the stage for the shift from slow-growth, bureaucratic corporations to the nimble, responsive, knowledge-based industries of the new economy. With factors such as speed, innovation, flexibility, and knowledge essential to economic growth and development, entrepreneurship has emerged as a key player in driving regional economic prosperity.” (From 60 to 80 percent of new net jobs are created by small businesses, especially those under two years old)

“Contrary to popular expectations, innovation occurs not only in the latest computer and biomedical products; it also can be a competitive advantage for low-tech entrepreneurs such as artisans” (Rosenfeld).

“One important need is for locally available financing. Examples of the effort to meet that need are the Regional Angel Investment Network (RAIN) funds in Minnesota (Mercil).”

“… knowledge clusters resemble a public good; they provide benefits for many but may be under produced if not encouraged by government and community involvement.
Knowledge benefits are not easily, automatically, or efficiently transmitted throughout a region. The fact that clusters are much stronger in some regions than others with similar assets suggests that local institutional arrangements, practices, and culture can do much to help or hinder knowledge spillovers.”

“The cluster phenomenon suggests that competitive advantage lies not solely within firms but also within specific locations. Firms in clusters benefit from linkages (among firms, workers, financiers, and so forth) and spillovers, as well as complementary assets in skills, technology, and economic information. The existence of externalities points to the need for private and public actors to work together to eliminate constraints to cluster development and to enhance the contributions of public assets, including educational institutions (Porter, 2000). Conditions and events with spillover benefits, such as the presence of serial entrepreneurs or the acceptance of calculated risk… can be considered a quasi-public good. Learning effects, in other words, are good for the private sector, but private actors do not have the incentive to provide sufficient learning for others.”

“Local proximity is essential for accessing knowledge spillovers. Both knowledge-based firms and workers place a greater value on locations with clusters than those without. Because of knowledge spillovers, the value of an entrepreneurial firm is greater in the (local) presence of other entrepreneurial firms. Yet individual firms and workers are reluctant to invest in the creation of such a cluster . . . due to the public nature of knowledge. Policy makers, whose interest lies in generating growth for a particular location, have to step in” (Audretsch 2003).

“Key Components to a Knowledge Cluster Strategy
·Understand your local knowledge base.
·Develop strategies for promoting innovation around knowledge clusters.
·Promote a regional basis for developing local strategies."

Additional information can be found at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute and about the Knowledge Clusters Conference where online presenter presentations are available. MHSM has prepared a regional knowledge cluster plan that is proceeding to implementation, Shreveport’s Historic Music Village: A Regional Economic Development Strategy.

Beware! Is Hidden Agenda included in Rankings?

2006-02-04T10:29:00.000-08:00

There are a number of groups and think tanks comparing communities in an attempt to set a standard for all to aspire. It should be no surprise that many of these groups base their rankings not on objective criteria but on certain biases about taxes, social judgments or economic agenda. Peter Fisher, in a 2005 study for the Economic Policy Institute - Grading Places, What do the Business Climate Rankings Really Tell Us? - looks at ranking systems and how they stack up to testing judgment criteria with more objective performance measures. This revealing work documents that rankings are often aimed at setting policy agenda for government and in so doing are not instructive in establishing effective innovation strategies for competitive communities. Have you been confused trying to understand state and community rankings? This document presents a new perspective. Peter explains underlying agenda and shortcomings in methodology for the eight indexes evaluated. The following are several excerpts from the report:

“Newspapers love rankings. Their readers have an apparently insatiable interest in how a particular state or city compares to others. Recognizing this, a number of advocacy think tanks have accommodated the press in recent years by creating and publicizing rankings that purport to show which states or cities have the best “business climate,” the most “competitive” tax and regulatory environment, or the conditions most conducive to small business growth and entrepreneurialism…The purpose of this report is to dissect these various indices to see what really drives them. Are they based on science? Do they have biases? Do they in fact work as predictors of economic activity?”

“Thirty-four of the 50 states can brag that they are in the top 10 in terms of business climate or competitiveness; they just have to pick which of the five indexes they want to point to. Forty-four states are in the top 20 on at least one of the five. Only two states are among the top 15 on all five rankings; no state is in the bottom 15 on all five measures. The average state’s best ranking is 26 positions above its worst.”

“The underlying problem with the five indexes, of course, is twofold: none of them actually do a very good job of measuring what it is they claim to measure, and they do not, for the most part, set out to measure the right things to begin with.”

“It is precisely because the competitiveness indexes produced by the ideological think tanks are aimed at promoting particular kinds of legislation that they do a poor job of predicting state economic growth: the measures used must pass an ideology screen, so the validity and relevance criteria go by the wayside. This is also why the indexes are probably ignored by the business people actually making the decisions. They should be ignored by policy makers for the same reason.”

Mixing and Connecting - Do Neighborhoods Matter?

2006-01-22T14:42:00.000-08:00

The whole is generally greater than the sum of its parts. It is also true that all the parts of a whole are connected. Apply the dictum to fundamental parts of regions – neighborhoods. Stronger and healthier parts lift the whole to new heights. Conversely, weaker parts lower the value of the whole. There is a question somewhere in these thoughts about balance and management.

The challenge American communities face is how to grow without abandoning neighborhoods and the human potential left behind to navigate in an expanding sea of poverty. We have observed the deterioration of inner communities and older suburbs for decades. Policies and strategies have been implemented to treat symptoms without adequately understanding the causes or measuring the effects.

There is hope. Finding connections between quality place, innovation and brainpower results in neighborhoods where moving up does not mean moving out. Bruce Katz does his usual good work in capturing how we have gotten to our current condition of neighborhoods and sets forth a new vision in a Brookings paper, Neighborhoods of Choice and Connection: The Evolution of American Neighborhood Policy and What It Means for the United Kingdom.

Katz defines a new vision for neighborhoods of choice and connection:

“Neighborhoods of choice are communities in which people of lower incomes can both find a place to start and, as their incomes rise, a place to stay. They are also communities to which people of higher incomes can move, for their distinctiveness or amenities or location. This requires, first and foremost, an acceptance of economic integration as a goal of neighborhood and housing policy. It also requires a dynamic, market-driven notion of neighborhood change, rather than any “community control” vision dedicated to maintaining the status quo.”

“Neighborhoods of connection are communities which link families to opportunity, wherever that opportunity is located. This requires a new, profound, and sustained commitment to improving the “educational offer” in these communities and the cities in which they are largely located. It also requires a new, mature, and pragmatic vision of the changing “geography of opportunity,” particularly with regard to jobs and other housing choices.”

There are many examples of connections but perhaps the most important are neighborhood schools. Katz explains what research shows:

“Every school system has a direct impact on its neighborhoods. Schools affect housing markets… home values… success of marketing newly developed housing… the ability to retain residents in a particular school system or local community.”

Murphy Park redevelopment in St Louis focused on the neighborhood school, Jefferson Elementary, and achieved remarkable results for revitalizing the neighborhood and improving student performance. (Pages 16-19)

The following are excerpts from the paper that describe our current condition of deteriorating neighborhoods:

“In a suburban nation that treasures the “new,” these places stand out for their visible poverty and often-dilapidated, sometimes-vacant housing and commercial structures. Bearing the mark of a succession of government programs, these communities seem strangely out of place in this prosperous country—a grim reminder of the racial, ethnic, and class divisions that persist beneath celebrations of the American dream.”

“…search out the underlying causes of weakness or evil in the community, rather than …[remedy] their most superficial manifestations …” (Joseph Rowntree) A true rebirth of distressed areas will only occur if we make these places neighborhoods of choice for individuals and families with a broad range of incomes and neighborhoods of connection that are fully linked to metropolitan opportunities…this thesis fundamentally challenges neighborhood policies which, under the guise of “revitalizing communities,” reinforce patterns of concentrated poverty—the root cause of neighborhood distress. It also demands that neighborhood actions operate within the broader metropolitan “geography of opportunity” rather than the insular, fixed borders of deprived areas.”

“Since World War II, the decentralization of economic and residential life has been the dominant fact of metropolitan growth in the United States. In place after place, explosive sprawl where farmland once reigned has been matched by decline or slower growth in the central cities and older suburbs. In the largest metropolitan areas, the rate of population growth for suburbs was more than three times that of central cities—60.3 percent versus 17.2 percent— between 1970 and 2000.”

“As people went, so did jobs…the suburbs now dominate employment growth and are no longer just bedroom communities for workers commuting to traditional downtowns…. The result is that the American economy has essentially become an exit-ramp economy…a new spatial geography of work and opportunity has emerged in metropolitan America.”

“These unbalanced growth patterns…helped construct the metropolitan dividing lines that separate areas of wealth and opportunity from areas of poverty and distress.”

“These unbalanced growth patterns are also not inevitable. They are fundamentally shaped by a complicated mix of federal and state spending programs, tax expenditures, regulatory practices, and administrative policies. Federal and state policies, taken together, set “rules of the development game” that tend to facilitate the decentralization of the economy and the concentration of urban poverty.”

“Metropolitan areas with myriad small local governments sprawl more than those with larger units of local government... local governments compete with one another to gain desirable land uses (retail and other non-polluting business uses that yield high property or sales taxes while demanding few services) and to avoid less desirable ones (high density and affordable housing, which yields lower property taxes and demands more services, especially education).”

“…research has demonstrated that all children—middle-class, poor, black, white, Asian, and Latino—perform better in integrated, middle-class schools than in schools of concentrated poverty.”

“Beyond educational achievement, research shows that adults and teenagers who live in areas of concentrated poverty face real barriers to participation in the workplace. These barriers owe partly to the emergence of a “spatial mismatch” between inner-city residents and jobs associated with the decentralization of employment.”MHSM recently completed a plan to address spatial mismatch, Job Access – Transportation Plan

“The evidence is also mounting that living in high-poverty neighborhoods has negative health implications, partly owing to the stress of being poor and marginalized and partly owing to one’s life transpiring in a deprived environment of dilapidated housing and run-down neighborhoods.”

“…the federal government has—over the course of the past several decades—pursued three distinct sets of strategies to address the challenges of distressed communities and the families who live there.
The dominant strategy—which I will call the “improving the neighborhood” strategy— focuses on making urban communities quality places in which to live. This is a place-based strategy that … seeks to spark revitalization by improving the physical stock and commercial quality of the community. … neighborhood improvement strategies “confuse the linkages between the revitalization of a neighborhood and the alleviation of poverty.” … the neighborhood improvement field sorely needs consolidation and streamlining… metrics by which neighborhood improvement is assessed rarely take into account the broader goals of poverty alleviation and access to opportunity.
The second strategy—which I will call the “expanding opportunity” strategy—focuses on giving the individual residents of distressed neighborhoods greater access to quality jobs and good schools in the broader metropolis, wherever they may be. This is a people-based strategy that seeks, by either moving residents to areas of lower poverty or by linking them to employment and educational opportunity in the metropolitan area, to improve, first and foremost, family outcomes.
The final strategy—which I will call the “transforming the neighborhood” strategy—is the most recent and, in many respects, the most ambitious. It focuses on fundamentally altering the socio-economic mix of distressed neighborhoods and creating communities that are economically integrated and attractive to a broad range of households. This strategy has both place- and people-based components, and it works simultaneously to create neighborhoods of choice and to smooth low-income residents’ access to opportunity through housing mobility and services that support work…this new vision treats people and place policies as fundamentally intertwined and mutually reinforcing.”

Katz also suggests new neighborhood policies:

“First, neighborhoods and neighborhood policy need to be set within a metropolitan context

Second, broader national, state, and local policies need to align with the goals of neighborhood policy…fix the basics. …adopt smart growth policies… connect low-income families to employment opportunities and embrace policies that build income and reward work.

Third, neighborhood policy needs to embrace economic and demographic diversity in both cities and suburbs

Fourth, neighborhood policy needs a new mix of private- and community-sector action, in both cities and suburbs

Finally, neighborhood policy needs to be implemented in an integrated, accountable and sustainable fashion.”

“Regional Competitiveness”: The Evolving Era of ED

2005-06-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

A May 2005 report, A Review of the Federal Role in Regional Economic Development by Mark Drabenstott of the Center for the Study of Rural America, presents an insightful look at the role of government in Economic Development. This study shares some ED history and explains how the federal government is organized to support economic development.

“The current federal hand in economic development is not easy to characterize. Programs have grown up in nearly every corner of government over the past 50 years or more. Nine federal departments and another four agencies all get involved in one form of economic development or another. This effort is largely unfocused—there is no overriding goal focusing the effort. In that sense, it is far easier to list the 180 programs involved in economic development than to describe the policy driving them. However, what can be said is that many of the programs assume that regional economic development is largely homogeneous across the nation, and is driven by an industrial economic engine.”

Drivers of regional economic development have evolved over time. The 50’s thru the early 80’s were the age of industrial recruiting, deregulation in the 80’s brought on cost competition, and accelerated globalization of markets in the 90’s led us to a currently developing age of Regional Competitiveness. The main drivers of this current trend are innovation and entrepreneurship. Human capital and higher education are critical assets in our current understanding of this new era. The following are additional excerpts from the study:

…”critical distinction between today and the earlier eras is that economic development is no longer a matter of one economic development strategy applied to all regions—what some might call a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Industrial recruitment was universal. Indeed, the remnants of this strategy still run far and wide. Competing on cost was a similarly far-flung approach. Regional competitiveness, by contrast, is highly idiosyncratic. Every region has a different set of economic assets, a unique capacity to innovate, its own crop of entrepreneurs, and its own opportunities in global markets.”

“The theory that a region’s growth depends on exploiting its indigenous assets is the critical foundation to regional competitiveness, the third stage of regional economic development. This framework for explaining how regions grow has developed in three distinct strands of economic research. Some economists are focusing on the importance of clusters, suggesting that a concentration of similar firms creates synergies that can fuel growth. Others describe a new economic geography, in which local amenities are critical determinants in creating a pool of skills and capital that can spawn new ideas and businesses and grow a region’s economy. Still others focus more on entrepreneurs and innovation, arguing that fresh technologies and the right climate can lead to a rich seedbed of businesses, spurring economic gains. While each strand has merit in its own right, together they form a strong consensus that regional competitiveness is becoming the accepted model for regional economic growth.”

This research supports the competitive communities model of brainpower, quality place and innovation. Uncovering assets that bring entrepreneurs and higher education to the table of creative collaboration will lead to unique regional ED strategies.

Our current work includes a regional ED strategy built on the music history of the Louisiana Hayride and its neighborhood, where the cultures of south and west collided with the blending of country, blues, gospel and jazz leading to rock-a-billy. The Foundation for Arts Music & Entertainment (FAME) is working with a regional higher education consortium of 12 institutions (CERT) to implement a regional ED plan network of rural and urban communities branded as the “Magic Circle”. To learn more you can download the plan, Shreveport’s Historic Music Village.

“The Need for Unity”

2005-05-15T07:55:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from a speech to The New York Regional Plan Association on April 29, 2005 presented by Bruce Katz, director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. The entire speech, Beyond Red and Blue, is instructive for the entire country in framing strategies for our competitive future.

“This convincing dissection and dismissal of the red/blue divide leads to my second point—the Washington political class is highly polarized at a critical time in our nation’s history—when the country is undergoing a period of profound demographic and market change that is comparable in scale and complexity to the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Everyone in this room can attest to the breathless pace of demographic change in this city and our nation.

• Our country is growing by leaps and bounds—33 million people in the past decade, 24 million in the decade before.
• Our growth is being fueled in part by a wave of immigration not experienced since the turn of the last century. 34 million of our residents are foreign born, 12 percent of the population, the highest share since 1930.
• Immigration is essential to offsetting another major demographic trend – the aging of our population. Like much of the industrialized West, the US population is growing older and living longer.
• And our family structure is changing. Women and men are delaying marriage, having fewer children, heading smaller households.

