Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

The Next Urban Comeback

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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

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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 Odd Couples, Complementary Needs, and Chance Can Change Cities

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On a Sunday morning a few weeks from now, the 47th running of the New York Marathon will begin on Staten Island as 50,000 runners and wheelchair athletes thunder over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn. They’ll loop through Bay Ridge and into Williamsburg, then cross into Queens like an invading army. They’ll begin thinning out in Long Island City before heading into Manhattan across the high-arching Queensboro Bridge (the heartbreak hill of New York marathoners).

In Manhattan they’ll turn right and head north until they reach the Willis Avenue Bridge and cross into the Bronx, where they’ll basically make a U-turn back to Manhattan. The rest of the 26.2-mile run will be, comparatively speaking, a breeze, through Harlem, into the Upper East Side, with a triumphant finish in Central Park. The world’s best runners will finish in under two and a half hours. Mere mortals will take a while longer.

It’s an amazing spectacle. And if you’re lucky enough to see it (or better yet, participate in it), you may wonder: Where did the inspired idea of running a marathon through five boroughs and all these neighborhoods come from? And what does it tell us about how things like this happen in cities?

Answer: It came from a meeting in 1975, where two people found a way of connecting their entirely different needs in a way that created not just a common solution but a sensation. The central figures were Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president, and Fred Lebow, head of the New York Road Runners.

The two could not have been more different. Sutton was a polished lawyer and politician. Lebow was a Romanian refugee who made money in New York’s garment district before falling in love with long-distance running. Sutton knew power; Lebow knew showmanship. In short, they were the odd couple.

Their needs, too, were completely different. During one of New York’s worst years ever, Sutton was looking to change the narrative about his city, to give it something hopeful in the Bicentennial year of 1976. (He also hoped to become New York’s first black mayor.) Lebow wanted something to distinguish New York’s marathon from the much older and better known Boston Marathon. At the time, New York’s race was run entirely inside Central Park, with runners dodging cyclists and families pushing strollers.

What brought them together was a misunderstanding. Lebow and others were talking about running the marathon in the streets (as Boston’s was). By the time the idea reached Sutton, it had somehow become a race through every one of New York’s boroughs. Sutton was intrigued by the idea; Lebow, once he heard what was on the table, was horrified. (The cost, the logistics, the likelihood that something would go wrong . . . this was a crazy idea.)

And here’s where the magic happened. Once they sat down and started talking, the two men found answers to every objection. And more: They found greatness in the idea. This wasn’t just a partial answer to New York’s image problems or a way to make the New York Marathon distinctive. This was a way of creating a spectacle that could rival 1945’s V-J celebrations in Times Square . . . and, if successful, could be held every year.

Their relationship held Sutton and Lebow together as they worked through the security, logistics, organizational, and cost issues. But the opportunity of a great civic spectacle became their driving force.

If anything, the New York Marathon has grown beyond anything Sutton and Lebow could have imagined: it’s a showcase of great runners (and tens of thousands of average ones) and great urban neighborhoods, an economic and tourism boost for the city, an irresistible draw for the news media, and a civic celebration. But it also is an illustration of how legendary civic projects come about: when odd-couple leaders find ways of connecting their needs and creating solutions that become greater than the problems they began with. You see it in the origins of Atlanta’s Beltline project and the reinvention of Denver’s Union Station.

There is no way to plan for these things. Having an open door and lots of relationships helps. So does having a creative mind that can connect needs in creating solutions. But luck plays a role. How else can you account for the fact that, had Percy Sutton not misunderstood Fred Lebow’s original idea, we would not today have one of the world’s greatest athletic events and urban celebrations?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Peter Miller licensed under Creative Commons.

A Better Way to Teach Civic Leadership

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If I could change things in cities . . . well, the list would be long. But one item in the top 10 would be making community leadership programs better at doing what they set out to do—train people in civic leadership.

I come to my criticism with respect for these programs and some knowledge. I’ve spoken to dozens of civic leadership programs in the last 35 years. I’ve studied them on behalf of a foundation. I’m an alumnus of two leadership programs myself. And I’m a member of the national Association of Leadership Programs.

I’m impressed by the people who participate in the programs and those who run them. The participants are exactly who you’d hope they would be: people in their 30s and 40s who are ready to step up to civic leadership and eager to learn how. The program managers often do their jobs with the skimpiest of resources.

And perhaps it’s too much to think people would emerge from these programs ready to lead. We don’t expect brand new college graduates to be fully accomplished in their professions. Surely civic leadership demands the same level of on-the-job learning as the law, medicine, or city planning.

And, yet, I think community leadership programs could do better.

Their greatest limitation is their structure. Most programs are nine-month affairs with monthly meetings, starting or closing with a retreat. In these sessions, the programs try to shoehorn two massive courses of study. The first is what is called “community awareness,” which is an introduction to the community’s issues and processes. So a class of 40 might visit the courts to learn how the criminal-justice system works, a charity hospital to learn about health issues, or the mayor’s office to learn the ins and outs of local government.

On top of this, some programs layer a second set of courses dealing with leadership skills. They might include sessions on diversity, team building, group facilitation, or conflict resolution—all things civic leaders need to know to be effective.

That’s a huge amount of learning for nine sessions. At the end, graduates are given a certificate, a better grasp of the community’s issues, a new set of friends and contacts, and an exhortation to get involved. Then it’s time for the leadership program to choose the next class of 40.

What more could a leadership program do? After all, participants’ time is limited (most have demanding jobs). The fees they pay barely cover expenses. Few of these programs have other financial resources.

