Otis White

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How to Read a Flawed Book About Cities

April 1, 2015 By Otis White

A little more than 10 years ago, I read one of the most wonderful—and deeply flawed—books about cities I’ve ever picked up. It was called, “City: Urbanism and Its End.” If you can get your hands on this book, I recommend it. My own copy is coffee-stained, dog-eared, highlighted across its 432-page expanse (not counting notes, bibliography, and index), and marked up with scribblings in the margins. Good luck doing that on your e-reader.

The backstory of the book is fascinating. The author, Douglas W. Rae, was a professor at Yale and chair of its political science department in 1990 when New Haven, Connecticut, Yale’s hometown, elected its first African-American mayor. The new mayor asked Rae to be his chief administrative officer, and Rae accepted. This, then, is a Cinderella story in reverse: where the ivory tower professor descends to city hall and finds . . . a god-awful mess. Exactly how awful isn’t explained. (He says the city was in the grips of “its worst fiscal crisis since the 1930s.”) It couldn’t have been much fun because, in less than two years’ time, Rae resigned and went back to Yale to ponder his experience.

The result isn’t a memoir but a dissertation on New Haven’s troubles. And not just troubles in the 1990s but over the past century, beginning in 1910 when, as Rae explains, urbanism was at its peak in New Haven. What followed, in his telling, was a long and more or less steady decline in population, economic vitality, housing stock, civic involvement, political health, and neighborliness. Along the way, some tried to halt the decline (one mayor became a national leader in urban renewal). But in the end the city was overwhelmed.

If this sounds depressing, surprisingly it is not. The book reads like a mystery that opens with a murder. After examining the crime scene, Rae leads us through the victim’s promising early years, through a series of bad decisions mixed with circumstances beyond the poor fellow’s control, and then on to his demise—in search of a good mystery’s two most important questions: Who did this, and why?

Three things help carry the book along. First, as serious academics go, Rae is a good writer. When he drops you into different periods of New Haven’s history, you understand them.

Second, Rae tells his story with a clever structure. It consists of doing what I just said: Dropping you into several periods, starting with New Haven of a century ago, where he introduces you to the mayor, a well-meaning small-business man and civic booster named Frank Rice. Then he skips to the 1950s and 1960s, when New Haven was in steep economic and social decline and, hoping for a revival, elected the visionary Richard C. Lee as mayor. (More on him later.) The remaining chapters are about the succession of . . . OK, let’s be blunt . . . hacks who followed Lee.

Finally, the book is helped along by Rae’s interest in decision making and his sympathy for those making decisions. So while he doesn’t think much of Rice, whose tenure was untroubled in a way no mayor could imagine today, he explains in an evenhanded way why this mayor’s highest priorities were . . . building sidewalks.

Of Dick Lee, who directed a flood of federal money into reshaping New Haven—to disastrous ends—Rae is similarly sympathetic. Given the problems New Haven faced in the early 1960s, who wouldn’t have done the same? In fact, as I read the book, it occurred to me that Lee’s greatest problem might have been his own ambition, intelligence, and political talents. A lesser mayor (say, Frank Rice) might not have found all that federal money and figured out how use it in leveling entire neighborhoods.

As for those who followed, Rae offers a shrug. Urbanism is over. What could any mayor do?

Well.

As I read the “City: Urbanism and Its End” in 2004, its first flaw was as apparent as its subtitle. Urbanism’s end? Somebody forgot to tell the cities.

As Rae was writing, cities were in fact in the middle of a great revival—a reversal of fortunes no one could have foreseen in the brief period Rae was in city hall and apparently he missed on return to the ivory tower. (Well, not entirely. On page 421, he has a small section titled “Another Urbanism?” that hints something may be going on, though he never says what it is.)

But the deeper flaw is sometime I’ve noticed in the years since I first read it. It is Professor Rae’s analysis of how city governments steer their cities. And let me be as sympathetic to him as he was toward New Haven’s mayors. This may be an area where being a political scientist is a liability, not an asset. That’s because political scientists have trouble making sense of local government since they are naturally more attuned to state and federal government. As I’ve written elsewhere, if you try to understand city hall the way you do state capitols and the federal government, you’ll miss the mark. They are fundamentally different creatures.