The pace of demographic change is matched only by the intensity of economic transformation.

• Globalization and technological innovation are reshaping and restructuring our economy and altering what Americans do and where they do it.
• These forces have accelerated the shift of our nation’s economy from the manufacture of goods to the conception, design, marketing, and delivery of goods, services, and ideas.
• These forces are changing the ways businesses manage their disparate operations and make location decisions—enabling large firms to locate headquarters in one city, research and design somewhere else, production facilities still somewhere else, and back-office functions—within or outside the firm—in still other places.
• For a region built on global finance, they are also changing the way we finance housing and business, through standardization and securitization in the capital markets.

These demographic and market forces have reset and rescrambled the rules of economic success in our country. Here are just 3 new rules to consider:

Rule Number One: What you know determines what you earn as a family and whether you prosper as a community. In our changing economy, higher and higher levels of education are the keys to prosperity for families and competitiveness for regions. A metro’s income grows 1 percentage point for every 2-percentage point growth in adults with a bachelor’s degree.

Rule Number Two: How you grow physically affects how you grow economically. Density and compact development matter in the knowledge economy, because they enhance innovation and contribute to labor productivity. Cities and urban places, in short, have a renewed economic function and purpose after years of decline.

Rule Number Three: How a region governs needs to reflect the new geography of work and opportunity—the metropolis. In a rapidly changing economy, regional cohesion and collaboration is no longer an oddity, something that only the Twin Cities or Portland, Oregon partake in. Rather, regional thinking and action is now a necessity for addressing a host of economic, environmental, and social challenges that cross antiquated political borders.

These rules sound simple and unconventional, but they require radical and revolutionary changes in how policymakers at all levels of government think about competitiveness and prosperity.”

Incentive Wisdom – Myth or Reality

2005-05-07T05:30:00.000-07:00

Does your community offer incentives to lure new businesses and development to town? Does it surprise you that the rationale for offering these subsides usually considers only positive outcomes with no offsetting measure of the public costs or negative impacts deducted to determine a true picture of the value of new development?

A myth has spread the country “faster than a speeding bullet”– if you throw enough money at a company they will come to your community with jobs and no matter the cost the future will be better for all. The myth is so institutionalized that every community and every state has played the game. It should be no surprise that the incentive game pits communities in bidding wars to the benefit of large companies bottom lines. The bidding has become outrageous with bankrupting offers of billions to companies by some states to bet on the next bigger than big industry or to steal current top performing companies from other communities. As the incentive game has developed some communities are compelled to practice defensive recruiting and find incentives to prevent resident large employment companies from leaving.

Tighter government budgets cause logical minds to question bad habits. These more rational evaluations of incentives have revealed that companies generally do not locate based on incentives. Certainly if you throw incentives they won’t be turned down, however, location decisions are based more on factors such as workforce, education levels and quality of life. When incentives are the deciding factor they are usually so large that when the negative aspects, such as the cost to provide public services and pay for increased traffic congestion, are factored into the equation the investment results in a reduction in public services or increased taxes for your community. The result is a shrinking ability to make the kinds of public investments that will make you a more sought after destination by both workforce and new business.

The bottom line, incentives should be tied to comprehensive plans and real measures of return on investment. To learn more visit Dr. Dave at the New Rules website for a good overview of the issue and a link to additional studies.

One of the more interesting sources for Dr. Dave is an Economic Policy Institute publication by Robert Lynch, Rethinking Growth Strategies – How State and Local Taxes affect Economic Development.

Also check out these related entries to Competitive Communities: Loosing Good Cents and Leveling the Playing Field.

Entrepreneurship paves way to Growth & Prosperity

2005-04-27T05:22:00.000-07:00

Entrepreneurship is the driver for regional economic growth across the country. Innovation and entrepreneurship are linked in the competitive communities strategy of brainpower, quality place and innovation. Sustaining economic growth depends on entrepreneurs capitalizing on innovation. A good measure of entrepreneurial activity in your community is to count new company births. Another predictor is the annual dollars invested in R&D activities. The most entrepreneurial regions of the country (large, medium and small) spend 54% more than the least entrepreneurial regions according to a 2004 study by Advanced Research Technologies LLC, The Innovation-Entrepreneurship Nexus. Find out how your region stacks up by checking out the appendix chart that shows Regional Entrepreneurship Index, rankings for New Firm Births, annual Change in New Firm Births and percent of New Firms Growing Rapidly. The following are excerpts from the report on the impacts for large, medium and small regions:

“Differences in economic growth between the most and the least entrepreneurial regions are most significant for large regions. Among large U.S. regions, the most entrepreneurial realize 100 percent greater average annual gains in employment and 146 percent greater average gains in productivity than the least entrepreneurial. In addition, average annual wage growth for the most entrepreneurial large regions is 7.8 percent, which is 73 percent greater than that of the least entrepreneurial (4.5%). Entrepreneurship appears to be linked with higher levels of economic growth and prosperity. These advantages also appear sustainable over time...”

“Among U.S. regions of medium size, the most entrepreneurial realize 85 percent greater average annual gains in employment and 58 percent greater average gains in productivity than the least entrepreneurial. In addition, average annual wage growth for the most entrepreneurial medium-sized regions is 6.1 percent, which is 45 percent greater than that of the least entrepreneurial regions in this category. Like the best of the large regions, the most entrepreneurial medium-sized regions appear to possess an advantage in their ability to leverage indigenous entrepreneurship activity for long-term economic gain.”

“Among small U.S. regions, the most entrepreneurial realize 73 percent greater average annual growth in employment and 50 percent greater average gains in productivity than the least entrepreneurial. In addition, average annual wage growth for the most entrepreneurial among the small regions is 14 percent greater than that of the least entrepreneurial regions in this size category. The entrepreneurial elite among the smaller regions on average also produces 87 percent more new ventures, and, like their large and medium counterparts, are able to sustain their competitive advantage over other small, less entrepreneurial regions.”

Developing regional mechanisms and processes that bring together innovation and entrepreneurs is an important strategy for Competitive Communities. Whether in the form of a “think tank”, a consortium or other means of getting different brains around the table to explore and develop the potentials of new ideas, just do it. You will be surprised at the creativity in your regional community. The following is another excerpt from the report:

“Entrepreneurs assemble the resources necessary to create economic transaction activity (e.g., new products, new markets, new ventures, etc.) around innovation. The Nexus proposition suggests that the enterprising transaction activity of entrepreneurs (i.e., individual or organizational) enhances the economic value of innovations. To derive the greatest benefit from an investment in innovation capacity, therefore, regional leaders may benefit from a greater understanding of the dynamic role of entrepreneurship and the real opportunities that exist at the innovation entrepreneurship nexus. The Nexus Proposition, therefore, proposes that entrepreneurship is a generative process through which innovation influences regional economy. In other words, all or some of the overall impact of innovation on regional economy is indirectly realized through entrepreneurship.”

Also refer to these additional Competitive Communities entries: Successful Communities Measured by Outcomes, Growing Rural Competitive Communities, Nurture Innovation Cultures and Building Innovation Communities - Are You Counting Your Entrepreneurs?

Is Bigger Better?

2005-04-09T06:40:00.000-07:00

Dependence on sales tax and grasping for good economic news has somehow distorted reality for many communities. Do big box and chain stores with their national marketing campaigns, sometimes lower prices and predictable brands add real economic value to communities? Does expansion to your neighborhood deserve public subsidy? Many political leaders fall in to a trap of becoming advocates to recruit big box clusters to their communities by offering subsidies such as tax breaks, tax increment financing (TIF) that can reduce construction cost substantially, extending roads and many other unjustified assistance.

During a public meeting concerning a Kings Highway Corridor Plan in Shreveport, where approximately 90% of the businesses were unique local operations, one business owner expressed an understanding that he was actually subsidizing his demise. He understood that his tax dollars were being used to support growth of big box sprawl that threatened his existence. You may think that is the cost of progress. Maybe you should think again. The cost of such growth is not sustainable. If you are witnessing big box and chain store growth and your population is not substantially increasing you may see the negative results more quickly. What are these results? To name a few: loss of tax base as small businesses close, less retail revenue per square foot of retail, fewer jobs per square foot of retail, reduced residential property values in the area of this type of retail growth, higher poverty rates than communities without such development, increased police services, traffic congestion, negative impacts on surrounding small communities… Enough? There is more.

In evaluating this type of growth consider zero sum game theory. There is only so much retail expenditure per population. If you are not growing population then the new businesses will be shifting dollars from existing businesses. What are the impacts on the region when these shifts occur? Is it part of a well-conceived plan or just leap frog fill-in-the-gaps low-density haphazard growth.

Managing this type of growth is one of the keys to becoming a more competitive community. If your not convinced look at the studies from across the country compiled by New Rules that quantify cost to cities, costs to states, economic impact of local businesses vs. chains, existing businesses & jobs, wages & benefits, poverty rates and subsidies.

Successful Communities Measured by Outcomes

2004-11-21T09:20:00.000-08:00

The Milken Institute has released its ranking of 200 large and 118 small best performing cities for 2004. The report also includes the 2003 ranking as an indicator of momentum. The rankings are based on criteria that measure outcomes (jobs, wages and GMP, gross metro product, growth) of metro economies. The report includes ideas for communities working to improve their ranking. Suggestions focus on entrepreneurs as key to a sustainable economy. Creating the environment to nurture innovation should be a part of every community’s strategy to prosper in a knowledge-based economy.

“A region’s most important source of competitive advantage is the knowledge embedded in its people. The knowledge, skills, experience and innovative potential of talented individuals have greater value than capital equipment. A successful enterprise accesses, creates and utilizes knowledge to sustain competitive advantage. A successful metro will develop, nurture and support a growing knowledge-based economy.”

Check out the report by Ross DeVol and Lorna Wallace, Best Performing Cities: Where Americas Jobs are Created and Sustained.

Growing Rural Competitive Communities

2004-10-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

Innovation, changes in the economy, growth patterns of large metropolitan areas and a shift to regional thinking are ingredients that can set the stage for reinvigorating small town America. Many small towns are missing the boat by aspiring to growth patterns of larger cities. Keeping an eye on assets that distinguish small towns is an integral part of the competitive strategy for rural communities. Quality compact development and locally owned business are strengths to be nurtured along with developing brainpower connections to research institutions. While many small communities seem determined to repeat growth mistakes of cities, many of these larger metropolitan areas are learning how to make cities function more like a collection of villages. Must be something about the quality of life and efficiencies. Learning to “Think small in big ways” is how author Roberta Gratz describes the tactic.

Small communities face problems and are not effectively planning to take advantage of their assets. The National Governors Association is focusing on strategies to help rural America. The following excerpts are from a recent NGA publication, Innovative State Policy Options to Promote Rural Economic Development:

“America’s rural areas and small towns face unique and difficult challenges in the 21st-century economy. Rural economies generally face challenges from poverty, geographic isolation, infrastructure deficiencies, poor links with metropolitan and global markets, weak community infrastructure for business development and growth, and the flight of skilled human capital to metropolitan regions.”

“Three promising strategies for governors interested in rural economic dynamism are:

• Adapt cluster-based principles. Economically successful regions have clusters of interconnected businesses that collaborate. States can support clusters by encouraging the development of industry networks that provide a channel for businesses to work together. To meet the need of cluster businesses for highly skilled workers, states have deployed colleges and universities as training centers. States can ensure that cluster businesses in remote, rural communities have access to the same capital and technical resources as their more advantageously located competitors.
• Promote entrepreneurship outside the agricultural sector. As traditional resource-based, extractive rural industries decline, entrepreneurship development can be an effective strategy for states to consider. States can best serve entrepreneurs by providing access to seed capital; by developing local ability to identify, encourage, and train entrepreneurs; and by using online networks and other technology to connect entrepreneurs with critical information and financial resources.
• Reinvigorate the agricultural sector through diversification and value-added agriculture practices. There is more to farming today than simply growing commodity crops. Farmers know they can earn more by growing different types of crops or by raising nontraditional species of livestock. Other farmers are directly processing their crops into finished products that they market themselves. To support this new agricultural environment, states can provide the capital and technical assistance that allow farmers to follow these new paths to wealth creation.”

“Entrepreneurial businesses are responsible for the vast majority of job creation in the U.S. According to the National Commission on Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs create 600,000-800,000 businesses annually” (See National Commission on Entrepreneurship web site). “High concentrations of entrepreneurs create robust economies highlighted by more growth and better quality jobs” (Interview with Don Macke, September 25, 2002).

“Entrepreneurship policies rely upon developing assets that are unique to the community, are flexible with specific conditions of rural regions, can be scaled to the size and needs of the community, and can be implemented through local intermediaries.”

“Entrepreneurship policies are especially attractive options for rural areas.

Several characteristics of rural communities and regions present special challenges for entrepreneurship. Small population and low density limit the availability of producer services and access to markets. Many rural areas also face serious human capital constraints. Highly skilled individuals tend to seek employment in metropolitan areas, and those remaining in rural areas may not be aware of entrepreneurial opportunities or possess the skills necessary to take advantage of them. Finally, rural areas frequently lack the institutions for collaboration in business, and the linkages to urban markets and businesses that permit business growth. States should explore policy and program options to facilitate rural entrepreneurship. Effective tools include the following.

• Provide access to capital through budget appropriations or by support of venture capital fund intermediaries. Capital is one of the most critical and glaring needs in rural entrepreneurship.
• Develop community capacity—the ability to identify and encourage local entrepreneurs—through specialized training programs.
• Use technology such as online networks to connect far-flung rural populations to the informational and financial resources that can assist entrepreneurial business development.”

“…Rural economic development policies must build upon the inherent strengths of rural America—abundant natural resources, close-knit communities, strong local business networks, and a largely untapped tradition of entrepreneurial creativity.”

Also see a September 17 entry at Ed Morrison’s blog, Small Town Opportunities.

Additional information is available at the Center for the Study of Rural America.

Affordable Housing has a role in Managing Growth

2004-10-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

Part of a quality place strategy for competitive communities includes balancing housing growth. Shifting away from unbalanced growth trends, that isolate both wealth and poverty, toward mixed income neighborhoods will address several negative outcomes of current outward growth patterns. The idea of capturing the wealth in a region into homogeneous safe havens may be profitable to developers that market the benefits of this housing, however, the public cost and problems are regionally inequitable and unsustainable. Isolating citizens by income level neighborhoods has exacerbated the problems of low-density outward growth.

A presentation by Robert Puentes, Reframing the Challenges and Opportunities for Affordable Housing, explains why affordable housing is an important part of managing growth and suggests an agenda for policies.

Among the points made by Puentes:

“Smart Growth without affordable housing contributes to the spatial mismatch between jobs and poverty. Working poor get concentrated in areas remote from education and employment… This imbalance worsens traffic congestion by forcing families to travel long distances… Spatial mismatch places stresses on a regions employees by limiting the pool of workers that can live within a reasonable distance of jobs - For smart growth to succeed, affordable housing must be central to the agenda.”

“School and education policy plays a critical role in housing and neighborhood location decisions… Children that live in poor neighborhoods are at greater risk of school failure. When low-income families are given the chance to move to better neighborhoods, school performance improves. Housing mobility is important. Connection with education should be explicit.”

