Archives for 2019

The Next Urban Comeback

October 29, 2019 By Otis White

I was fortunate to have a front-row seat for the greatest urban story of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the revival of America’s downtowns. A few scenes from that story:

When I started paying attention in the mid-1970s, downtowns were at their lowest point. With the rise of the automobile, families had started moving away from downtowns in the 1920s, followed by retail in the 1950s and offices in the 1960s.
By the 1970s, what was left in many downtowns was government, the courts, law offices, a few office towers, and a handful of once-grand churches struggling to hold on to their congregations. Some had a historic theater, a civic center, or a stadium that drew crowds a few nights a week. But main streets were pockmarked with empty storefronts, and on most evenings the sidewalks were deserted.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that downtowns found the keys to success: adaptive reuse of old buildings, housing, wider sidewalks, streetscaping, transit, density, waterfront access, mixed uses, business improvement districts, sidewalk dining, activities and concerts, and a dozen other New Urbanist-inspired strategies.
Today, downtowns are being revived everywhere in Georgia, from Savannah to Columbus, Augusta to Atlanta. And in new cities like Sandy Springs and Johns Creek, downtowns are being created where none existed before.

The comeback of downtowns isn’t complete but the goal line is in sight. So it’s time to consider: Where will the next great urban revival take place? My guess: in neighborhoods.

You can see neighborhood revival in some cities. In Atlanta, the Beltline is fueling a rush of development into nearby neighborhoods. In other cities, neighborhoods with historic homes and traditional street grids attract outsiders. As a result, you might think cities’ greatest problem is gentrification.

Gentrification is a serious issue, but decay and abandonment are even greater problems for most cities. So how do we turn around declining places and do so in ways that include those living there now?

It gets complicated because, when it comes to reversing neighborhood decline, we’re in the same place as downtowns in the 1970s. We don’t have a playbook. Parts of the downtown playbook might work in some neighborhoods: walkability, mixed uses, transit, and so on. But much of it won’t.

Even more complicating, we had help from big commercial interests in downtowns. We won’t have their help in neighborhoods. And taxpayers will be even less supportive of spending money in other people’s neighborhoods than they were of investing in downtowns. After all, downtowns are used by everyone. Neighborhoods are mostly for their residents.

So whom do we turn to in reviving neighborhoods? Who will write the playbook of neighborhood revitalization? And where do we get started?

My suggestion: Begin with the only genuine asset that neighborhoods have, their residents. Get them involved and organized, help them to learn about positive neighborhood change, then let them share in decision making and provide some of the effort. In other words, create partners so that the city government is no longer doing things FOR neighborhoods, but doing things WITH neighborhoods.

Where will these partners come from? From strong, representative neighborhood associations, along with crime-watch groups, friends of neighborhood parks, community-garden groups, PTAs, small-business associations. Really, any group focused on making a neighborhood—or even a single block—better.

In some neighborhoods, such groups do not exist. That’s why city governments from Riverside, Calif. to Longmont, Colo., Phoenix to Philadelphia are helping residents organize them. There’s no reason we couldn’t do the same in Georgia.

But for this to work, city leaders must practice restraint. In the case of neighborhoods, a wise approach is to help residents organize, learn, discuss, and come to consensus on a short list of achievable projects before the government makes its commitments. Oh, and be sure the neighbors contribute something to the effort, even if it’s just working alongside city crews or offering the proceeds from a bake sale.

After all, groups that have helped scrub graffiti from buildings, sold cakes to turn a vacant lot into a community garden, or worked with police to shut down a drug house won’t let the graffiti come back, the garden fall into disuse, or the drug dealers return. Not without a fight. And that is what cities need if we’re going to turn around troubled neighborhoods: committed, effective partners willing to fight for the places they live.

A version of this posting appeared on the Georgia Municipal Association website.

A Reservoir for Civic Progress

August 7, 2019 By Otis White

If you want to see how civic projects can move communities forward, take a look at the Bridge Center in Baton Rouge, La. Or, at least, at what it will be when it opens next year.