That may explain Rae’s belief that city governments were always “weak players” in the realm of power who became steadily weaker as urbanism waned. “Focused on the city of 1990,” he wrote, ” . . . the end of urbanism meant the end of thinking about city government as a pivotal and more or less autonomous power system.” And it’s not just city governments that were weak and slow-moving, in Professor Rae’s eyes. So were cities themselves. “Most American cities,” he writes, “are sitting ducks, unable to move out of the way when change comes roaring at them.”

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Given their weakness and slow ways, how could city after city have staged amazing economic, social, and physical revivals in the past 20 or 30 years? How could New York have come from its “Bronx is burning” chaos in the late 1970s to the safe, vibrant, seriously overpriced city we know today? Or San Francisco? Or Minneapolis? Or Seattle? Or Houston? Or even my own city of Atlanta, where neighborhoods that were all but abandoned in the 1980s are filled today with loft apartments, brew pubs, boutique charcuteries, and tattooed hipsters on bikes and motor scooters? In fact, I’ll bet that not far from Professor Rae’s office, there might be signs of urbanism’s comeback even in New Haven.

That’s because urbanism never really ended in America. For a host of reasons, it receded for a while but eventually was revived because we needed it . . . for artistic and economic creativity and even (hello, Yale!) to produce a certain kind of education, one that teaches people to live and work amongst diversity.

And perhaps because he’s wrong about urbanism’s death, Professor Rae is wrong as well about local government and how it works. It isn’t so much a forum for decision making as it is an important part of the assembly line of change in cities. Mayors may help plan great civic projects and city councils certainly have to contribute some of the parts. But they do so with the knowledge that, for anything of consequence to succeed, others in the community must add their parts—including the business community, nonprofits, volunteers, charitable foundations, and neighborhood groups. This collaborative approach isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a unique strength of cities. In fact, that may be why it was such a disaster in the 1960s to give Dick Lee all that federal urban renewal money. It allowed him to stop working with neighborhoods and start working on them. And as it turned out, he didn’t know better than they what they needed.

Having said all that, let me repeat. I like Douglas Rae’s book. In a way unlike any other, it takes you inside city hall at different periods and into the life of a city that has always struggled with great economic, political, and social forces. It helps you understand how different mayors saw the city and why they acted as they did. Finally, Professor Rae makes a convincing case for what cities have lost in the past century, although I would add that there’s much we’ve gained in those years in health, prosperity, and social justice.

But read it with the knowledge that political scientists, even those who’ve spent a while in city hall, have trouble understanding cities. And keep in mind, too, that there’s a missing chapter, the one where New Haven and other cities rediscover urbanism and find incredible new opportunities buried in old streets.

Oh, and please ignore that subtitle.

A Mayor’s Test for Good Decisions

February 12, 2015 By Otis White

Decisions are what government executives, elected officials and civic leaders do. They may make them in groups or alone, in public or private, but they spend a great deal of time preparing for, making, and carrying out decisions. Which begs the question: How do we know if we’re making good decisions?

We certainly know what good decisions are supposed to do: Solve problems or fulfill opportunities without creating equal or greater problems. These unintended consequences often take time to develop, so it’s hard to judge decisions right away. As time passes, though, we can usually see the good and the bad more clearly. That’s why support for past decisions either grows or melts away.

This is good news for historians, but not so good for decision makers, who need something quicker: a real-time test they can apply hours before making a decision, something that tells them if they’re on firm ground or about to step into quicksand. Is there such a test?

I’ve searched for one for years by wading through books on decision making and asking people who make decisions. And I’ve found it: a checklist you can use to steer clear of most bad decisions and have confidence in good ones. Most impressively, it came not from a book . . . but from a mayor.

Before I share it with you, let me tell you what I’ve learned from the books. First, we are filled with hidden biases, and if you know the most common ones (“confirmation bias,” “sunk-cost fallacy,” “anchoring,” and so on), you’ll avoid traps and, in general, make better decisions. Any book by Dan Arierly will tell you about your biases. Second, there are disciplined ways of thinking that will lead to better decisions. You’ve almost certainly used some of them, such as SWOT analysis. Some you probably haven’t, like PEST analysis (Google it) and Peter Drucker’s Five Questions (Google it, too). Read up on these and other strategic planning techniques; they’ll help.