Puentes proposes a five-part policy agenda for affordable housing as part of a smart growth approach:

1. Education and Income – “Low levels of educational achievement lead to low paying jobs, which impedes families’ access to quality housing… households can build wealth through decent housing in thriving neighborhoods.”
2. Regional Planning and Implementation – “Regional approaches help address “Fair Share” requirements for considering and planning affordable housing needs…Regions don’t delineate the difference between hot and cold markets.”
3. Location – “Don’t cluster in low income neighborhoods, especially in the core…Enable low-income families to live closer to employment centers, better schools, quality transit and other amenities…promote infill development, neighborhood revitalization and re-using vacant land.”
4. Regulations – “Identify and get rid of policies that are exclusionary or unnecessary…Promote thoughtful growth management policies with strong affordable housing components.”
5. Private Sector – “Incentives should be provided for private developers to provide more affordable housing…In hot markets, private sector can be encourage to proffer units and/or cash.”

Creating a range of housing opportunities and choices is one of ten categories (See blog entry Auditing Smart Growth) of policies for implementing smart growth assembled by the Smart Growth Network in two volumes: Getting to Smart Growth and Getting to Smart Growth II. Chapter 3 in both publications provides more detailed ideas for utilizing housing policies to better manage growth.

Property Tax Policy Fuels Sprawl

2004-09-24T21:05:00.000-07:00

Understanding causes of the many problems communities face is complex and overwhelming. The way communities grow is a primary factor in shaping most of these problems. Growth patterns are like a herd of cattle stampeding toward a cliff. The policies and perceptions that are the rules of growth are extremely difficult to redirect, even when the big picture shows impending disaster.

What does it take to encourage investment in older areas of communities? Why do some property owners refuse to maintain their property? Has your community seen historic downtowns demolished one building at a time in favor of surface parking? Why do some property owners sit on their property and refuse to sell until surrounding investment raises the value of their land? What are the impacts of these growth practices on the cost of public services? How can we turn things around?

Uncovering policies that result in negative outcomes is among the first steps to improve the future and assure opportunity for generations that follow. Many problems of sprawling growth patterns are being documented and thematic solutions are on the rise. Occasionally someone identifies a core issue that is equivalent to discovering the cause of a disease. The method of taxing land is one of the policies that have shaped communities. If you take a look at the property tax system and analyze its impacts you realize we are encouraging, even rewarding actions that are shaping negative outcomes for our communities. James Howard Kunstler has evaluated two approaches to taxing land. He explains that current policies of taxing building improvements on land are a core factor shaping negative impacts of current growth patterns. Taxing improvements on property is a deterrent to making quality improvements to property. The better alternative is taxing land based on location and proximity to public services.

Not so sure you believe? Find out more about the history of property tax in the United States and more explanation from Kunstler’s A Mercifully Brief Chapter on a Frightening, Tedious, But Important Subject . The following are a few excerpts from this paper:

“Our system of property taxes punishes anyone who puts up a decent building made of durable materials. It rewards those who let existing buildings go to hell. It favors speculators who sit on vacant or underutilized land in the hearts of our cities and towns. In doing so it creates an artificial scarcity of land on the free market, which drives up the price of land in general and encourages even more scattered development, i.e., suburban sprawl..."

“This happens because we tax buildings much more heavily than the land under them… The higher the buildings value, the higher the tax. Under this system, a rational person has every reason to put up crappy buildings that will not be highly assessed, or he has every reason to let his property run down, or build nothing at all. This is a major reason for the current desolation of American towns and cities.”

“The alternative to this is to tax land itself and not the buildings on it. The criteria for assessing the value of land minus buildings is based on its location or site. If it is one block away from Main Street, for instance, it is considered to have high site value because it is very close to other things that people like to be near, public utilities, the post office, civic amenities such as parks, museums, libraries, schools, other businesses and other services, and so on. The theory behind this is that in human society land derives value from both explicit public investment (sewers, water lines, streets), and from the aggregate of private human activities that go on around it. This is termed socially created value.”

You can also learn more about this issue at New Rules and at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and their Property Valuation and Taxation Library.

Reforming our property tax system could become an important step for Competitive Communities positioning to advance quality place, brainpower and innovation strategies. Several communities in the United States are shifting to site valuation taxation. Pittsburgh and Harrisburg Pennsylvania stand out as implementing a two-tiered system that is gradually shifting taxation from buildings to land. Sydney, Australia is another city that has seen tremendous benefit from a land valuation system.

Mixing Uses

2004-08-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

Are you concerned about your community? Do you spend time trying to find answers to complex problems that both rural and urban communities face? Have you struggled to find the most effective starting point for renewing older neighborhoods suffering from disinvestments? You’re not alone. The number of forces working against redeveloping older neighborhoods is overwhelming. So many policies, public and private, have over time devolved to reward undesirable outcomes. Tax and land use policies have encouraged development patterns that isolate poverty, increase public costs to unsustainable levels and consolidate business in an ethic of abandon and resettle.

Growth patterns impact health, safety and welfare for all citizens. Unsustainable policies are so ingrained in all of us that low-density isolation development is marketable and receives preference from financing institutions. A 2000 National Governors Association publication by Joel Hirschhorn, Growing Pains – Quality of Life in the New Economy, presents information about these undesirable growth outcomes as well as responsive initiatives across the country that NGA classifies as New Community Design. In 1920 the average density of cities, suburbs and towns was 6,160 people per square mile. The average density of development since 1960 is 1,469 people per square mile. We have shifted our settlement patterns to an average of 60% suburban with some larger cities as high as 75% suburban. Hirschhorn summarized the current laws of development as:

“Law No. 1: Population increases are accompanied by much larger increases in land consumption and somewhat larger increases in residential dwellings and private vehicles.

Law No. 2: As distance from urban cores increases and population density decreases, the rate of growth increases for population, land consumption, residential dwellings, and private vehicles.

Law No. 3: Rapid suburbanization and urban decay are mirror images of the same phenomenon.”

The dilemma resulting from these laws of growth is “the greater the number of people who want to live in a low-density living environment, the more difficult it will become to do so. At the same time, urban decay makes it difficult for those who prefer to live in an urban environment to do so as well.” The result is reduced freedom of choice. Perception is not always reality. Gated communities and new urbanist suburban developments, “new burbanism”, are furthering isolationism as fulfilling the ideal lifestyle. These are mythical lifestyles where families, settling homogenized low-density neighborhoods in once picturesque fields of green, spend more time alone in vehicles and often have more vehicles than family members. It is simply not a sustainable pattern of growth.

We need an alternative. How do we create marketable models for living options that are more fulfilling, richer in diversity and accessible to more people? How do we alter systems that fuel growth? Can we initiate policies that provide greater rewards for reinvestment and disincentives for abandonment?

Mixing uses is emerging as an effective strategy that offers a desirable, community-building quality of life for both urban and suburban living. The idea of placing business, housing, shopping, recreation, education, religious, cultural and governmental functions in a variety of diverse, compact arrangements produces many socio-economic benefits and new opportunities. This more compact development pattern can achieve higher quality development at lower public and private cost. Mixed-use projects are more complex than current traditional real estate products. However, these projects appear to have greater staying power and greater long-term profitability than the easier to understand single-use products that flood communities beyond saturation limits.

Mixing uses is a strategy to revitalize older areas and to focus newer low-density growth toward the efficiencies of compact development. Like so many upstream ideas the problem is often figuring where to start a new direction. Planning is critical in uncovering new opportunities. Finding the idea, determining the catalysts and organizing implementers is the initial work. Among the places to look and test the feasibility of implementing mixed-use projects are: locations where employment is concentrated, around stable institutions in deteriorating neighborhoods, recycling vacated mall / big box properties in older suburban areas and locations in rural communities that connect new growth to historic town centers. We are currently in the early stages of several exciting mixed-use projects that will become catalyst to stimulate reinvestment in communities. Stay tuned.

The following are links to several sources and stories that reinforce the value of mixing uses:

An article in Affordable Housing Finance, Mixed-use projects spread across the country by Bendix Anderson discusses several mixed-use projects.

A Smart Growth News article, Urban Mixed-Use Projects Curb Sprawl, But Need to Show Profits Threatens New Ventures, discusses some of the challenges and the long-term viability for mixed-use projects.

Transit-Oriented Development: Moving From Rhetoric To Reality, by Dena Belzer and Gerald Autler is a 2002 Brookings Institute publication concerning the public value and challenges of mixed-use development around public transit and alternative modes of transportation.

Another Brookings publication, Financing Progressive Development, discusses the short-term bias of conventional financing and the long-term financial benefits and higher quality of sustainable development.

A National Governors Association document, New Community Design to the Rescue, presents ways to eliminate institutional barriers to mixed-use, mixed-income and walkable development.

Public Process driving Regional ED

2004-08-01T06:30:00.000-07:00

Ideas grow from effective dialogue. Competitive Communities are using open processes to plan a future of brainpower, quality place and innovation. Opportunity in these communities often grows when diverse groups learn to creatively communicate in ways that connect problems and solutions. Different points of view, “brain gumbo”, can define issues as challenges for creative problem solving. In fact, a well-defined problem (simply stated, specific and outcome focused) is the most creative part of processes leading to good solutions. Open, well-structured dialogue helps identify where public resources can have the greatest return on investment and builds consensus for priorities.

Implementing projects without understanding problems, opportunities and priorities is like looking for a light switch in the dark. Public resources in many communities are currently stretched beyond the ability to keep up with basic infrastructure needs. Often “short-cut-shooters-from-the-hip” want fast results and profess planning process dialogue (often the inspiration for vision) a waste of time.

This “Ready! Fire! Aim” approach to implement projects du jour, without adequate thinking, without inclusion and without thoroughly understanding targeted problems is characteristic of some communities looking for fast and easy prosperity. Transferring project solutions from one community to another can also be quicksand. It seems easier to copy sexy projects that another community made successful. Look around; many communities look more and more alike because transferring ideas is easier than building on unique assets that distinguish communities. A more successful approach is learning and understanding goals and processes that other communities are utilizing to bring human capital together to shape a better future.

Competitive Communities are mobilizing brainpower. There is a growing recognition that promises of the quickest path to an unplanned better future are more often a slow, expensive path to a growing list of unmet needs. It’s amazing how often leaders in control choose not to bring a community’s diverse brainpower together to support innovation. It may seem slower because its harder in the beginning, however, an inclusive process that builds consensus for creative solutions to well defined problems builds momentum and, in reality, is faster, more accountable and sustainable.

Growing Forward, an article in the Spring 2004 issue of Economic Development America, provides ideas to communities exploring processes that build regional cooperation for planning growth and resource investment. Over 2,000 participated in developing a Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) for Northwest North Carolina. The following are excerpts from the article:

“The lessons learned in Northwest North Carolina have strong relevance to other communities. The lessons on competition, regionalism, and community investment are helpful to any community looking for a new direction in economic development:

·Form close relationships and pool resources with neighboring communities. A regional approach to economic development helps communities succeed and offers residents a wider range of opportunities.
·Make sure economic development activities and local policy cater to entrepreneurial businesses. Entrepreneurs and small businesses will drive future economic growth.
·Strengthen K-12 education, downtowns, and support for local businesses. These investments increase a region’s appeal to new businesses and talented workers. Now more than ever, it is critical to invest in the core of the community.
·Empower local residents and businesses to participate in economic development. They are a great source of new ideas and extend the reach of an economic development organization.
·A region’s ability to attract knowledgeable and talented people is equally as important as the ability to recruit new companies.
·Successful regions will take aggressive steps to reduce social disparity. As disparity decreases, the potential of attracting new investment increases.
·The ability and freedom to innovate differentiates the U.S. from every other country. A region’s economic development campaign must embrace and cultivate innovation.”

You can view the reports and other information about this regional CEDS at the Angelou Economics project web site, Northwest North Carolina CEDS.

Auditing Smart Growth

2004-07-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

Is your community making progress toward growing smarter? Do current policies inhibit smarter development? One way to find out is to audit your community or even better, audit your region. Smart Growth is an informed approach to managing resources and improving quality of life. The Smart Growth Network examined qualities of successful communities and as a first step in formulating goals identified 10 principals or values to define smart growth:

Mix land uses
Take advantage of compact building design and efficient infrastructure design
Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
Create walkable neighborhoods
Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place
Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty and critical environmental areas
Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities
Provide a variety of transportation choices
Make development decisions predictable, fair and cost-effective
Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration in development decisions

Conducting a Smart Growth Audit is a process of identifying and measuring accomplishments or plans to incorporate these principals into community growth strategies. It is not a one size fits all approach and encourages uniqueness values in creatively interpreting these principals. Getting to Smart Growth – 100 policies for implementation, a publication by the Smart Growth Network and the ICMA is a good place to learn more about the principals of smart growth and what communities are doing to implement these ideals. At the conclusion of this document is a checklist of policies that can provide a starting point for communities to begin an audit process. Setting appropriate benchmarks and measuring progress provides evidence of the benefits of smart growth and a means of identifying the policies that are working against achieving these principals.

The following are some additional resources from communities that using audits as an early step in moving toward a smarter future:

July 6, 2004 by the Smart Growth Leadership Team, Policy and Code Audit Report - East Baton Rouge Parish and the City of Baton Rouge
Smart Growth Audit Results – Assessment of Local Zoning Laws, Municipal Procedures, and Development Activity in the 52 Communities of Southeastern Massachusetts Her is the audit form used by each community
Community Choices - Quality Growth Toolkit: Smart Growth Audit is a publication from the Atlanta Regional Commission. References at the end of the report are linked to additional information.

APA has also published a book, Smart Growth Audits, by Leora Waldner and Jerry Weitz to provide guidance to communities looking for a better way grow.

Also check out other related entries in Competitive Communities: Agenda for a Connected Future, General or Specific Area Plans?, Connecting Economic, Social and Physical Planning thru Dialogue and How will your Community Grow? The CHOICE is Yours!

Connecting Pre K-12 to Economic Development

2004-07-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

Smart, talented people are the primary ingredient for successful economic development. Strategies to grow a creative workforce connect to education beginning as early as childcare. Competitive Communities understand that investment in human capital through quality education is a more effective long-term plan than incentives to attract companies. In addition, these brainpower cultures are more entrepreneurial resulting in greater numbers of business owners and more local wealth. Connecting brainpower and innovation makes sense. Understanding the relationship between education and quality place is equally as important in effective economic development strategies for Competitive Communities.

Education policies and community growth policies are often unintentionally connected by undesirable outcomes of disconnected planning. Parents want a good education for their children. Home ownership and property values are higher in good school districts. Lower performing school districts tend to have more poverty and lower property value. Schools influence settlement patterns in communities. As jobs and wealth move to greener pastures, schools eventually follow. New school facilities serving low-density growth stretch school system resources resulting in abandonment and consolidation of inner schools serving a majority poverty population. School sprawl contributes to the spatial mismatch between poverty and jobs. This cycle of growth divides communities into socio political economies of haves and have-nots. Leaving out a segment of the population from opportunities available in the knowledge economy is not a successful strategy for aspiring brainpower communities. Public resources are inadequate to overcome this disparity without changing growth patterns. Connecting education planning (brainpower) with physical growth (quality place) and economic development (innovation) planning is the formula for Competitive Communities.

In a 2004 Knowledge Works Foundation report by Jonathan Weiss, Public Schools and Economic Development, confirms the role of education in shaping communities. Key findings include:

“There is a clear consensus among researchers that education enhances productivity.

Research indicates that quality public schools can help make states and localities more economically competitive.

Public schools indisputably influence residential property values.

Emerging evidence suggests that the quality, size, and shape of school facilities themselves affect economic development.”

Additional information about both short and long term economic development roles of education beginning with child care is found in an April 2004 report by the Cornell University Department of City and Regional Planning, Investing in New York – An Economic Analysis of the Early Care and Education Sectors.