The Bridge Center will be a place for people suffering from mental illness or substance abuse, and, in particular, an alternative to police and EMTs taking them to jail or an emergency room. This “third option,” as advocates like to call it, should bring a cascade of benefits: relieving overcrowding at emergency rooms and the county jail while dealing with the region’s addiction and mental illness issues more humanely and productively.

It will even be easier for the cops. Processing a prisoner at the county jail can take an hour’s time or more; waiting at an emergency room can take even longer. The Bridge Center’s aim: Complete the handoff in 15 minutes. And did I mention that it will save money? One study estimated that the Bridge Center will save up to $55 million in its first decade over incarceration or emergency room treatment. Little wonder then that nearly every public official, from the mayor to the county coroner, supported it.

But it’s also an example of how hard such things can be. The project began five years ago when a group of law enforcement officials, mental-health advocates, public-health experts, judicial-system leaders, and elected officials met to study Baton Rouge’s problems and identify solutions. Experts from around the country were brought in. There were group visits to a center in San Antonio, Texas, that became the Bridge Center’s model.

A clinical-design team outlined a series of services the Bridge Center could offer and how they could work together. A study suggested how the center might be funded. A nonprofit board was assembled that included the district attorney, the sheriff, mental-health care advocates, physicians, and other stakeholders.

With this mountain of testimonials, documentation, near-unanimous political support, heartrending stories of loved ones lost in the jail, and favorable news coverage, supporters asked voters in December 2016 for a modest tax increase to get the center started. They said no. It took two more years and a massive citizen-engagement effort to get a different result. Last December, voters in East Baton Rouge Parish, where Baton Rouge is located, finally said yes to a 1.5-mil increase in property taxes. Looking back, local officials are convinced the Bridge Center was worth the effort. “It was absolutely a step forward,” says Mayor Sharon Weston Broome.

Then again, local government leaders could afford to be patient with the slow pace. They have an ally, an organization that managed the Bridge Center proposal from first meeting through months of research and two referendums and will stick with it through ribbon-cutting: the Baton Rouge Area Foundation (BRAF), a community foundation that has evolved into a kind of research and development center for civic progress. BRAF’s fingerprints are on numerous projects, from a plan for downtown Baton Rouge to a nature center that takes visitors into a Louisiana swamp. It is trying to launch passenger rail service from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. And this is just a partial list.

By managing so many civic projects, BRAF applies the lessons of one initiative to the next. (One lesson: Don’t take referendums for granted.) Along the way, it has gained a reputation for getting things done, which opens even more doors. As foundation President John Davies says, “When the Baton Rouge Area Foundation asks people to come to a meeting, they will usually come.” And these advantages grow over time. While elected leaders come and go, BRAF Executive Vice President John Spain notes, “we are consistently here.”

Mayor Broome is a fan. “We are extremely fortunate to have a strong foundation like BRAF in our community,” she says. Still, she’s careful to add that the foundation doesn’t dictate to local government; it collaborates. As she sees it, the city and the foundation are “co-creators” of civic progress.

I’ve seen other organizations play this R&D role in a community, at least for a while. Typically, it is a business group such as a chamber of commerce. Occasionally, a university will step up. But most communities have no organized way of learning how civic progress works. They depend on extraordinary leaders (some elected, most not) to figure things out. And here’s the problem with that: In a lifetime, an extraordinary leader may take on one or two big civic projects before drifting out of civic work. When she leaves, her knowledge, skills, and relationships leave with her.

So you may want to ask: How does my community pass civic knowledge from one leader to the next? How do leaders build relationships? How do good ideas find funding? How do they survive disappointments?

If there isn’t an organization or at least a process for learning from successful projects and storing civic knowledge, good ideas may come like rain striking parched ground. They make a splash, raise hopes and then evaporate. Is it time to build a reservoir?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Charley Lhasa licensed under Creative Commons

How a Leader Assembles a Winning Team

April 4, 2019 By Otis White

The Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus in Buffalo, New York is so successful today, it’s hard to imagine it didn’t always exist. But it dates only to 2002, when five institutions agreed to collaborate in planning their adjacent properties and recruiting others to join them on the 120-acre campus.