Still, this wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted a test you could apply the day before a big decision and sleep better that night. That’s why I sat up when a mayor offered hers.

The mayor was Teresa Tomlinson of Columbus, Georgia, and she described her test while I was interviewing her for a podcast about why she ran for office and what she had learned along the way. The test—she called it a “pep talk—was a checklist she had developed as a young lawyer before going to trial. (Click the media player at the top of this post to hear Mayor Tomlinson describe it in her own words.)

The mayor’s test is simple but demanding. It asks four questions:

  • Am I doing this for the right reasons so my motives are pure?
  • Have I done my homework so I know what I’m talking about?
  • Have I sought out, listened to, and respected others in coming to this decision?
  • Have I been reasonable in my approach?

If you have done these four things, as Mayor Tomlinson says, “then you are OK and you need to stay the course just as hard as you can.”

What Tomlinson’s test won’t tell you, of course, is how history will judge your decision. Nor will it tell you what might happen in the future—whether circumstances could change in a week’s time causing you to rethink things. But most decision makers understand that. What they need is a way of telling if, knowing what’s known at this time, this is the right decision to make. The mayor’s test, answered honestly, will do that.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Sasquatch 1 licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Four: The Art of the Compromise

July 15, 2014 By Otis White

I’d like to persuade you to stop badmouthing the “c” word. The word I have in mind is “compromise.” Done right, a compromise is a way of opening the door to change by reducing the objections of interest groups. And it is the closest thing in politics to an art form.

That doesn’t mean all compromises are good, of course. Some satisfy interests but don’t create much change. In fact, some compromises are designed just to paper over problems. (In Washington, this is called “kicking the can down the road.”) Others appear at first to be ingenious solutions but come apart because they aren’t sustainable. And some look so ungainly that even participants call them “ugly babies.“

But just as you can admire the creative process while sometimes not liking the art, I encourage you to step back and look at how your city hall arrives at these deals. Yes, by all means write about the bad deals and car-wreck compromises. But also develop a little curiosity about why some compromises DO work. Look for patterns in the way they are arrived at in your city. Figure out who your city’s compromise artists are. And by all means, don’t denigrate the art form.

Before we begin, though, a little perspective: If you’ve read the introduction to this series and the first three installments, then you can see some themes developing. Projects and policy ideas tend to flow into city hall from the outside. The city council is at or near the center of decision making, sometimes in the lead role, sometimes in the mayor’s shadow. And the central issues of cities have to do with land and how it is used by people.

This lesson is about the most important work that mayors and city councils (and sometimes others) do, which is creating compromises that allow projects and big policy ideas to move forward.

Now, please don’t charge out the door looking for these things. Major civic projects and big policy changes don’t come along every day. Most of what mayors and city councils do is routine: creating and amending budgets, approving small policy changes, making appointments or approving personnel changes, reviewing contracts, and acting as quasi-judges on zoning matters and development decisions.

But that’s why you should sit up when one of these difficult decisions does come along. That’s when talented politicians do their best work, bringing the interests together, finding hidden areas of agreement, plotting the way forward, and figuring out how to present the results in ways acceptable to other politicians and the public.

And they do this in one of two basic ways, by personality or process. That is, they personally hammer out a compromise, or they send the dispute through some sort of process that the combatants and larger community feel is fair.

Here are two examples of the personality-driven compromise. First, a small but telling compromise authored by Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle allowing ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft to operate in his city while offering taxi owners just enough to quieten their opposition. (Why is it “telling”? Because a mayor who can knock out a compromise like this in his first six months in office demands our attention.) 2023 update: Ed Murray was, indeed, a talented mayor who was undone after three years in office by a sex scandal.

The second, more sweeping example is Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s 2012 plan for reforming his city’s schools, which required that he get state legislative approval and the governor’s support after reaching a series of compromises with local business interests, educators, reform advocates, and labor and ethnic leaders.