If you are interested in how schools should fit into our communities check out a 2003 NCEF publication, Schools as Centers of Communities: A Citizens Guide for Planning and Design.

For additional information check out these entries on our blog, Knowledge Centers for Competitive Communities, Schooling Growth and Learning the Hard Way.

Agenda for a Connected Future

2004-07-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

Evaluating the complexities that shape American communities is a necessary process in moving away from policies and practices that have become obstacles; and toward new directions that respond to current challenges and opportunities. Bruce Katz and the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Program released a May 2004 study, A Progressive Agenda for Metropolitan America, that summarizes results of current patterns of growth, current policies that are obstacles to more rational growth and recommendations for policy changes. Competitive Communities will benefit from connecting policies for housing, workforce, education and transportation. This proposed agenda is presented as a challenge for the next administration. The following are excerpts from this work:

The Current Situation
“Broad demographic forces—population growth, immigration, domestic migration, and aging are sweeping the nation and affecting settlement patterns, lifestyle choices and consumption trends. Substantial economic forces—globalization, reindustrialization, and technological innovation – are restructuring our economy, altering what Americans do and where they do it.”

“These patterns—of racial, ethnic, and class stratification, of extensive growth in some communities and significantly less growth in others—are all inextricably linked. Poor schools in one jurisdiction push out families and lead to overcrowded schools in other places. A lack of affordable housing in thriving job centers leads to long commutes on crowded freeways for a region’s working families. Expensive housing – out of the reach of most households—in many close-in neighborhoods creates pressures to…build…in outlying areas, as people decide that they have to move outwards to build a future.”

“The fiscal costs of unbalanced growth are also enormous. Low-density development increases demand for new infrastructure (e.g., schools, roads, sewer, and water extensions) and increases the costs of key services like police, fire and emergency medical…the substantial impact of abandonment in older communities on the property values of nearby homes…the implications of concentrated poverty for additional municipal services in the schools and on the streets. Ultimately, these factors lead to reduced revenues, higher taxes and over-stressed services for older communities.”

Federal Policies shape growth patterns
…”Since the middle of the twentieth century, broad federal policies…have contributed substantially to unbalanced growth patterns in metropolitan areas…Federal polices…set “rules of the development game” that encourage the decentralization of the economy and the concentration of urban poverty. Federal transportation policies generally support the expansion of road capacity at the fringe of metropolitan areas and beyond…The deductibility of federal incomes taxes for mortgage interest and property taxes appears spatially neutral but in practice favors suburban communities, particularly those with higher income residents. Federal and state environmental policies have made the redevelopment of polluted “Brownfield” sites prohibitively expensive and cumbersome, increasing the attraction of suburban land.”

…Federal policies…rely on states and localities to “deliver the goods.”… Despite the fact that the bulk of the funds for transportation programs are raised in metropolitan areas, federal law currently empowers state departments of transportation to make most transportation decisions… metropolitan areas make decisions on only about 10 cents of every dollar they generate even though local governments within metropolitan areas own and maintain the vast majority of the transportation infrastructure.”

Solutions – Transportation & Housing policy changes
“It is time to develop a federal metropolitan agenda that takes account of the new spatial geography of work and opportunity in America…A progressive metropolitan agenda…economically efficient, fiscally responsible and environmentally sustainable. It is also necessary to revitalize central cities and older suburbs and to connect low-income families to broader educational and employment opportunities.

     - A New Transportation Agenda for Metropolitan America -

Metropolitan America faces a daunting set of transportation challenges— increasing congestion, deteriorating air quality, crumbling infrastructure, spatial mismatches in the labor market—that threaten to undermine their competitive edge in the global economy. Three reform ideas stand out for federal attention and action.

…Continue to expand the responsibility and capacity of metropolitan transportation entities.

A “Metropolitan Transportation Fund”…created to provide metropolitan areas with the predictability of resources required for long term planning and the flexibility necessary to tailor transportation solutions to individual markets.

…Establish a framework for accountability that includes tighter disclosure requirements, improved performance measures, and rewards for exceptional performance…increase the practical opportunities for citizen and business participation in transportation decision making…funding to experiment with state-of-the-art technologies for engaging citizens in public debates.

       - A New Housing Agenda for Metropolitan America -

…Expand housing opportunities for moderate and middle-class families in the cities and close-in suburbs while creating more affordable, “workforce” housing near job centers…federal policies should help regional elected leaders balance their housing markets through zoning changes, subsidies and tax incentives so that all families—both middle class and low income—have more choice about where they live and how to be closer to quality jobs and good schools.

…Federal tax incentives should be expanded to boost homeownership in places where homeownership rates are exceedingly low.

…Continue…efforts to demolish and redevelop distressed public housing and promote economic integration in federally assisted housing.

…Invest more substantially in vouchers…the most cost effective and market-oriented of federal housing programs…enable low-income parents to base their housing decisions on the performance of local schools.

…Shift governance of the housing voucher program to the metropolitan level.

…Make it easier to allocate low-income housing tax credits to areas of growing employment, not only to areas of distress and poverty.

…Prohibit lucrative federal highway investments in communities that have been found in violation of federal civil rights laws or otherwise have engaged in exclusionary housing practices.”

Building Support for Change
“This new metropolitan agenda…will require not just new policy ideas but new political coalitions that span jurisdictional, ideological and party lines. Existing local constituencies will have to think differently about metropolitan issues and make connections between policies—housing, workforce, education, and transportation—that are now kept separate and distinct.

…Urban policy in America can no longer be exclusively about cities or neighborhoods. It must be about the new metropolitan reality that defines our economy and society and the larger government rules that help shape that reality. The next administration has an historic opportunity to design and implement a metropolitan agenda that promotes balanced growth, stimulates investment in cities and older suburbs and connects low-income families to employment and educational opportunities.”

Nurture Innovation Cultures

2004-07-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

Competitive Communities are growing an innovation economy with creative ideas and risk taking. In a previous entry, Building Innovation Communities – Are You Counting Your Entrepreneurs? , we presented information about characteristics of communities with cultures of innovation that are attracting clusters of entrepreneurs. Growing better is more important than growing bigger. Innovation cultures require a system with incentives for growing companies. Investments in quality place to attract brainpower do more to create the environment for innovation than do investments in large incentive packages to compete in recruiting big companies.

CEOs for Cities and Progressive Policy Institute published a study in Fall 2000 that supports our competitive communities model, Urban Economic Prospects in the Knowledge Economy. Download the index or the document.

The following excerpts from the study set the stage for new opportunities and offer suggestions for Competitive Communities developing strategies for the new economy:

“In the old economy, a good business climate meant government-imposed or government-influenced low costs (e.g., taxes, and unemployment insurance). In the new knowledge economy, costs, while still important, are much less important than other factors. To succeed in the New Economy, places need to foster a culture of innovation. “

“Business cultures are embedded in larger civic cultures. These civic cultures vary significantly between different parts of the country. People talk about the open and friendly Midwesterners; the entrepreneurial Yankees; the "open-to-anything" Californians. Cultures that do best in the new economy have the following characteristics: people feel they are in it together; risk-taking is accepted and even encouraged; people are encouraged to cross institutional borders; and business, government, and labor trust one another.”

“There are new economic realities, many driven by technology, that are shaping the economic potential of cities and their surrounding regions. These include:

Trend 1: The high-tech industry is growing quickly relative to other parts of the economy and it is driving overall metro growth rates;
Trend 2: The high-tech industry tends to cluster in metropolitan regions;
Trend 3: Attracting and retaining talent is a critical factor to a region’s success;
Trend 4: Within metropolitan regions, high-tech development remains, for the most part, a suburban phenomenon;
Trend 5: High-tech products and services are transforming the rest of the economy, putting a greater share of the metropolitan and urban economy “in play.”

What to Do: New Economy Success Factors and Policies

Know Your Region
High-tech is not one industry, it is many, and each has different requirements and location patterns. Develop an in-depth and ongoing understanding of the regional economy, including how the major economic sectors work and what the region’s economic strengths and weaknesses are.

Stop Trying to Get Bigger; Try to Get More Prosperous
In the old economy, the goal of economic development was almost always to “get big.” In the new economy, the goal should be to “get prosperous,” meaning to create higher wages and better jobs, improve the quality of life, reduce poverty, and expand opportunities for all of the region’s citizens.

Stop Trying to Get Cheaper; Try to Get Better
In the old economy, “getting cheap” meant tax holidays, big subsidies, and other giveaways to companies that only cared about reducing costs. In the new economy, the key to success is to “get better.” Getting better means:

-Develop a vibrant technology infrastructure. Support and enhance high quality research universities and institutions; invest in fast and low cost telecommunications infrastructure; and expand access to the Internet.
-Create a skilled workforce. Make all schools high quality schools; increase training in technology skills; create industry-led workforce development alliances; reform local Workforce Investment Boards.
-Create a great quality of life. Reduce crime, increase transportation mobility, boost “New Economy culture” (European-like urban amenities combined with Western U.S.-like outdoor recreation activities), and ensure adequate physical infrastructure.
-Foster a culture of innovation. Identify cultural strengths and weaknesses; recognize and celebrate innovation, both public and private; support the formation of high-tech business councils to encourage networking and learning.
-Reinvent and digitize government. Government in the New Economy can’t govern alone—it needs to form strategic visioning and managing partnerships with the other key players. Be entrepreneurial and innovative and rely on information technology to create a fast and responsive government.”

General or Specific Area Plans?

2004-06-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

Plans are important for managing public resources, establishing priorities and competitive positioning for the future. More challenging than the planning process is implementing plans. Plans that have broad consensus support from those affected by plans are likely to be implemented. Market conditions, existing public policies and politics can limit the degree to which plans are implemented.

Good General Plans look at the entire community or region and capture ideals and policies to accomplish efficient and quality growth scenarios for the future. These broad view plans are often difficult to implement due to lack of participation / interest in the planning process by large numbers of individuals and businesses that will be affected. These constituencies often use market conditions and politics to gradually undo General Plan implementation when specific projects move through the approval process.

Specific Area Plans of smaller areas of communities are more likely to be guided by constituencies affected by outcomes of the plan. The result is implementation that more closely resembles plans. Broader general plans don’t have the understandable application of smaller, comprehensive plans that are more focused on implementation. Specific Area Plans build human capital resource capacity by empowering citizens to shape the future of their neighborhoods and communities. The process of organizing, funding and planning specific areas is an opportunity to also build constituencies for broader regional planning issues. Structure the process as a grassroots, action oriented approach to connect smaller areas to the larger region. These smaller specific area plans can establish competitive position, which requires evaluating broader trends, available resources and impacts on the region. Broader issues are better understood and accepted when applied to a smaller, more familiar context.

Smart Growth in Action; Part 2, a 2003 research document from the Reason Public Policy Institute and the Solimar Research Group, provides analysis of implementing growth management plans and policies by evaluating six case studies in Ventura County California. It is instructive for communities that understand the importance of managing growth and are overwhelmed by the realities of effectively implementing change. The following is an excerpt from the conclusion of this work that recognizes some of the values of specific area planning:

“… Specific plans appear to make a significant difference in creating plans that can be implemented "as-is".

A specific plan is a document that envisions the buildout of a specific part of a community, often under a separate set of planning policies and regulations. It is a hybrid document that includes planning policies, a buildout scenario, development regulations, and often a financial agreement between the developers and the city as well. Whereas general plans are "big picture" documents that both developers and citizens may have difficulty relating to, specific plans are often "real" enough to engage all parties in a meaningful way. Residents are less likely to stand outside the specific plan process than the general plan process because the issues are focused closer to home.”

We suggest a strategy to connect broad general plans and specific area plans in competitive communities. First, utilize initial general plans to capture regional data concerning positive and negative trends. Next, structure the initial broad planning process to identify specific planning areas and to organize constituencies responsible for specific area plans and implementation. After completing specific area plans, these new action groups become advocates in formulating a more comprehensive regional plan.

Check out specific area plans for Shreveport’s Historic Music Village, The Gladstone Neighborhood Improvement Plan and The Kings Highway Corridor. The North Shreveport Regional Development Plan is a more general plan that identifies common issues for a new Community Development Corporation and recommends specific planning areas.

Loosing Good Cents

2004-06-04T18:45:00.000-07:00

Do “Economic Development Incentives” relate to city income sources? Communities that are sales tax dependent seem more likely to offer incentives to superstar retailers. Creating income from sales tax for city government becomes more important than the sustainable approach of improving education and creating higher incomes per resident. Sales tax dependency is resulting in corporate welfare subsides to “big boxers” that concentrate the regional market by offering lower prices or achieving the shopping phenomena status of tourism attraction. These incentives ultimately decelerate the economy. Smaller communities in the region loose and the total retail jobs decline as these superstores redistribute the same regional dollars using fewer employees per square foot than the smaller retailers they displace. Over the longer term not only jobs but also property taxes are reduced and infrastructure problems exacerbated as concentrating sales in big boxes increases congestion in places that were not adequately designed for these “attractions”.

Retail incentives are more productive for the economy when connected to achieving outcomes, such as, stimulating investment in redevelopment neighborhoods or as part of catalyst projects that promote compact mixed-use development. Will a new super retailer or retail center add to the costs of government services? Will it expand public infrastructure? Will it capture regional market share in a manner that will adversely impact other neighborhoods or surrounding communities in the region? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, or even maybe, then public investment in incentives can be better directed.

In March 2004 The UIC Center for Urban Economics released an interesting report that is instructive for communities considering any incentive for big box retail: The Economic Impact of Wal-Mart: An assessment of the Wal-Mart store proposed for Chicago’s West Side.

Check out these related Competitive Communities entries: Retail Recipe, Will the real Santa Fe please Stand Up, Leveling the Playing Field, and Do City Income Sources affect Growth Policies.

Connecting Economic, Social and Physical Planning thru Dialogue

2004-05-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

Divide and conquer. For too long communities have drifted to disconnected solutions to connected problems. It’s all about jobs! We must fix our failing education system! How will we deal with the growing number of homeless? Our expanding and aging infrastructure cannot be maintained with our current tax structure. How do we catch and keep the wave of prosperity captured by those lucky communities? The list goes on and on of single important issues. Specialized consultants are sought, which work with a few like-minded groups, to devise specific strategies to steer us toward a narrow menu of disconnected solutions.

Competitive communities get it! Connecting diverse issues and strategies leads to innovation, sharing resources, minimizing duplication and greater consensus for solutions. New strategies for competitive communities are more complex and involve more people. The right process is inclusive, bringing the public together to learn and contribute to shaping visions and tactics for the future. Effective dialogue leads to unique regional branding with appropriate combinations of innovation, brainpower and quality place. Strategies connect economic, social and physical planning to implement shared vision. Results of effective dialogue are more opportunities for a greater portion of the population.

A Northwest North Carolina region of eight counties is learning the benefits of an inclusive process and effective dialogue. Over 2,000 people contributed to a ten month Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) led by Angelou Economics. This public driven process developed cooperative roles for each county in a shared vision for the future that will focus on the regions unique tradition of design. Enthusiasm for the CEDS is evident by a turnout of 900 from across the region for the plan role out event. Learn more from this article, Growing Forward, from the Spring 2004 issue of Economic Development America. The following is an excerpt from the article:

“The lessons learned in Northwest North Carolina have strong relevance to other communities. The lessons on competition, regionalism, and community investment are helpful to any community looking for a new direction in economic development:

· Form close relationships and pool resources with neighboring communities. A regional approach to economic development helps communities succeed and offers residents a wider range of opportunities.
· Make sure economic development activities and local policy cater to entrepreneurial businesses. Entrepreneurs and small businesses will drive future economic growth.
· Strengthen K-12 education, downtowns, and support for local businesses. These investments increase a region’s appeal to new businesses and talented workers. Now more than ever, it is critical to invest in the core of the community.
· Empower local residents and businesses to participate in economic development. They are a great source of new ideas and extend the reach of an economic development organization.
· A region’s ability to attract knowledgeable and talented people is equally as important as the ability to recruit new companies.
· Successful regions will take aggressive steps to reduce social disparity. As disparity decreases, the potential of attracting new investment increases.
· The ability and freedom to innovate differentiates the U.S. from every other country. A region’s economic development campaign must embrace and cultivate innovation.”