How successful has BNMC been? Matt Enstice, its president and CEO, recites the numbers off the top of his head: from 4.5 million square feet in 2002 to 9 million today; from 7,500 employees to 16,000; from five institutions to nine anchor institutions plus 150 nonprofits and companies. Fueling all this has been $1.4 billion in private and public investment.

So when Enstice and others began talking about the campus idea in 1999, everyone could see its merits, right? Well, no. The five original institutions, which included a hospital, a cancer research and treatment center, a university, an independent research institute, and a large medical practice, didn’t exactly oppose the idea but weren’t convinced it would work, either.

“It took a huge amount of volunteer time,” to get the medical campus idea off the ground, said one of the founders, Tom Beecher, an attorney and veteran civic leader. Assurances were made to the institutions: This would not be a governance organization and would not replace existing boards. Skeptical neighborhood organizations had to be convinced that these institutions would welcome their ideas. Foundations and political interests had to be persuaded.

And then there was the sheer weight of cynicism. You see, the idea of a medical campus in Buffalo wasn’t a new one in 1999. It had been tried before. Several times. At one point Enstice gathered all the failed plans. “I had a stack of plans up to my waist,” he remembers, “and I’m six feet tall.”

So how did Enstice, Beecher, then-Mayor Anthony Masiello, and consultant Richard Reinhard turn the idea of a collaborative, entrepreneurial medical campus from repeated failure to success?

They did it the way great civic leaders always do these things: They saw the way forward, creating not just a plan but a strategy. That’s a critical distinction. Lots of people, it seems, are good at creating plans, but it’s a rare leader who knows how to move from plan to reality.

This was the case in Buffalo in the 1990s, where many could see the city’s needs. (A big one: What could replace our fading manufacturing economy?) Some could even see solutions. (How about building around one of our bright spots, the city’s medical and biosciences economy . . . perhaps by centering it in a campus?)

But only an experienced and respected leader could see how to put the pieces together by assembling a team of planners, advocates, and strategists, anticipating the objections they would face, shaping the arguments, finding money for starting the effort, identifying early wins, and building momentum.

Fortunately, Buffalo had such a leader in Mayor Masiello. His talents lay in three areas: He had relationships with the right people, he knew how government worked and what it could do, and he was a natural cheerleader. He also had a good sense of timing. He recognized that, in 1999, there were changes at the top of the medical community, so there was a little more openness to trying something new.

His first step was probably the most important one. Masiello picked the right people for this project. Beecher had deep relationships in the philanthropic and health care communities (he had chaired one of the hospital boards). Enstice and Reinhard, who had been Masiello’s chief of staff, were natural organizers with a deep understanding of communities. And Masiello was comfortable leading from behind, as cheerleader, early funder, and remover of political obstacles.

Along the way these four made smart tactical choices. Example: How they invited people into the planning effort. Their rule: You could participate only if you brought money, which they called “skin in the game.” This built commitment to the project and cleared out the time-wasters and political hangers-on who had bogged down earlier efforts. Another example: When they created the BNMC board, they suggested each of the large institutions have two representatives, one of whom must be the institution’s chair. Their thinking: While the CEO would be focused on the institution, the chair would have a longer, broader view of the city’s wellbeing. Again, it built commitment to the idea of a collaborative campus.

There were a half-dozen other things the team did well, from finding and exploiting early “wins” to involving the neighborhoods in exactly the right way. Knowing that Buffalo was, as Masiello puts it, a “seeing-is-believing town,” they led leadership tours of successful medical campuses around the country.

But none of this would have been possible without the decisions made early on by Mayor Masiello: When is the right time to get started? Who are the right people to lead this effort? What obstacles will they face? And what can I do to help them succeed?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo of the medical campus and downtown Buffalo, courtesy of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

The Next Urban Comeback

A Reservoir for Civic Progress

How a Leader Assembles a Winning Team

About Otis White

The Great Project

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