The personality-driven approach seems to be the way most compromises come about, and in cities with strong mayor forms of government that’s what you expect to find. (Story idea: If your city has a strong mayor system and there are big disputes not being resolved, why? Does the mayor not consider these things important, does he not consider fashioning compromises as part of his job, is he bad at this work, or is there some other reason? What do others in the city say?)

The other way of reaching compromises is with a process. San Diego’s “ugly baby” compromise on housing was a “locked-room” process. Basically, the city council president sent the interests to a room and told them to come back with something they could all support.

Other processes involve task forces, which involve broader community interests, and mediation. Mediation was how Minneapolis resolved a difficult dispute over a light-rail line. In this case, you see the importance of fairness in a process. The compromise was reached after the mediator proposed it, but it was pretty much the same set of ideas others had suggested. When it came this time from a neutral party, city officials took it to heart.

Finally, there are those compromises that are so complex they defy easy description. Detroit’s “grand bargain,” by which it will exit bankruptcy in the months ahead, is a web of compromises involving a federal bankruptcy judge, the governor, the city’s emergency manager, state legislative leaders, foundation leaders, the mayor, business executives, Wall Street interests, labor leaders, and a host of others. Which parts of the bargain were contributed by leaders and which came as a result of the bankruptcy process? Hard to say precisely, but the biggest elements (including the foundations stepping in to support the art museum) were clearly the work of creative leaders.

So, how can you report on compromises in your city in new ways? Well, you can start by reverse engineering them. That is, you can begin with the deal, which is almost always announced publicly, then ask who was involved at each step and how each element of the compromise fell into place. I promise you this will make a great narrative that will tell you and your readers much about how your city works.

Then you can ask not only how the compromise came about but why. People usually agree to things involving sacrifice only because they fear an alternative. So what were the alternatives? And how were they presented to the different interest groups? (This alone may be a fascinating story, as you may see that the alternatives presented to one side were the opposites of what was presented to the other.)

Finally, you can revisit some earlier compromises. Some likely will have failed. Why? Were they too ambitious, not ambitious enough—or were they designed (consciously or not) for failure? If they were designed for failure, what were the design flaws? For those compromises that succeeded, again . . . why? Did the interests find the alternatives so frightening that they stuck with the bargain through good times and bad? Did participants discover over time that there was hidden value in this new way of doing things? Or did the interests just move on to other issues?

What about the personalities and processes behind these compromises? What makes some leaders good at crafting deals? Do they use a standard way (some leaders use anger and threats, others tend toward calmness and reason) or does each situation demand a different approach? If they sent the dispute through a process, what was the process? Why did it work? Why did people accept it as a legitimate way of deciding these things?

This is the heart of civic decision making as it plays out inside city halls. And it’s what makes talented politicians so valuable. Perhaps the best comparison is to business leaders who see markets others can’t and ways of reaching those markets that don’t exist yet. A book ghostwritten for Donald Trump called this “the art of the deal.” (There’s little evidence Trump was much of a dealmaker, but others in business are.) In politics, the compromise that allows progress while sustaining itself is the work of art.

Footnote: So why do reporters denigrate compromises? I’ll let others do the full analysis, but let me offer one theory. It has to do with nonzero-sum contests.

Huh? Most city hall reporters also report on political campaigns, and elections are zero-sum contests. (Google the term.) That is, every vote I get is a vote you have to overcome and exceed in order to win. There aren’t that many zero-sum contests in our lives. Sports, conventional land wars, card games, a few others.

Most of our lives is spent in a nonzero-sum world, where both sides can gain from a transaction and, sometimes as a result of cooperating, the pie grows. I hope your newsroom is a nonzero-sum environment, along with your family life, your relationships with friends, even your dealings with merchants. (If you’re happy with the car you bought and the dealer is pleased with the money, then voila. Nonzero sum.)

The problem for some reporters and politicians is that they have trouble making the transition from the artificial world of zero-sum elections to the more common world of nonzero-sum government. Put another way, they can’t believe that a compromise where no one walks away with a clear win isn’t . . . well, fishy.