If you would like to know more you can download presentations about the plan and process at the NorthwestNC web site. Related entries to Competitive Communities include: How will your Community Grow?, Building Innovation Communities - Are you counting your Entrepreneurs? And The Changing Face of Place.

How will the Community Grow? The CHOICE is Yours!

2004-05-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

Strategies for growing competitive communities require an understanding of growth trends and an assessment of growth impacts on economic, social and environmental health. The Urban Land Institute (ULI), the South Carolina Real Estate Center (SCREC), and the South Carolina Quality Growth Initiative’s Statewide Committee issued a 2003 report: Growing by Choice or Chance, State Strategies for Quality Growth in South Carolina.

Among the statewide trends explored are: Growth and development projections to 2025; demographic trends; housing trends; hotel trends; shopping center trends; office/ industrial trends; infrastructure needs; urbanizing land use trends; and environmental trends. By looking at anticipated population growth and anticipated settlement patterns certain projections can be rationalized about needs for the future. Based on the number of new residents there are several square foot rules of thumb can be applied:

·One new housing unit for every 1.5 new residents
·20 to 30 square feet of retail per person
·15 to 20 square feet of office space per person
·60 to 80 square feet of industrial and warehouse space per person
·One hotel room per 40 to 70 residents

Assembling such square foot data for your community will narrow the range of these growth measures. Utilizing such projections is a means for determining public cost to support growth and for making land use decisions that affect future generations for the next 100 years. The report is also instructive in comparing the state to national trends. Some interesting national trends for comparing your community include:

·Growth is fastest in suburban counties, followed by urban with least growth in rural counties.
·19% of the nations children live in poverty
·The median household income in 1999 was $41,944
·Approximately 63% of housing is single family
·Manufactured housing is 7.6% of all housing
·15% of households have critical housing needs based on affordability
·65% of all households can afford median priced new housing
·6-10% of Americans own second homes
·The national average is 105 hotel rooms per facility
·The average hotel rooms per capita is .014
·The average shopping center size is 124,000 square feet
·Shopping Centers capture 50% of all retail sales
·7% of the nation’s retail malls are greyfield sites and another 12% are anticipated to fall into this category

The following is an excerpt from the summary of recommendations that includes 10 guiding principles:

“The Statewide Committee believes that growth should be accommodated in ways that are economically sound, environmentally responsible, and supportive of community livability. A quality growth strategy for South Carolina should seek to remedy many of the problems caused by growth that is haphazard and inefficient. These problems include increased traffic congestion, lack of affordable housing, a jobs/housing imbalance, loss of prime farmland and natural resource areas, and shortfalls of public funds to provide needed capital improvements and public services.

Principle 1: Preserve and enhance South Carolina’s quality of life.
Principle 2: Encourage comprehensive land use planning.
Principle 3: Enhance and revitalize existing communities.
Principle 4: Develop mixed-use communities.
Principle 5: Coordinate transportation investments with land use decisions.
Principle 6: Preserve open space, natural resources, and the environment.
Principle 7: Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost-effective.
Principle 8: Respect private property rights.
Principle 9: Foster governmental collaboration and coordination.
Principle 10: Encourage education and community participation.

A high quality of life and economic vitality do not come about by accident: they require a clear vision and effective planning.”

The report also provides a good list of the benefits of planning for quality growth. Embracing comprehensive planning as a strategy for the future is a challenge. This report places great responsibility on the state to guide these efforts. The dialogue required to shape competitive communities requires greater involvement of citizens in shaping plans and accepting responsibility for implementation. In several previous entries - Connecting the Dots, Growing in for the Future and Politics of Place - we have described the value of community involvement and placing responsibility for implementation of specific area comprehensive plans in the hands of a non-profit development corporation.

Variable Density Key to Great Neighborhoods

2004-05-15T09:46:00.000-07:00

Quality Place is increasing in importance as a strategy for competitive communities. We will continue to pass along good information about what makes a quality place and how to build on uniqueness. One of the issues for quality place is density. Finding the right balance of higher density and low-density development to achieve community goals and benefits requires good design. Density done well requires “strong public involvement, detailed attention to the pedestrian environment and uncompromising dedication to superior design”.

Poorly designed higher density (average of 8 dwelling units per acre and higher) will exacerbate problems such as congestion and crime. Where higher density is not properly planned communities will reject the benefits in favor of continuing the high cost/ negative benefit of land consuming low-density (average of 3 dwelling units per acre) growth.

Sustainable Neighborhoods are important components of the “Quality Place” element of our competitive community model. Effective placement of compact multi-use development is a strategy that can enhance existing and new neighborhoods with higher density. Creating Great Neighborhoods: Density in Your Community is a September 2003 publication, produced by the Local Government Commission in cooperation with the U.S. EPA, that provides examples and principles to guide communities searching for strategies to make more effective use of their resources. The following is an excerpt:

“More and more people understand that to achieve their community goals and create a vibrant place to live, the community needs different types of development – different types of density. It cannot thrive over the long-term with only one development choice.

To achieve this balance, many communities are concentrating development in key locations, offering residents the opportunity to live in different types of neighborhoods, walk, drive or ride transit as they choose and enjoy great places to live. By balancing density in the community, these goals can be met.”

Community Benefits to density described in this study include:

·Creating walkable neighborhoods
·Supporting housing choice and affordability
·Expanding transportation choices
·Supporting community fiscal health
·Improving security
·Protecting the environment

Among the many interesting facts in this report are:

“Research suggests that densities of seven units per acre or higher are needed to support a small corner store; a small supermarket requires 18 units per acre.

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) found that infrastructure costs per housing unit drop dramatically as density increases. The combined cost of utilities, schools, and streets falls from $90,000 for one dwelling sited on four acres to just over $10,000 per unit for developments of 30 units per acre. (OTA-ETI-643, 1995; ULI, Wieman, 1996)”

This study explores nine case studies (from Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, Texas, Minnesota and Virginia) in determining that density can contribute to a community’s economic, social and environmental health by following design principles:

·“Increase densities in appropriate locations,
·Connect people and places through a complete street network that invites walking and bicycling and provides convenient access to bus or rail,
·Mix uses to create a quality of life where people may chose to live near their work, walk to the local store, or bike to the library with their kids,
·Place parking in alternative locations to support density and create inviting places to walk, and
·Create great places for people.”

The chapter on each of the design principles also includes a list of questions that can be of value for communities exploring the benefits of more compact development. Increasing the density of existing, older, low-density neighborhoods or regions is a strategy to stimulate the economy and land values of communities that are now struggling with effects of abandonment and transition. Where to place? and how to design? higher density mixed use areas are key questions that must be answered and supported by the surrounding community. Competitive Communities are answering these questions with comprehensive plans of specific areas that are managed by local non-profit development.

Understanding Growth: The Good, the Bad and Change

2004-04-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

What is the role of state government in the competitiveness of communities and regions? Do state policies support connected strategies for innovation built on brainpower and quality place? Has your state recognized the link between patterns of physical growth and prosperity? Understanding impacts of growth trends on the economic and fiscal health of both states and communities is an evolving body of work. Much of this research and analysis points to the need for an “extreme makeover” or at least new priorities for a new direction. Rapidly expanding public infrastructure is outpacing public resources in models of growth that subsidize abandonment.

The Brookings Institute continues to support research that explains the impacts of policies on growth. A March 10, 2004 presentation by the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Growth in the Heartland: The Implications for Fiscal and Economic Health , looks at growth trends in Missouri and suggest goals and strategies for the future. Included is comparative data on counties and metro areas that are instructive measures applicable to other states and competitive communities. The presentation addresses the following questions:

·“What are the growth and development trends in the state…?
·What are the consequences of these growth trends?
·Why are some of these trends occurring?
·What are strategies that … states can pursue to help communities grow in high quality ways?”

The following are excerpts from presentation slides:

“Emerging academic evidence shows that:

·The cities and metro areas with highly skilled workers also have high population and income growth
·The cities that provide high density learning environments will excel in creativity and innovation
·The cities and metro areas that have high proportions of skilled, educated workers are able to reinvent themselves and adapt to changing economic needs

Current State Policies in Missouri Facilitate Decentralization:

·Fragmented Governance
·Heavy Local Reliance on the Sales Tax
·History of Road Building
·Weak Land-use Planning

States can become more fiscally and economically healthy by enacting reforms in the following areas:

·Infrastructure – “Coordinate transportation and infrastructure investments to build strong communities and maximize scarce dollars”
·Preservation and Land Use – “Protect the integrity of signature rural spaces and preserve different types of communities by supporting better local planning”
·Reinvestment – “Make reinvestment in older, established communities a top priority”
·Regional Governance – “Promote regional cohesion and collaboration among localities”
·Taxation – “Reform tax and fiscal structures to promote more efficient growth”

Related competitive communities entries include: Do City income sources affect growth policies? , Connecting the Dots and The Why and How-to of Regionalism.

Knowledge Centers for Competitive Communities

2004-04-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

Competitive Communities are discovering effective strategies to connect brainpower, innovation and quality place. Nothing is off limits in questioning conventional wisdom about how we have always done things. Is the educational environment for our children contributing to building better communities? Do school policies coordinate or conflict with community goals and strategies? Can communities play a greater role in shaping and implementing academic missions? Can schools be designed to encourage community use and improve public services efficiency? How do we more specifically define the role of schools in building Competitive Communities? Answering these questions requires open inclusive dialogue and leadership committed to positioning community and region to participate in a better future.

New Schools Better Neighborhoods is an organization promoting change in the role of schools in communities. Schools As Centers Of Communities: KnowledgeWorks Foundation Concept Paper is an article in the Spring 2004 newsletter of NSBN. The following are excerpts from the article that encourage building consensus around a five point agenda. Implementing this recommendation moves communities toward our competitive model on the quality place scales.

"Point 1: The Role of Community in a New Era of Accountability. In this new era of accountability, community support is essential to improving and sustaining public education... that accountability goes both ways; just as communities have a responsibility to sustain and improve the education of their children, schools must also be open and accountable to the community... community-wide support for public education must be rooted in a deep and abiding commitment to equity.

Point 2: Building Community-School Partnerships. Communities can play a powerful role in supporting the academic mission of public education to prepare all of our children to lead productive lives in a democratic society...development of community/school partnerships that can provide an array of services and after-school opportunities to support the academic mission of the school. Community/school partnerships provide a framework for increased family involvement and link schools to a diverse network of organizations and cultural institutions (museums, the arts, community-based organizations, youth development groups etc.) that have a capacity to sustain and support public education. The creation of community-school partnerships is also an opportunity to reach out to new and important constituencies from mayors to senior citizens to support public education.

Point 3: Building a New Type of School Facility. In this era of life-long learning new schools should be built as "community learning centers," facilities that are open later and longer, for more people. Creating such schools, by definition, requires an entirely new way of doing business in the planning, design and funding of multi-purpose facilities that serve the entire community. Every effort should be made to pool resources and to create new joint governing structures and ways of managing that foster the development of community-wide partnerships.

The planning and design of new schools is also a unique opportunity to rethink the teaching and learning process and encourage development of smaller learning environments. Community values should shape teaching and learning, and small learning environments foster parent involvement and use community partnerships for learning. Research demonstrates clearly that children are safer, and have higher achievement and graduation rates in smaller learning environments.

Point 4: Smart Growth, Sustainability and Community Renewal. The planning and design of new school facilities is an important opportunity to anchor communities and to support community renewal. School boards need to be supported in the development of safe, healthy, and energy-efficient facilities and be encouraged to apply the principles of smart growth and sustainability in the planning and design of new facilities. Historic schools need to be seen as generational links to the past and modern examples of community-centered schooling.

Point 5: Building the Capacity to Develop Schools as Centers of Community. Public policy must fundamentally -- if not radically -- change to accommodate this new vision of public education and the role of the community. The core of the issue is that current practices, policies and governing structures that define public education's relationship to the broader community are inadequate to meet the demands of 21st Century education.

At a time when state and local government are facing severe budget constraints, they are also seeking solutions and new ways of operating. There is an urgent need to develop creative solutions and incentives that encourage increased collaboration between schools, local government agencies, civic and community based organizations. Just as teachers must learn new skills and schools need to be modernize, we need to develop new policies and governing structures that allow us to spend public tax dollars in a collaborative way."

Also check out an October 2002 report by Renata Simril written for NSBN, A New Strategy for Building Better Schools

Related entries in Competitive Communities include: Learning the Hard Way , Schooling Growth , Building Innovation Communities- Are you counting your Entrepreneurs? , Exploring Connections between Brainpower and Quality Place , and What it takes to build a Competitive Community

The Why and How-to of Regionalism

2004-03-29T19:35:00.000-08:00

Competitive Communities are embracing regional strategies. It is easy to agree that there is benefit to a region working together. Understanding how regionalism should work and the obstacles that exist to implementing an effective regional strategy is more complicated. Concentrated poverty is perhaps the biggest among a long list of obstacles. Incentives that encourage these pockets of community disinvestments work against regional cooperation including: tax policies, infrastructure investment strategies and fragmented local governments. Current regional efforts encourage competing local governments to waste shrinking public resources. Finding ways to efficiently develop thoughtful plans for regions operating in this distrustful working environment is no small challenge.

Tax reform, land use reform and metropolitan governance reform are categories of recommendations from Myron Orfield in a 2003 Ameregis book summary publication, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality . This research utilizes cluster analysis and GIS mapping of the 25 largest metropolitan areas to group suburban areas by several fiscal characteristics. Two significant factors are "needs" as defined by school populations and "resources" measured by tax capacity. The analysis identified six types of suburban communities, three of which are considered at risk:

·At risk, segregated (high poverty, lowest tax capacity, slowest or negative growth, aging physical conditions, higher densities and highest percentage of minorities in schools)
·At risk, older (low tax capacity, slow or no growth, higher density, aging physical conditions and low poverty)
·At risk, low density (low tax capacity, high poverty and increasing growth - transitional from rural or farmland to suburban; low resources stretched by increasing infrastructure demands)
·Bedroom developing (rapidly growing affluent white population with average or below average tax capacity resources - moderately at risk)
·Affluent job centers and Very affluent job centers (affluent residents, more than 2 to 5 times the average tax base, low poverty and more office space per household than central city with intense traffic congestion and little open space)

More and more communities are attempting to improve the efficiency of their economic development efforts by organizing regional strategies. One of the keys to successful regional initiatives is to understand how regions work by identifying inefficiencies and inequities. Agreeing on the problems is the first step in building consensus for solutions. The following are several instructive statements from the summary document text that support the case for regional change:

"Regions where population density in the urbanized areas declined the most tend to show the greatest degrees of racial segregation and tax-base inequality."

"A strong, accountable regional governing body is an essential part of a comprehensive regional reform plan...Whether an MPO with expanded authority or some other regional body."

At-Risk Developed Suburbs
"The residential resources of at-risk developed suburbs are often deteriorating or threatened by rapid change on their borders. A strong, well-implemented housing plan that requires newer suburbs to take more responsibility for affordable housing is the only way to avoid this downward transition. Such a plan takes pressure off the older suburbs and prevents the concentration of poverty and decline in these places. Once older declining suburbs understand that they already have more than their fair share of affordable housing, they can use a good regional housing plan as a powerful defensive strategy to maintain their communities' stability."