Answers: You could stretch the learning process and take on a third level of leadership training. To do all this, you need to create a graduate program that invites alumni to return regularly and deepen their learning.

What would they learn in these sessions? They’d learn about strategy. In the community context, this means where you get started with change, how you overcome the obstacles you’re sure to face, and how you assemble the team and resources for the journey.

Where could a cash-strapped leadership program find people to teach this? All around. In every city, there are veteran leaders who would be delighted to explain how they mounted a successful referendum, raised money for building a museum, or took on a major community problem like homelessness. Oddly enough, they’re rarely asked about these things.

Leadership programs are the natural homes of this transfer of knowledge. And by bringing graduates back on a regular basis for “how to” seminars, the programs could increase their worth to their communities, deepen alumni support, and offer new opportunities for philanthropic and business sponsorships.

More important, when you hear enough of these stories of successful change, you notice they have common elements. That’s because in every city there is a path to success, a way good ideas become reality. Collect the stories, mark the path, and in no time the leadership program could do more than educate would-be leaders and award them certificates. It could offer them guidebooks.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Josh Hallett licensed under Creative Commons.

The Magicians of Main Street

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If you know nothing else about cities, know this: City governments don’t really run them. They police, regulate, and plan cities; they facilitate their growth and tend their needs; they supply some services. But run cities? No more than the National Park Service “runs” national parks. The parks run themselves. Park rangers make sure humans don’t do anything so bad that it interferes with nature’s order.

So who runs cities? Well, they run themselves. But their direction is set by a multitude of interests working together, from neighborhood groups and nonprofits to local businesses and foundations—with governments playing an important but not exclusive role. This has always been true, but as I’ve written, it is growing even more so today. Some of the interests that have a say in a city’s direction are relatively new, like neighborhood groups and business improvement districts, but others have been around a long, long time.

One that has endured is the local chamber of commerce. Chambers have been so central to civic leadership for so long, it’s amazing that a serious history of these organizations hasn’t been written. Until now.

Chris Mead, senior vice president of the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, is the author of “The Magicians of Main Street: America and its Chambers of Commerce, 1768-1945.” I found the book fascinating—and you may too. (Full disclosure: Chris sent me an early draft, and I made some small suggestions. He was wise enough not to follow all of them.)

Among the things I learned from reading “The Magicians of Main Street”:

  • Where chambers of commerce came from and why they’re called chambers as opposed to, say, associations. Answer: The first chamber was organized in France in 1599, where it was called a chamber de commerce. The idea and name jumped the English Channel to Great Britain, then the Atlantic to North America, where chambers caught on almost immediately among the sociable, business-minded Americans.
  • How far back in American history they go, and how resilient they are. By the time of the American Revolution, there were fully functioning chambers in cities like New York and Charleston. Alas, these two chose the wrong side in the war, which caused them to fold after independence—only to be revived almost immediately, this time with business people in charge whose loyalty was unquestioned.
  • How the focus of chambers shifted in the mid-1800s. In the early years, chambers were focused on, well, commerce—specifically, international trade. But in time, they moved toward the things we associate with chambers today: improving and promoting their cities and regions.

And here’s where I found Chris’ book especially interesting: Turns out that nearly every important civic improvement of the 19th and early 20th centuries (canal-building, railroads, highway construction, air travel, industrial development, tourism, anti-corruption efforts, city planning) were either helped along by chambers or outright invented by them.

Along the way chambers did surprising things. Charles Lindbergh’s history-making flight across the Atlantic? St. Louis’ chamber of commerce raised money for it and got an early version of naming rights in return. (That’s why Lindbergh’s plane was called “The Spirit of St. Louis.”) Al Capone, the gangster who terrorized Chicago in the 1920s? The Chicago chamber played a role in putting him in prison. (That Eliot Ness guy got the credit, of course.) The Miss America Pageant? That was a chamber of commerce invention, along with a string of world’s fairs and college bowl games. Even Punxsutawney Phil, the star of Groundhog Day, was created by a chamber of commerce.

This is not to say chambers were always on the right side of history. Some were supportive of segregation and unconcerned about bigotry. Chris points these things out, too.

But there’s much to learn from studying these enduring civic organizations. One thing is how consistent they’ve been over the years. After the Civil War, chambers everywhere created a kind of civic agenda around transportation, education, good government (or, at least, a business person’s definition of good government), economic development, and community image. They’re still focused on these things.

Another is how effective they’ve been—sometimes spectacularly so. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was in the news not long ago for a bridge scandal. But all the attention made me wonder: Who thought up this government agency, which owns and operates airports, seaports, bridges, tunnels, and transit in the New York area, and then sold the idea to two governors, two state legislatures, and Congress? Chris’ book gave me the answer: A chamber did.

Finally, “The Magicians of Main Street” left me with an even deeper appreciation for civic volunteerism. You would think if there were a group that would be indifferent to civic work, it would be business owners and executives. After all, they celebrate competition and individual accomplishment, not collective action, and an executive’s time is so valuable, why should you expect her to give it away? But, it turns out, business people are among the easiest to organize in most cities, as chambers have shown us time and again.

I’m not sure why that is so, but it is. And, as I learned from reading “The Magicians of Main Street,” it has been this way since businessmen wore tricorne hats.

Footnote: You can buy the book on Amazon by going here.

Photo by Adam Fagen licensed under Creative Commons.

About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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You can find Otis White’s urban issues updates by searching on the Mastodon social media site for @otiswhite@urbanists.social.