If that is so, then every successful marriage, enduring business, and long-term friendship is fishy. Because like good compromises at city hall, they too live in a nonzero-sum world.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Cabinet Office licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Three: Seeing the Unseen City Council

June 24, 2014 By Otis White

Here’s where I deliver the poli-sci lecture I never got in college, the one titled “Introduction to Local Governments.” There are two types of local government, and if you are as puzzled by your city council as I was as a young reporter, it may be because you are looking at one type and expecting the other.

The type you most likely have is a council-manager form of government, where there’s a full-time city manager and a city council that includes someone called “mayor.” The one you may be expecting is a mayor-council form of government (sometimes called a “strong mayor” system), where the mayor functions both as political leader and government executive, the way the president does in Washington.

What’s the difference? Well, to begin, there’s that city manager person, who is probably a professional (in the sense that she went to college, possibly studied public administration, and may hold a certificate or two). But in truth, mayor-council forms of government have such professionals as well.

The real difference is the manager’s relationship with city employees and the city council—and the city’s council’s role in public policy.

In council-manager governments, city managers are hired—by city councils, of course—to run governments the way CEOs run corporations or superintendents run school systems. That is, with a free hand, more or less. If things work as they should, a council member’s only contact with city employees will be through the city manager or at city council meetings. (Story alert: If council members are phoning city employees directly, that’s a management problem and could be an ethics violation. Call your state’s city managers association or a nearby university’s public management department to find out why.)

Another important feature: When it comes to proposing budgets, suggesting changes in city policies, or offering new ways of structuring city departments, it’s the city manager who proposes and the council that disposes. That’s why she sits at the dais along with the council. She is constantly bringing them things to consider.

Let’s turn now to the other type, the less common mayor-council (“strong mayor”) form of government. Here the mayor is the one who is the full-time employee with responsibilities for administration and proposals of policy and procedure. AND he’s elected—not beholden to the city council for his position.

I won’t get into the strengths and weaknesses of the systems. It’s an interesting subject but not relevant for most city hall reporters. After all, you have the system you have; your job is to understand it. (If you are interested, I can point you to a good book: “More Than Mayor or Manager: Campaigns to Change Form of Government in America’s Large Cities.”)

Where I would focus your attention is on the city council, which may be the least analyzed yet important part of city government. This may seem like an odd statement because, as a city hall reporter, you’ve probably sat through countless council hearings and meetings. (I did as well.) And you’ve reported what council members said and did. You may have interviewed every council member at one time or another.

But here’s where your reporting may have fallen short: You probably haven’t tried to understand the council as a political body—how it makes decisions, who brokers compromises and deals, how the deals come about, how rewards are offered to those who go along and punishments meted out to those who don’t. And here’s a key insight: These things happen differently in council-manager systems than in mayor-council ones. And they happen differently in places that elect council members by districts than in those that elect them citywide.

Places that elect their councils citywide (and until recently that included such big cities as Detroit and Seattle) tend to have councils that work on consensus, a bit like the ruling party in a parliamentary government. After all, everyone represents the same interests and has pretty much the same power.

District elections change that calculation. People in the southern parts of the city may be very different from those in the northern, with wholly different concerns and interests. So consensus becomes more difficult in councils elected by district, and brokering becomes more common (these are deals where you get what you need, and I get what I need—even though what you get and I get may be different and unrelated).

When you have brokering, you have brokers. Who are they on the city council you cover? How do they work? When the council casts split votes, are the splits predictable? (City council votes are one of the easiest things to analyze since they’re public record.) What do the patterns tell you about politics in your city? Are the divisions ethnic, economic, geographic, generational, ideological, partisan . . . or some combination? If you go back further in time, have some council members drifted from one faction to another? If so, why?

Interview the council members. When they are divided, whom do they look to for compromises or deals? Is it the presiding officer, the mayor (who may or may not be the presiding officer), a factional member or two, a senior council member, or someone outside the council?

There’s something else about district elections that’s important. Districts often usher in something called “council member prerogative,” where the council defers to the district representative on issues relating exclusively to his district. (For a glimpse of how prerogative works in Philadelphia, read this.) What does it mean? It means the council member is pretty much the boss of his ward. If you need the city’s permission to do something in that district, such as rezone property, you need that member’s blessing or you can forget about it. Does this suggest any stories to you? It should.