The Developing Suburbs
"While bedroom-developing communities are places of comparatively low poverty and diversity, their children- per-household ratio is very high. Throughout the country, at-risk low-density suburbs spend less per pupil than districts in other types of metropolitan communities...In chasing after development to make up for the lack of a local tax base, developing communities tend to neglect the provision of infrastructure that will eventually be needed but will be more costly to provide retroactively once development is in place...Sprawl is another problem of particular concern to residents of bedroom-developing suburbs. Most of the local initiatives to curb growth have been in these places. But a single community can have little effect on the growth of a region. Acting alone, a community is not only unlikely to solve its own growth-related problems but is likely to impose higher costs on the region when it tries."

Affluent Job Centers
"Despite their low poverty rates and high fiscal capacities, affluent job centers are not immune from problems caused by the prevailing pattern of regional development. Because they are intense centers of job growth, these communities are often troubled by higher rates of congestion than other suburban areas, particularly in the country's fast-growth regions. Open space is harder to preserve in these communities, because land becomes very valuable. In the most extreme cases, suburban "edge cities" can become as densely urban and congested as city business districts."

"A new metropolitics must understand the diversity of U.S. suburbs and build a broad bipartisan movement for greater regional cooperation. If metropolitics does not succeed, our metropolitan regions will continue to become more unequal, and more energy will be spent growing against ourselves."

Also check out the web site for Myron Orfield's research companies, Metropolitan Area Research Corporation and Ameregis. You can order Orfield books American Metropolitics or Metropolitics from the Brookings Institute.

Do City Income Sources affect Growth Policies? and Smart Money Invests in "Competitive Communities" are related entries on Competitive Communities.

Learning the Hard Way

2004-03-24T04:59:00.000-08:00

An unknown sage is credited with this wisdom, “experience is what you get when you get what you don’t want.” Experience can also be costly. Blindly following a “nothing is to good for our children” philosophy has led Michigan to a future that is likely to achieve just the opposite. After passing a state law that tied school operating funds to school population a competition for students began. Five hundred new schools were built and 278 older schools were closed. These schools were built outside existing communities to accommodate a 4.5% growth in student enrollment that will shrink 1.5% in the next 30 years. Now that property taxes are rising and school related debt has increased since 1994 from $4 billion to $12 billion, questions are being asked. What have we done? School districts are building lavish new schools with marketing campaigns to attract new students and their families to abandon their established communities in favor of a low-density pseudo rural lifestyle. Michigan is now consuming land eight times faster than it is growing population. Although Michigan is growing slowly it is one of the fastest sprawling states. School location decisions seem to be playing a significant role in this expensive growth trend. To learn from the mistakes of others check out this report in the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service prepared by Mac McClelland and Keith Schneider for the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and the Michigan Land Use Institute, Hard Lessons: The real cost of Michigan’s school construction boom.

Some of the lessons learned and recommendations include:

·“In every case we studied, building a new school cost more than renovating an older one.

·The broader the public’s involvement in school construction decisions, the more effectively a school board develops long-term, less costly solutions.

·Establish renovating existing schools as the top priority; constructing new schools in existing neighborhoods the next priority; and constructing new schools in farm fields the last resort. Schools must conserve land and reduce costs through more efficient site design, and sharing playing fields, athletic stadiums, and recreational facilities among different schools and the community.

·Persuade districts to submit long-term construction and improvement plans to local governments for review and comment. School boards and local government should ensure that such plans are incorporated into community master plans.

·Encourage districts to improve their system of assessing the condition and capacity of all school facilities by avoiding “free” feasibility studies from architects and construction managers and instead paying for independent assessments that provide truly accurate information about the costs of both renovation and new construction. These assessments must include a comprehensive comparison of the costs of building a new school versus renovating an existing one, including all short and long-range land, infrastructure, staffing, and transportation expenses.

·Amend the Michigan School Bond Loan Program to strongly encourage schools to stay in existing neighborhoods.

·Provide additional financial incentives to upgrade school buildings to urban school districts to level the playing field with their suburban neighbors.”

We recently provided master planning services to the Webster Parish School Board that led to a successful tax election to invest in Minden, Louisiana school improvements. The school board and the community worked together through the planning process to formulate and evaluate plans to invest for the future. The idea of a new large edge school was considered and consolidation concepts were compared to reinvesting in existing campuses. The community saw the benefits and cost advantages of reinvesting. The decision of this historic small town positions it as a “Competitive Community”. Improving existing schools and rebuilding on existing sites sets the stage for redeveloping neighborhoods and building the future on qualities that can increase the uniqueness value of this community.

Also check out the 3.17.04 Competitive Communities entry, Schooling Growth and a 1.4.04 entry, Exploring Connections between Brainpower and Quality Place

Smart Money invests in “Competitive Communities”

2004-03-21T06:58:00.000-08:00

How does your community grow? Is it the latest trend development? Or is it planned? Is it low density on the edge? Or is it compact and maybe a redevelopment area? How do you know which form of growth is best? Do growth patterns affect economic development? Is there some means of comparing costs and benefits of planned verses low-density trend development? These are important questions for competitive communities.

Shrinking public resources, increasing public infrastructure needs and pressure to improve economic performance are overwhelming the best-intended community leaders. It makes since that planned compact forms of development require less infrastructure and public services than unplanned low-density trend development. It is less obvious that thoughtfully planned communities enhance regional economic performance. Measuring the impacts and costs of growth help identify problems created by current policies. Savings and earnings from better-planned growth will provide competitive communities an edge in future.

To add to the research the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy released a March 2004 discussion paper by Mark Muro and Robert Puentes, Investing in a Better Future: A review of the Fiscal and Competitive Advantages of Smarter Growth Development Patterns. The following are summary points and quotes from the paper:

·“The cost of providing public infrastructure and delivering services can be reduced through thoughtful design and planning. Several studies suggest that rational use of more compact development patterns from 2000 to 2025 promise the following sorts of savings for governments nationwide: 11.8 percent, or $110 billion, from 25-year road building costs; 6 percent, or $12.6 billion, from 25-year water and sewer costs; and 3.7 percent, or $4 billion, for annual operations and service delivery. School-construction savings are somewhat less.

·Regional economic performance is enhanced when areas are developed with community benefits and the promotion of vital urban centers in mind. Studies show that productivity and overall economic performance may be improved to the extent compact, mixed-use development fosters dense labor markets, vibrant urban centers, efficient transportation systems, and a high “quality-of-place." Productivity increases with county employment density. Communities that practice growth management realize improved personal income shares over time.

·Suburbs also benefit from investment in healthy urban cores. Finally, studies suggest that to the extent these smarter development patterns foster equity in regions by improving center-city incomes and vitality, they will also enhance the economic well being of the suburbs as well as the city. City income growth has been shown to increase suburban income, house prices, and population. Reduced city poverty rates have also been associated with metropolitan income growth.”

“…This paper makes the case that during times of tight budgets, more efficient and beneficial growth strategies make more sense than ever. As these strategies become more widespread, the challenge for the research community will be to move beyond the obvious fiscal savings and continue to quantify the profound effects on economic competitiveness, equity, and quality of life available through better planning and community design. Ultimately, these issues lie at the crux of what better development is really all about.”

“…Smart growth appears to offer governments the possibility of quantifiable fiscal savings over time through the reduction of capital-facility and service-delivery costs. It also promises regional economic and productivity gains. Finally, it likely will enhance both urban and suburban income levels.”

For additional resources check out the 11/24/02 Competitive Communities entry, Establishing Policies for Quality Place.

Schooling Growth

2004-03-17T17:27:00.000-08:00

Brainpower is one of three essential elements for Competitive Communities. To state the obvious, pre-K through 12 education plays a significant role in building community brainpower. Less obvious and less understood is the role pre-K to 12 education plays in the success of quality place and innovation strategies.

Families choose where to live, in part, based on school attendance zones. It is also predictable that low performing schools will have greater numbers of students living in poverty. These phenomena contribute to neighborhood deterioration and accelerate low-density sprawl development. Little attention is usually paid to the impact of school board decisions on community growth and economic development. Schools have mirrored trends in retail growth by abandoning poverty, chasing outward migrating wealth and consolidating to gain economies of scale.

On the surface, it seems to make since to build new schools where population is growing and close schools in inner areas that are victims of abandonment and disinvestments. However, this tactic is evidence of disconnected planning and lack of effective community growth management. Continuing this trend contributes to an unaffordable public infrastructure and hinders community efforts to gain a competitive position in the knowledge economy. Competitive Communities are recognizing the importance of comprehensive planning that combines strategies for brainpower, quality place and innovation. The results will better connect schools to communities. Concepts for “Community schools” and more completely understanding the economics of small schools (e.g., higher capital costs per student and lower cost per high school graduate) are among trends that begin to bridge gaps between education goals and community goals. Competitive Communities are recognizing that reinvestment in existing school sites can, when part of comprehensive plans, be part of redeveloping neighborhoods at greater public benefit than current “sprawl schools”.

The March 2004 issue of Governing cover story, “Edge-ucation: What compels communities to build schools in the middle of nowhere?” by Bob Gurwitt, reports on the growing discussion of the important role of schools in managing community growth. Following are several quotes from the article:

“…School districts often make the argument that, given their financial pressures, they can offer the full range of educational opportunities to students only if they can build large schools on large parcels in order to reap the benefits of economies of scale. This is one of the reasons it’s not unusual to find high schools and even middle schools — such as the one containing 4,000 7th- and 8th-graders that recently opened in Cicero, Illinois — that are larger than many colleges.

…Just as schools going up on the periphery of a community can promote sprawl, so a decision to build or renovate in the central city can generate revitalization.

…School building decisions have an impact that stretches far beyond the education of a community’s students. Which is why those concerned about stemming school sprawl are beginning to focus on one key consideration: Not HOW decisions get made, but WHO makes them. They’re questioning the freedom that school boards and administrators have had to weigh their own criteria separately from the wishes of other public bodies.”

…A bill in this year’s (South Carolina) legislative session by…Republican Ben Hagood…would require contiguous municipalities, local transportation authorities and school districts to coordinate their land-use planning. “Growth is happening, and I’m not anti-growth,” says Hagood. “But I’m for better planning of the growth. The idea is to plan where you build and build where you plan.”

…Elsewhere, getting school districts to play ball with other public agencies is likely to be difficult. The attitude of many state school board associations is pretty well summed up by Ed Dunlap, who runs the North Carolina School Board Association. “Our position is very clear,” he says. “It is the responsibility of the local board of education to make decisions about where schools are sited. Period.”

Rating Growth with a Smart Project Scorecard

2004-03-11T19:57:00.000-08:00

Understanding impacts of growth patterns is no small challenge. Market forces and public policies have evolved into an addictive, land consuming belief in a lifestyle that requires unsustainable levels of public investment. Competitive Communities are investigating actual costs of community growth patterns and reevaluating policies that, over time, contributed to many undesirable outcomes. The methodology starts with documenting trends that have impacted community long-term health – economically, environmentally and socially. In order to effectively change policy the problems must be understood. It is difficult to achieve consensus on solutions when there is no agreement on problems that new rules will solve. Communities are in need of better tools to manage growth in a more cost efficient manner. Increased taxes and public use fees are trends accompanied by reduced levels of public services. Do these trends parallel community growth patterns? You bet! If you need more proof its time to organize your community and invest in a growth trends impact analysis.

One challenge of your perception is a look at retail trade in your community. Do you think this sector has added jobs and business establishments? Check out FedStats. Click on your state and then enter your city. Click on the link to HUD’s state of the cities data system and check out retail trade. If your community is not managing growth, chances are, you will see a decline between 1990 and 2000 in the number of both jobs and business establishments. It is also likely that you will find that average wages in this category have also gone backwards. Does the lack of community growth policies contribute to the decline? Unmanaged growth is like trying to run your communities’ largest company without a business plan.

Organizing non-profit, public purpose, groups as implementers responsible for specific area comprehensive plans keep focus on accountability and public return on investment. These plans provide advocacy tools, for attracting investment and managing impacts of development or redevelopment projects, to improve long-term community health. It is often difficult for communities experiencing rapid outward growth and accelerating inner community decline to wait for plans to address issues from what Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institute refers to as “hyper sprawl”. To provide an interim means for evaluating projects until appropriate plans can be developed the Congress for New Urbanism and the EPA have published a “Smart Scorecard for Development Projects” (SPS). This checklist approach uses “Smart Growth” objectives to assist community leaders interested in better understanding the positive and negative outcomes of projects. Smart Growth objectives listed in this publication include:

· To help minimize the impacts of new development (public infrastructure costs, congestion, air pollution, loss of agriculture land, etc.);
· To provide greater accessibility and choices in how we move about from home, work, shopping and leisure activities;
· To stabilize and improve the long-term financial performance for commercial and homeowners;
· To maximize the return from public investments in existing and new roads, schools, utilities, transit systems, bridges, waterways, etc;
· To protect natural habitat and watersheds for the future; and
· To foster a greater sense of connection, responsibility and continuity for citizens with their communities.

The SPS includes the following ten checklist categories:

1. Proximity to existing / future development and infrastructure;
2. Mix and balance of uses;
3. Site optimization and compactness;
4. Accessibility and mobility choices;
5. Community context and site design;
6. Fined-grained block, pedestrian and park network;
7. Environmental quality;
8. Diversity;
9. Re-use and redevelopment options;
10. Process collaboration and predictability of decisions

Although this scorecard is useful it is not an adequate substitute for comprehensive planning that includes economic, physical and social strategies.

Building Innovation Communities – Are You Counting Your Entrepreneurs?

2004-03-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

Competitive Communities build on three strategic elements: brainpower, quality place and innovation. When each supports the other a community economy is sustainable. A quality place is the means to attract smart people. Brainpower is a source of ideas and potential for the future. These two elements are the foundation of the trilogy. Innovation capitalizes on brainpower and grows in the proper physical environment / quality place. Innovation is the realm of the entrepreneur.

Does your region have an entrepreneurial culture? Research institutions, quality K-12 education and a high amenity environment are important. However, to achieve innovation benefits of entrepreneurs require thoughtful planning and managing of relationships between brainpower, quality place and innovation. The key is open effective dialogue.

The National Commission on Entrepreneurship (NCOE) goal is to provide a road map for more regions across the country to become “hotbeds of entrepreneurial activity.” To better understand why some communities have succeeded NCOE conducted 18 focus groups across the U.S. with over 250 entrepreneurs. The results of this dialogue were published in a July 2000 report, “Building Companies, Building Communities: Entrepreneurs in the New Economy”. This work provides some basic insights into important connections between the three strategic elements of Competitive Communities. Here are a few excerpts from the report:

“When you visit an entrepreneurial hotbed in the U.S., it is clear that “something is in the air.” But what is that something? Entrepreneurial companies are not equally distributed around the country: they tend to cluster in certain regions or cities. The causes of this phenomenon cannot be tied solely to the personal attributes of entrepreneurs. Can it be that people in Silicon Valley and Austin are the only ones with good ideas? Not likely. Some deeper processes are at work. The NCOE … analyzed the factors that entrepreneurial regions have in common … what policies are needed to help create more entrepreneurs and to ensure that more entrepreneurs succeed.

One or two entrepreneurs can shine in any community, but one or two entrepreneurs do not make an entrepreneurial community. To have a strong entrepreneurial community, lots of threads must be woven together: public policy that supports entrepreneurship, people, money, technology, customers, transportation, a supportive environment, and services, to name just a few. As more threads are woven together, the community’s strength and resource base grows.

… The secret of an entrepreneurial community is how regional development strategies and networks work together. While there are many strong entrepreneurial regions in this country, entrepreneurs are not sprinkled evenly across the landscape. Our focus group participants clearly understood that their regions grew according to a pattern. The presence of a university or anchor company served as a spark, and, as the region grew, more entrepreneurs—as well as entrepreneur support systems—emerged and prospered. The biggest challenge today is to find ways to give more regions the option to pursue this path to development.”

The Changing Face of Place

2004-02-29T06:56:00.000-08:00

Understanding and defining knowledge worker lifestyles is an important economic development tactic for the future. Benefits from this segment of the economy are too attractive to ignore. Higher income per capita and increased levels of entrepreneurial activity are among benchmarks used to rank these innovation economies. If you don’t have a strategy for your region, get one. Many communities continue to focus shrinking resources on business recruitment, while watching real per capita income and entrepreneurial activity trend down and the quality of place / uniqueness value follow. These traits are characteristic of a “Consolidation Model” on our Quality Place Scales. Consolidation communities see a proliferation of big boxes, logistics and large-scale manufacturing.

Redirecting public investments from recruiting business to recruiting and retaining creative people is often a hard sell to decision makers. Changing moves communities to a “Competitive Model” on our scales. These places are knowledge based, small scale and entrepreneurial. Place strategies are becoming integral parts of economic development plans for regions building a knowledge economy.

The following is from a 60-page plan released last week, “The Essential New York Initiative – Transforming Central Upstate to a Knowledge-Based Economy”,by the Metropolitan Development Association with consultants Richard Florida and the Battelle Memorial Institute:

“Quality of Place is Increasingly Important - To attract and retain creative people, stimulate innovation and generate regional economic growth, a region must maintain substantial but balanced performance across a wide range of factors. Technology, business attraction and talent are major components of any economic development plan, but they are not enough. A holistic plan must also consider the factors that impact talent attraction. As discussed, well-educated, creative workers make location decisions based on factors beyond employment opportunity. A region’s quality of place, its reputation for tolerance and its cultural diversity play important roles in attracting and retaining members of the creative class.

These talented individuals consider a wide-range of lifestyle amenities in their location decisions. Big-ticket attractions such as stadiums do not appear to be major factors in attracting talented people and high-tech industries. Features such as a vibrant street life, easily accessible outdoor recreation and a cutting-edge music scene appear to be much more compelling in luring the nation’s most creative and educated workers.”

Connecting the Dots

2004-02-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

Our Central Business Districts and Main Streets historically symbolize unique characteristics of our communities. As outward growth has accelerated in the past few decades, strategies to maintain character and economic viability of our downtowns generally focus within the specific boundaries of these districts. The unique character has often eroded in the wake of demolitions and surface parking. Retail storefronts have diminished as wealth and retail consolidation continue to migrate farther from the unique core that distinguishes our community from other communities. Strategies have included the malling of downtown and giving in to the notion of single use areas such as downtown office or warehouse housing districts.

Neighborhoods around downtowns have largely been overlooked as part of these revitalization strategies. Downtowns worked because they were conveniently diverse, walkable and connected to adjacent neighborhoods. Downtowns are regional centers, however, success of a diverse day-to-day retail environment is equally dependent on servicing adjacent neighborhoods. As inner neighborhoods decreased in wealth and population so has the viability of downtown retail.

Times are changing. The search for alternatives to commuter lifestyles and unmanageable infrastructure is leading to rediscovery of the benefits of mixed-use environments. Connecting inner neighborhoods to downtowns and encouraging mixed-use projects require new planning and implementing strategies. Specific Area Plans build community ownership in visions for manageable areas. Non-profit organizations, whose mission is a neighborhood or specific area, are good sources of leadership; follow thru and public accountability for directing and implementing these plans. Funding these smaller plans from both public and private sources also builds ownership, participation and accountability. Specific Area Plans provide priorities and direction for community wide plans and regional initiatives. Broad plans that support this tactic start by documenting community trends and identifying / organizing specific planning areas. This grassroots strategy is an effective means of addressing Quality Place Measures identified in our Competitive Communities Model - Uniqueness Value, Regeneration & Sustainability, Cluster Environment, Competitiveness Environment, R.O.I. Strategy, Development Scale, Infrastructure Efficiency, Congestion & Cutter Index, and Natural Environment.

Pennsylvania has recognized the importance of planning small areas that are guided by the public values of non-profit organizations. The new state community and economic development initiative, Elm Street Program, will provide planning grants of up to $25,000 with a local match of 10% or $2,500. The targets are inner neighborhoods and mixed-use areas that are pedestrian oriented. Additional state funding is available for implementation.

We recently completed a neighborhood plan for an inner neighborhood led by a non-profit, Gladstone Area Partnership. GAP funded the plan from donations and neighborhood garage sales. The organization is working to have the plan adopted as part of the city master plan and has begun implementation. The city has benefited by understanding the priorities of the neighborhood and is addressing some identified needs using existing budgets. Check out the Gladstone Neighborhood Improvement Plan.

Growing In for the Future

2004-02-14T18:31:00.000-08:00

Growing in is more challenging and rewarding than growing out. Inward growth is reinvesting in our communities. It is more cost efficient use of public resources and requires greater involvement of our citizenry in planning growth. Sound logical? It is! However, reality is that over time we have instituted growth policies and incentives that make growing out preferable. Changing these policies will occur as more communities discover how unaffordable outward growth has become in a competitive global economy. Strategies for growing in are more complex. Deciding where to start? And who will start? And how to sustain / leverage positive momentum often stifle best intentions. Positioning older neighborhoods to compete for broad market appeal against outward growth is an overwhelming idea. Attracting wealth into neighborhoods of poverty and charm is necessary but seems unlikely.

Success requires organizing groups to implement, preparing comprehensive plans of manageable areas and winning public support. Non-profit implementing groups representing neighborhood or community economic development interests can be effective at guiding both public and private investment. Comprehensive plans that combine both economic development and physical improvement tactics build value by providing a sustainable vision. Connecting several of these specific planning areas or districts begins to redefine the future of inner neighborhoods in our communities. Public support for these initiatives requires adoption of plans and directing public investments to support plan implementation.

San Diego is embracing this notion by a "City of Villages" vision for the future. Plans for five pilot areas were approved by the city council on February 10, 2004 to demonstrate how San Diego should grow over the next twenty years. The following is from a Union Tribune article:

Mayor Dick Murphy said the projects "will be role models for the rest of the city" in revitalizing older communities, providing affordable housing and reducing traffic congestion. The pilot villages combine housing and centers of employment and recreation with access to mass transit. They are meant to demonstrate how older urban neighborhoods could be redeveloped as alternatives to sprawl ? Selected villages are in Normal Heights, San Ysidro, southeastern San Diego, North Park and near San Diego State University.

Learn more about the pilot project.

Our current work includes comprehensive planning of connected inner city specific area plans in Shreveport for InterTech Science Park (800 acres) and Shreveport?s Historic Music Village (300 acres). Both plans were honored with the Louisiana APA Best Plan award in 2002 and 2003 respectively. Both of these plans combine economic development and physical planning that are resulting in implementation projects.

Retail Recipe

2004-02-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

Is there a workable blend of local business and national chain stores? The benefits of national chains, particularly big boxes, are short term and basically alter regional shopping patterns. Retail expenditures are shifted from local independents rather than attracting new dollars to regional economies. Shopping patterns trend from neighborhood to regional as an unmanaged big box culture captures regional market share.

Smaller communities in a region are first to experience negative effects. Given the importance of regional branding, robbing from neighboring communities does not foster regional cooperation. Over time the initial attractiveness of greater consumer options, increased jobs and property taxes prove to be short lived even for the communities where these chains are located. Are there methods of managing the negative impacts of chain stores on local economies?

Our competitive model for communities identifies quality place measures that are knowledge based, small scale and entrepreneurial. The New Rules Project has cataloged examples from a number of communities that are implementing retail development policies for better long-term community benefit. Two techniques for managing adverse impacts of retail development are establishing size standards and measuring long term economic impacts of proposed new development on regional/ local economies. As of this writing the New Rules Project has 32 examples of ordinances and policies from local, state, national and international governments.

Will the Real Santa Fe Please Stand Up?

2004-02-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

The retail sector of community generally has a large impact on the physical appearance of communities. One of our measures of quality place is uniqueness value. A good gauge of community uniqueness is the percentage of independent / small retail business and strategies to support the locally owned economy.

Unique characteristics of communities attract brainpower. Santa Fe is one of those places. The artist culture and the unique qualities of the old town attract a national following. It has also attracted an audience that threatens the value of this uniqueness - national retailers with their formula businesses occupying prototypical buildings surrounded by large surface parking lots.

The impact of independently owned businesses on the local economy is two times that of national chains. The dollar leakage and reduction of retail sector jobs that result from a growing percentage of retail chain stores is a concern that all communities should address.

In 1998 the Santa Fe locally owned retail economy provided 68% of all retail employment. In 2003 the rise of chain stores had reduced the impact of locally owned retailers to approximately 43% of retail sector employment. This is dramatically altering the uniqueness value of Santa Fe. The success of the uniqueness of Santa Fe seems to attract an invasion of national chain stores that are hiding local character in a sprawling sea of national retailer corporate branding. National averages during the same period show that locally owned retailers lost ground from 55% to 53% of local retail employment. From this one example it seems that the more special a place the more national chains are drawn to the location; and if uncontrolled will likely alter the very values that made the place important and unique.

During the same time frame (1998-2003) the number of locally owned / independent retail firms dropped from approximately 84% to 42% of the total number of retail businesses in Santa Fe. This runs counter to national trends that show that the number of independent firms has grown during that time frame from 48% to 74% of all retail firms.

To learn more about what Santa Fe is doing to alter the trends check out the Santa Fe Independent Business and Community Alliance where you can download The Santa Fe Independent Business Report by Angelou Economics. This concise report provides statistics and strategies that are instructive for competitive communities that understand the importance of uniqueness and its impact on an innovation economy.

Seeking Entrepreneurial Outcomes from Innovation

2004-02-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

Turning brainpower into business is one of the innovation challenges for Competitive Communities. Connecting the quality place context that brings entrepreneurs together will increase the level of innovation.

Entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. is on the rise. This is good news after 2 years of decline. In the recently released 2003 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) the U.S. ranked 7th in Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) and 5th in Firm Entrepreneurship Activity (FEA).

Interesting facts from the report:

· Approximately 300 million people around the globe were trying to launch businesses in 2003.
· 95% of existing firms tend to replicate activities and are not entrepreneurial
· New firms account for 2-15% of new jobs
· Informal investors fund 99.96% of start-ups. Fewer than 37 of every 100,000 receive venture capital funding. VC-backed firms in the U.S receive approximately 80% ($25.6 billion) of all venture money.
· People with post-secondary and graduate education are twice as likely to be involved in entrepreneurial firms. Those with the highest level of household income are six times more likely to own an entrepreneurial firm than households of the lowest income level.
· Being around entrepreneurial people is contagious. Those who know someone who started a business in the last 6 months are 2 to 3 times more likely to become entrepreneurial.

The report also offers these key recommendations:

· Provide a more positive personal context – increase education and training including increasing contact with existing entrepreneurs.
· Reduce the cost and complexity of registering a new business.
· Increase in-migration.
· Increase cultural support for entrepreneurial career options.
· Reduce economic activities managed by government.
· Create incentives to encourage more informal investment.

The fifth annual Global Entrepreneurship Monitor measures the entrepreneurial activity of 41 countries. You can read more about the study and download a draft of the report at the Kaufman Foundation web site.

Leveling the Playing Field

2004-01-31T09:09:00.000-08:00

Building the value of uniqueness is an important part of the strategy for communities preparing to participate in the knowledge economy. Corporate globalization / corporate colonization / corporate formula branding resulting in prototypical buildings are detrimental to community uniqueness. The primary value is to those fortunate communities where corporate headquarters are located. Their often-predatory brand on the rest of us tends to make our once unique communities trend toward a globalized consumption culture of sameness. Not an environment to nurture brainpower and innovation.

Local small business provides a backbone of uniqueness. Is your local entrepreneurial level diminishing as the community looks more and more like the latest trend in retail development? Why does the big box world need an incentive funded by struggling local small businesses? Believe it or not, that is what is happening. Small local retailers contribute more taxes and jobs per square foot with no subsidies and more obstacles than encouragement. As more and more small retailers close in the tidal wave of retail consolidation, public funds to subsidize big retail developments is more illogical than ever.

Wake up America! Austin certainly has. Realizing that their uniqueness played a large role in Austin’s success in the knowledge economy has led the community to a position of not subsidizing development for corporate retailers. “Help keep Austin Weird!” is now part of the city economic development strategy to support unique local business and their creative culture. Check out the war stories and research that started this movement and for fun this Keep Austin Weird song. This is a strategy to help level the playing field that has become far to one sided in favor of big corporations that don’t need or deserve public assistance to invade our communities.

So many community leaders just don’t or won’t understand economic realities of misplaced incentives that result in further erosion of shrinking city resources. It is certainly misplaced good intentions if not flawed judgement to think that shifting finite regional levels of household retail expenditures from local business to national corporate offices will result in a net gain for local economies. Stacey Mitchell presents several examples of this spreading dilemma in a December 2003 article, Does Wal Mart Really Need Our Tax Dollars? The incentives are often clouded in double speak as illustrated in this excerpt from Stacey’s article: “Rarely are tax dollars given to local retailers. For them, it’s sink or swim in a sea of giant, subsidized competitors. When asked how Scottsdale’s small businesses were to survive the arrival of Wal-Mart and Lowe’s -- slated to receive the second largest corporate subsidy in Arizona history -- city councilor Ned O’Hearn declared, "That’s urban dynamics. This is private enterprise. This is competition."”

Do City income sources affect Growth Policies?

2004-01-24T07:54:00.000-08:00

City Fiscal Structures and Land Development, a 2003 Brookings Institute paper by Michael A. Pagano, discusses the impacts of various income sources on city growth policies. Property tax, sales tax, income tax, service fees or combinations of dependency result in a growth focus on consumption, job creation or land values. Each focus has an impact on physical and fiscal outcomes for cities. Connecting income strategies and land development is an important revelation for communities that are struggling with growing infrastructure disrepair, expanding budgets and inadequate resources to address needs. Aligning income strategies and growth strategies can provide a better means of decision making, policy setting and priority setting. It also sets the stage for understanding who should receive incentives. For example: Enhancements that build higher value property taxes in the city are better than promoting suburban development that require larger investments in roads, schools and other public services. “That is to say, a corporate executive who works in the city and lives in the suburbs is less desirable than one who owns property in the city because the city’s direct fiscal impact is linked to heightened property values.” The paper looks at examples in Columbia, S.C., Oklahoma City, and Columbus Ohio.

Bruce Katz, Smart Growth Saves Money, presents additional support for the Pagano paper in an April 2003 article. He cites studies from several states that show that planned development saves the public money when compared to current low-density sprawl. One study by Robert Burchell for the Real Estate Research Corporation projected that compact growth could be 70% cheaper than scattered development. The issue - not having enough money to support current patterns of growth - is aligning non-traditional partners such as fiscal conservatives and environmentalists.