If district elections change how city councils work, then mayor-council governments change things even more. This has to do with the mayor’s independence, which comes from two sources. First, he’s elected separately from the council. Second, the city charter in a strong mayor form of government almost certainly spells out the mayor’s duties, and they’re likely to be . . . well, strong.

Hold on, though. Don’t council-manager governments also have mayors? Yes, but they usually fail one or both of the independence tests. That is, they’re either not elected independently (they are selected from among the council members), or they are given few powers other than presiding at city council meetings and representing the city at ceremonies.

Compare that to a strong mayor system. These mayors manage the city bureaucracy, propose budgets, and may even have veto power over council decisions. But their greatest power may lie simply in their sense of the job and the council’s sense of its job. To understand, let’s go back to the poli-sci lecture.

In a council-manager government, the responsibilities for leading the city are divided between the council and city manager. The manager is usually the “inside” leader and expected to offer proposals on improving government performance. But it’s not common for a city manager to accept responsibility for the larger city—the place whose central issue is people and places and the interaction of the two. That usually falls to city council members who are, after all, elected by that larger city.

In a strong mayor government, the mayor assumes both sets of responsibilities. That is, he’s both inside manager and outside leader, the one who worries about government efficiency, police procedures, and budgets, but also downtown renewal, neighborhood revitalization, the city’s image, economic development, social unrest, and a dozen other things.

Where does that leave council members in a strong mayor system? Some seek to be issue entrepreneurs, searching for problems or opportunities the mayor isn’t working on. A few take up the role of political brokers within the council. But most are happy just to tend to their districts and let the mayor worry about the big things. (If you’ve ever wondered what Chicago aldermen do with their time, read this to find out.)

And what does this mean for you as a reporter or blogger? I hope it leaves you with newfound interest in your city council as a political body. Why do people run for council in your city? Where do they devote their time once elected? If the council has at-large members, do they work in different ways than district members? What happens to council members when they leave? Do they run for higher office, and are they elected? Of the past five mayors, which served on the council at some point? How does that compare with cities similar to yours? (Call a local government expert at a state university—or just do a little Internet research.) If your city’s council is a dead-end political body, why?

If it’s a council-manager form of government, who looks for projects to improve the larger city, the realm outside the city government? (As I explained in Lesson Two, most of these ideas originate outside of city government, but at a point someone in government has to become their champions.) Do members play predictable roles when a big project is proposed? Is one a blue-sky thinker, another a bottom-line worrier, another a let’s-get-it-done sort, and yet another the one who worries about its impact on the disadvantaged? How do they come to agreement?

If nothing else, consider this good training as a journalist. What you’re doing is making the obvious apparent—looking at something everyone knows something about but few truly understand or appreciate. This is what great journalists, like Robert Caro and, before him, John Gunther, did so well. And who knows? If you get really good at understanding how your city council works, we may ask you to move to Washington . . . and explain Congress to us.

Footnotes: One of the most interesting stories in council-manager systems is the role of the mayor. If she is given the title by a vote of council members, it signifies something. But what? That this person is a good representative for the city? That she’s good at presiding (which usually means she’s viewed as fair)? Or is it something else? Good questions for the mayor . . . and her fellow council members.

And nothing is more fascinating than a mayor who doesn’t know what kind of government he has—or knows but won’t accept it. You see this sometimes in cities with council-manager governments that elect their mayors independently or on county commissions with an elected chair. The mayor or commission chair comes to office thinking he’s in charge of management and policy development, only to find a council and city manager who won’t defer to him.

In Dallas, Laura Miller spent one miserable term acting like a strong mayor and berating the city council for not making her one. Miller never accepted her role. Occasionally, some mayors do and we say of them, after a while, that they’ve “grown in office.”

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by John Ramspott licensed under Creative Commons.

The Leader as Strategist and Persuader

August 31, 2012 By Otis White

I’ve met a lot of mayors over the years. Some were smart, a few were philosophical, many were shrewd, but only a handful were strategic. One of the few, Frank Martin, died a few weeks ago.