The Brainpower Economy includes All Ages

2004-01-18T09:30:00.000-08:00

Competitive communities craft unique, balanced strategies of brainpower, innovation and quality place. These 3 basic elements do not stand as separate tactics. Focusing on brainpower development and young knowledge worker recruitment will be more successful when combined with an amenity improvement strategy to provide the quality lifestyle that appeals to this highly sought after group. These two elements are more successful when innovation strategies include the experience of older workers in building successful businesses. The “competitive community model” is reinforced in a recent study from the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Labor Supply Pressures and the “Brain Drain”: Signs from Census 2000. This insightful work looks at the migration patterns of knowledge workers, dispels some of the myths of the “brain drain” rhetoric, and recommends focusing on developing human capital as a long term economic development strategy:

“Ultimately, state and local economic development policy makers should consider shifting their emphasis from increasing the quantity of certain types of workers, toward embracing human capital development as a longer-term goal. Paired with amenity strategies for younger workers and more workplace flexibility for older workers, policies to raise the stock of knowledge in a region can “split the difference” between demand-side and supply-side labor market interventions.”

This work is part of a multi year Living Cities Census Series. Learn more by visiting the Living Cities web site.

Exploring Connections between Brainpower and Quality Place

2004-01-04T11:38:00.000-08:00

Education is evolving and how we learn and the ways we can be smart are becoming better understood. In competitive communities connections between our community brainpower and our physical environment goes beyond the campuses of our educational institutions. Programmatic strategies and physical design are more integrated. Community planning and education planning work together to understand common goals and conflicting goals to resolve more effective cooperative strategies. There is not a one size fits all formula. What is the correct unique fit for your community? Research on four programmatic perspectives for education environments - learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered and community centered - provides a platform for exploring physical design ideas and concepts. The following notes are from chapter 6 of the 2000 National Academy of Sciences publication, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School by John D. Bradsford et al.

Learner-centered environments – “environments that pay careful attention to the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs that learners bring to the educational setting.” “…building on conceptual and cultural knowledge that students bring” (“culturally responsive”, “culturally appropriate”, culturally relevant”, culturally compatible” - “diagnostic teaching”). Builds on interests and passions of learners.

Knowledge-centered environments – Focus on understanding and transfer of knowledge. “…emphasis on sense-making – helping students become metacognitive by expecting new information to make sense and asking for clarification when it doesn’t” (“progressive formalization” builds on the informal ideas of students; “learning the landscape” metaphor for learning to live in the environment… “learning your way around…what resources are available and how to use those resources in conducting activities productively and enjoyably – requires an network of connections that link one’s present location to the larger space.” “ Activities can be structured so that students are able to explore, explain, extend and evaluate their progress” …”balance between activities designed to promote understanding and those designed to promote… skills necessary to function effectively”

Assessment-centered environments – Assessment should be congruent with learning goals. “Formative” assessment to feedback to improve teaching and learning ( can be formal and informal and should encourage building student self assessment skills- learn to value opportunities to revise; working collaboratively in groups can also enhance feedback to students) and “summative” assessment that measures what students have learned at the end of a set of learning activities (need assessment that links assessment practices to learning theory)

Community-centered environments – People learning from one another and continually attempting to improve (“classroom as community, school as community… and larger community of homes, businesses, states, nations and even the world”). The idea is to promote a “sense of community” and the importance of “connected Communities” as an integral part of the learning environment. Classroom and School Communities- Establishing classroom norms is part of establishing community function. Traditional U.S. models of classroom norms are based on competition and having the right answer and sharing by talking. “Individual competition can impede learning when it conflicts with the ethic of individuals contributing their strengths to the community.” Classroom norms relate to culture of society. Japan places more emphasis on entire class, discussions of thinking behind wrong answers, and on listening as part of the entire class involvement. “Teacher learning communities” are an important aspect of this concept. Connections to the Broader Community – students spend 14% of their time in school and 53% in the community engaged in other activities. “Many recommendations for changes in the learning environment can be seen as extensions of learning activities that occur within families” (children learn by engaging with and observing others in shared endeavors). Including parents in classroom activities and planning; involvement in organizations and institutions outside school; connections to experts outside school; and presentations or exhibits to individuals or community groups are among strategies

Goals and expectations of education have changed over the last century. What is taught? How it is taught? How are students assessed? And what are the community connections? These questions should be answered in designing the appropriate environment for learning. The degree of focus on student centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, or community centered should shape unique learning environments for the future. Aligning these four perspectives has the benefit of overlap and mutual benefit, desirable characteristics for competitive communities.

Address regional growth issues regionally

2003-03-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

Today's Washington Post provides a good article on the problem of managing growth in the Washington, DC metro area. The article holds a valuable lesson for preserving the rural character of in any metro region undergoing sprawl. The basic message: the challenge of rural preservation should be addressed regionally.

Reducing the density of residential development in rural areas is the most common tactics local governments use to preserve open space. While this strategy works within the local jurisdiction, it simply pushes growth outward, accelereating sprawl. The Washington experience suggests that density limits should be coordinated regionally and combined with stronger incentives for in-fill development and redevelopment in urban areas.

I have been recently working in Charleston, SC, where the issue of regional growth and rural preservation is particularly sensitive. Here's the challenge in a nutshell. The region's economy is growing, and residential development is spreading into the rural areas of Berkeley and Dorchester counties. While in-fill opportunities exist closer to Charleston, there are few incentives to encourage residential development in denser patterns. Meanwhile, the pattern of land use regulation is piecemeal, so any attempt at a regional solution runs smack into the problem of implementation. How do we get there from here?

My approach will be to raise the issue to a higher level of awareness through citizen forums. Hopefully, once citizens begin to understand that development patterns don't have to be this way, we can make some changes. One major asset: there is a strong consensus within the business community that protecting environmental values really matters. (This is not speculation. We conducted an Internet interview with 339 business leaders. You can review the results here .)

To learn more about the issue of regional growth in Charleston, visit the regional growth model at Clemson. It outlines the future pattern of growth in the region. You can also visit our project web site. We are designing a regional economic development strategy that provides the basis for a sustainable economy in the Charleston region.

You can also learn more about managing growth from the State of Maryland's web site. The State Planning Department is a leader in the area of growth management.

The Politics of Place

2003-03-09T13:03:00.000-08:00

The political leadership formula for “competitive communities” is to become a champion for open dialogue in support of quality place, brainpower and innovation. Political leaders have a choice – power politics or empowerment. Empowerment is more complicated and perceived by far to many of our political leaders as threatening. Empowerment places our politicians in a position of leading from behind. Creating an environment of effective dialogue that leads to action by citizens groups beginning at a neighborhood level and working up. Is this a new breed of leader that understands that planning is a key tool of community dialogue?

The mayor of Rochester, William A. Johnson, Jr., is an example. In a recent speech to the American Planning Association in Chicago, Competitive Communities: Linking Planning, Smart Growth & Economic Development, Mayor Johnson explains the progress his community is achieving with the engaging politics of dialogue. His stated vision is: “In Rochester, I want to turn all 220,000 residents into capable and responsible urban planners”…” I think it's fair to say that the City of Rochester, New York, shares more power with its constituents than does any other city government in the United States”... “Essentially, we are trying to introduce a civic dimension into marketplace logic. The American landscape of the past 50 years has been constructed and managed to suit the economic requirements of the corporate sector, which are often based on short-term considerations. Clearly, people have embraced this. They're not scared off by the artificiality of sprawl, even if this means that the average citizen is reduced to being a mere consumer. I want cities like Rochester to become buffers against generic and impersonal market forces. Cities like Rochester have an opportunity to redefine themselves so that consumers can function as citizens too. More and more, people are finding just such a prospect liberating, even exhilarating”… “I'm talking about the physical expression of civic will. I'm talking about what happens to the face and character of a city when average people have the skills and resources to control the destiny of their neighborhoods. And I'm talking about the economic and social opportunities that open up when planning becomes ingrained in the civic consciousness”.

Mayor Johnson’s strategy of citizens broadly understanding economic development increases the importance of planning and the value of planners. The implementation of a Neighbors Building Neighborhoods Institute (NBN) in 1994 is part of teaching Rochester citizenry the potential of their role in economic development by focusing on planning for quality places. The 10 planning sectors of Rochester are charged with developing a vision of their future and action plans to accomplish the vision. NBN is performance based and action plans are updated every 18 months. The city supports this initiative by providing the financial and technical resources. Results are proof: “We've encouraged people to plan in Rochester, and they have responded enthusiastically and responsibly. What do people want when they are allowed to draft a comprehensive plan and a zoning code? Beautiful public places ... more choice in transportation ...more choice in housing ...more accessible green space ... a vibrant downtown ... pedestrian enhancements ... and a sense of community... Design charettes have become common in our neighborhoods as citizens gain confidence in the planning process. They work on such things as neighborhood mini-plans ... the transformation of our major streets into gateways ... and a massive rebuilding of our waterfronts ... as well as attracting significant neighborhood retail investment”.

The idea of “competitive communities” is that effective dialogue about quality places; brainpower and innovation is the framework for economic development. Rochester is recognizing that a change in leadership methodology provides a meaningful way to involve citizenry in shaping the future. Mayor Johnson is an example of this new leadership. His assessment of our current circumstances summarizes this discussion: “a change…is occurring in communities large and small throughout the country… wherever we live, we now use a different model to make economic development decisions than just a few years ago. It's the idea that a successful local economy is a high-amenity economy. It's the idea that economic competitiveness is not fate — it can be created. It's the idea that the physical environment…can support smart people and business opportunities. And it's the idea that the market has limits — that successful economic development depends on progressive partnerships of governments, chambers of commerce, nonprofits, and citizens to create competitive advantage, not just for cities and counties, but for entire regions”.

Establishing Policies for Quality Place

2002-11-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

Many Americans are not satisfied with the outcome of growth in their communities. Symptoms of inadequately managed growth are causing an increasing number of citizens groups to react. We all want to live in a quality place. We all tend to react at some threshold when our perceived quality of place is threatened. This threshold trigger could be any number of development actions promoted as economic development and positive growth. Among the many recognized threats to unique quality places are the intrusion of impersonal big box businesses, increased traffic congestion, abandonment of neighborhoods, decrease in locally owned business or general loss of any attributes that make one place special and different from other places.

Our current state of reactions, after fighting the good fight through the public review process, is aimed at introducing new zoning and land use regulations. Many of these new rules promote compact development, restrict retail business size, promote local business, introduce impact fees on unsustainable development, and any of the wide arrays of growth strategies that are aimed at improving quality of place and efficiency of resources. More proactive strategies include comprehensive planning that combine economic and design strategies to focus on building the “value of uniqueness”. It most effectively occurs at smaller units of a community such as a neighborhood, a target redevelopment area, or a traffic corridor. These efforts are more successful if there is also regional coordinating of many smaller initiatives. These proactive strategies are focused on effective dialogue - the basic element of competitive communities.

We are struggling to make progress in reinventing our communities. Fighting back the trend to corporate colony sameness that grows at a rate of acres per minute is a daunting challenge. We have institutionalized this low-density formula growth without a thorough understanding of the costs – economic, social, private and public. Many believe that current growth patterns provide greater benefit than harm. There is much work to provide the objective tools for measuring actual impacts and the policies that produce unsustainable outcomes. Changing the financial reward system of development is a painful paradigm shift that will occur when there is a broad understanding of the benefits of new sustainable alternative real estate products. Our methods of understanding community growth impacts are evolving. There are a number of studies and attempts to create useful analytical tools to help communities understand the impacts of sprawling growth patterns. One of these studies, released in October of 2002 is the Smart Growth America report Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact . This report, based on a three-year research project conducted by professors at Rutgers and Cornell universities, measures several factors in ranking metropolitan areas in the United States based on the impacts of growth patterns. The categories of measurement are: mix of jobs, shops and housing; street network; residential density; and centers of activity. This thoughtful report is a significant step in synthesizing the work of a number of groups and individuals in measuring the physical impacts of growth.

Although determining the appropriate physical outcome measures are an important step in evaluating communities, there is another level of evaluation needed that combined with physical measures will advance the quality and competitiveness of communities. The physical outcomes are the answer to the equation:

Decision + Implementation = Physical Outcome

Understanding the outcomes of decision-making and policies, both public and private sector, that led to undesirable or unsustainable growth patterns is a goal in redirecting community resources for greater long term return on investment. This is more complex and more dynamic than measuring physical results. The General Accounting Office in a 1999 report to congress, Community Development: Extent of Federal Influence on “Urban Sprawl” is Unclear investigated federal policies that contribute to sprawl. The following statement from the report reveals the need for more investigation: “Some experts believe—and anecdotal evidence exists to support their belief—that the federal government currently influences “urban sprawl” through spending for specific programs, taxation, and regulation, among other things, but few studies document the extent of the federal influence.”

Uncovering policies that produce undesirable growth outcomes is an important process in determining new policies to produce quality places. The policies that have resulted in our current growth patterns include both public and private policies and regulations. The basic assumptions that led to these policies can be identified, questioned and changed or redefined in terms that fit our current circumstances. Competitive communities that redefine growth strategies to participate in new economy opportunities will discover new strategies that develop unique qualities that positively impact all aspects of community. Many current policies are based on solving a problem that no longer exists and with no understanding of the consequences or new problems that old policy has created. Current community economic development strategies are often based on these old premises that are no longer relevant. The lack of open dialogue does not allow any challenge of these strategies. The result is poor understanding of real priorities, low consensus and apathy. There is an inadequate level of reinventing economic and physical infrastructure models to prepare for future opportunities. What should the future community look like? What are the strategies to get to the future? What are the obstacles?

For example, the current preferences for development project financing are based on several standard real estate products that promote single use low-density projects. These projects contribute to the prototypical built environment that has homogenized American communities and undermined the uniqueness value of communities. Development project financing is also evaluated on a short-term return of five to seven years. This rapid rate of return strategy causes short-term decision making in design and construction to reduce initial cost at the sacrifice of long term operational savings and reduced maintenance. As a result the projects require reinvestment in five to seven years, generally after sale of the property, to remain viable products in the market. This shortsighted view ignores greater returns on investment of longer-term mixed-use properties of higher quality. The longer-term property strategy provides significantly greater return after ten years and has a positive effect on the quality place strategy for competitive communities. A more detailed investigation of this missed opportunity is explored in a Brookings Institute article, Financing Progressive Development, by Christopher B. Leinberger, Arcadia Land Company, May 2001
Understanding that we have institutionalized economic and design strategies for communities that give us what we don’t want is a beginning. Important work has been accomplished in setting the stage for significant change. It is just the beginning. The vision for Competitive Communities is to use the basic element of dialogue to explore strategies for brainpower, innovation and quality place. It is a process strategy to build and cultivate unique communities.

What it takes to build a competitive community

2002-10-27T06:56:00.000-08:00

How do we build competitive communities?

In our own way, each of us can take four practical steps to meet our challenges of competing in a global economy.

• First, we can build brainpower by encouraging our schools and businesses to work more closely together, to build a flexible, responsive K-14 system. We have simple messages to deliver.

Every child must read by the 4th grade. High school is no longer a ticket to the middle class. Every child needs a career path that includes postsecondary education. And dropping out of high school—for any reason—is simply unacceptable.

• Second, we can encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, turning brainpower into business. Not just with start-up companies, but with all our companies. This is all about schools, colleges and universities connecting to business owners and managers. But let’s not stop at business. We need to start teaching these skills early...in primary and secondary schools.

• Third, we can build quality places, places that celebrate our uniqueness, our heritage, our history. Quality places are important because they bring us together; they shape our shared identity; they provide us anchors to which we can return.

• Fourth, we can teach the skills of conducting a dialogue. Above all, this means learning to listen respectfully to one another. With these skills, we can build trust...the life blood of both our economy and our democracy. It’s time to take the lessons we are learning here today and begin building lasting and powerful regional relationships within Oklahoma. Faced with global competition, no community has the resources to go it alone.