Martin was the mayor of Columbus, Georgia who, in a single term in office in the early 1990s, changed his city. Yes, you read that right: He served a single four-year term. (It was his decision. He finished his term to acclaim but chose not to run again.) And in that single term he set in motion changes that are still being felt, 20 years later.

I met Mayor Martin when I was researching a book about the remarkable turnaround of Columbus’ downtown, which was a desolate and hopeless place in the 1970s, only to be reborn three decades later as a thriving business, cultural, entertainment, and educational center. I wanted to know how these things happened, and that led me to the political leader who had changed the arc of the city. (If you’re interested in the book, you can find it here.)

We had three long conversations, one by phone, one in his office, and a third for a podcast. Each time we talked I was impressed by how his mind worked. He had the ability to look at something familiar (the city he had lived in his entire life or the government he presided over), see assets and opportunities that others couldn’t, and move decisively toward them. And, in a nutshell, that’s what great strategists do.

And one more thing: He knew how to change people’s minds. That’s important because, in civic work, it’s not enough to see the right thing to do. You have to bring others along with you. Martin knew that words weren’t enough. If you wanted to change people’s minds, you needed actions as well. Bold actions.

When he became mayor in 1991, Columbus was at a very low ebb. For 15 years, a handful of business and civic leaders had been searching for ways to turn around the downtown, without much success. For one thing, there was the sheer size of the problem: Block after block of empty storefronts, sleazy bars and porn shops, and some of the tackiest retail imaginable. The good stores had moved out of downtown in the 1960s, and many of the offices had joined them in the 1970s. (No one lived downtown then.) A few new projects had been built—a convention center, a hotel, a new office building or two—but the tide was still running out for downtown.

And beyond that, there was a huge impediment to change, which was the citizens’ deep-seated cynicism. After seeing decades of decline, they thought the downtown was hopeless and any effort to help it was throwing good money after bad. In fact, they thought the same of the city itself. In the citizens’ minds, Columbus was, if not declining, going nowhere and nothing could change it.

So, where do you begin when you’re trying to save a city that doesn’t believe in itself? Martin’s answer was to start with a bang, with what he called his “man on the moon project,” a project so ambitious and difficult to achieve that, when it does succeed, the civic self-doubt fades away. He found such a project on his first day in office, when he opened a closet in the mayor’s office and discovered a complete set of plans for a civic center. A previous mayor had commissioned the plans and then quietly rolled them up and stowed them away, defeated by the project’s politics and finances.

That, Martin decided, would be his “man on the moon project.” He would build the civic center that a line of mayors had talked about but been unable to deliver. To make a long story short, he did just that, and Columbus has an impressive new civic center today. But Martin didn’t stop there. While he was working on the civic center project, he put together a huge bond referendum that in addition to financing the civic center would make sewer improvements, build sidewalks and parks, and construct a major new softball complex near downtown. He campaigned furiously for the referendum and got it passed.

From the outside, this may not seem like much, but in the sleepwalk that was Columbus in the early 1990s, it was a huge awakening. And Martin was just getting started. The sewer project had an interesting feature, he came to understand. It involved running miles of storm water pipes alongside the Chattahoochee River. And here’s where Martin’s knack for strategic thinking came in: Why not turn this sewer project into a major new public asset by placing a river walk on top of it? (The idea wasn’t his, but he once he heard it, he grasped what it could mean.) He approached the city’s foundations and businesses, and they agreed to put up the additional money. The result is one of the largest and most attractive urban river walks in America today, stretching more than 20 miles.

And the softball complex? It became the way that Columbus got a share of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when it served as host for the women’s softball competitions. The city that doubted itself was suddenly seeing itself on international broadcasts, with its beautiful new riverfront improvements as a setting.

I could go on and on about Martin’s accomplishments and how they laid the groundwork for the downtown’s revival. (Again, if you’re interested, read the book.) But at the center of things was a civic leader who combined the mind of a strategist with a shrewd understanding of human nature and what it took to move people.

And these are the things the best leaders do: They see unnoticed assets, find ways of making them greater and far more apparent, and bring others along on the journey. Cities need an army of such people, but sometimes it takes only a few. Or, at the right time and in the right place, just one.

Photo of the Columbus Riverwalk from The Great Project, used with permission

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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.