Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

  • About
  • Archives

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.

The Secrets of Perspective

March 10, 2011 By Otis White

There are five essential ingredients for civic leadership: interest, knowledge, resources, position and skills. To explain briefly: To be leaders, people need to be interested in civic work, otherwise . . . well, they won’t do it. They need to know the community’s challenges and opportunities and how the community deals with change. They need to bring resources (connections to money and votes are the traditional ones, but access to ideas is fast becoming the third). They need a position that confers a legitimate place among community leaders; it can be mayor, chamber of commerce leader, neighborhood association chair, non-profit leader or interest-group representative. And they need the skills of leadership, which increasingly are about building consensus. Put these ingredients together, stir vigorously and, voila, you have a leader.

But while these ingredients will earn you a place among leaders, they won’t make you a great or even good leader. For that, you need a sixth ingredient: perspective. There are two parts to perspective. The first is learning to see problems as part of a thinking process and not just as issues. In doing so, you’ll sometimes find that you and your fellow leaders are thinking about things the wrong way. The second part is to identify which events in communities are replays of long-standing problems and opportunities, and which are truly new.

Why is this important? Because the job of civic leaders is to deal with their community’s most pressing problems. If you can’t answer this question—is this a new problem or have we dealt with it before?—then almost surely you will not find good solutions. Don’t get me wrong. Answering this question won’t give you the solutions, but knowing the answer will guide how you’ll search for them.

You can see how this works by looking at a common problem: downtown revitalization. If your city has a downtown, leaders have probably been trying to “save” it since the 1920s, when the automobile became popular and personal mobility expanded dramatically. As people moved farther out, retail followed, and many downtown stores shut their doors or joined the exodus. What followed was one failed attempt after another to compete with the new shopping centers and enclosed malls: free-parking schemes, pedestrian malls, skywalks and urban shopping centers.

Downtowns began turning around in the 1980s when leaders changed their perspective. Rather than asking how they could make central business districts more like suburban retail areas, they asked how they could take advantage of the things that made downtowns unique: historic buildings, sidewalks, mixed uses, access to transit and so on. They added some new ideas, like business improvement districts that improved safety and maintained streetscapes, and at long last downtowns began turning around.

You can see how the two parts of perspective worked here. First, leaders recognized that they had a long history with downtown revitalization and that most of their efforts had been disappointing. Second, they looked at the decision-making process itself and realized their greatest problem was how they were thinking about the problem.

For familiar issues, then, studying the record and examining the decision-making process will often yield new perspectives and better results. But what about problems that are truly new? The good news is that there aren’t many new of them. Most of the issues facing cities have been seen in some form or other before. But every once in a while, something comes along that has no antecedent.

The automobile presented that kind of challenge in the 1920s. Nothing before it—not horse-drawn carriages, steam-engine railroads or electric trolleys and subways—prepared cities for cheap personal automobiles. Previous generations of leaders did many things wrong in dealing with the car (running major highways through the heart of cities, for one), but in many ways it is amazing they coped as well as they did, considering the swiftness and magnitude of the challenge.

Today, I can think of only two major issues that are similarly without precedent. The first is the internet and in particular its effect on politics and civic involvement. This may be more an opportunity than a challenge, but it will be an important force in the future. From reporting common problems (through innovations like New York’s 311 system) to organizing protesters and volunteers, the internet is changing how citizens and leaders interact—and maybe even who becomes leaders in the future.

The second is the problem of retrofitting suburbs for their more urban futures. Yes, we do have a record of successfully remaking some suburban-style areas around mixed use and transit, but the scale of change in the suburbs of the past 20 years has been so vast—unimaginable shifts in demographics, overwhelmed transportation infrastructure, aging households, and social and public safety problems that were once exclusive to inner cities—that it’s hard seeing how the rickety political and civic structures of the suburbs can cope.

What do you do when the problems or opportunities are truly unprecedented? How do you find the right perspective? Studying the past won’t help. Rather, you have to become a student of the present and keep up with what your peers in other cities are doing. (This is why access to ideas is becoming a key resource for leaders.)

But also be skeptical. In the breathless world of news and information today, first reports are often wrong. Breakthrough ideas are sometimes overstated or depend on factors that don’t apply to your situation. Think of unintended consequences and guard against the “confirmation bias” of seeing what you want to see. And above all, grant that complex problems rarely have simple solutions. If they did, then free parking really would have turned around downtowns.

Recent Posts

  • The Next Urban Comeback
  • A Reservoir for Civic Progress
  • How a Leader Assembles a Winning Team
  • What Smart Mayors Can Learn from the Turnaround of Central Park
  • How Communities Can Thrive in a Post-Newspaper World
  • Seven Habits of Highly Successful Civic Projects
  • When Bad Things Happen to Good Governments
  • How Citizen Engagement Could Save State Politics
  • How Odd Couples, Complementary Needs, and Chance Can Change Cities
  • A Better Way to Teach Civic Leadership
  • The Worst Management Idea of the 20th Century
  • How to Deal with a Demagogue
  • What Government Is Good At
  • Return to Sender
  • The Loneliness of the Courageous Leader
  • A Better Way of Judging Candidates
  • How to Build an Army of Supporters
  • A Beginner’s Guide to Facilitation
  • The Temperament of Great Leaders
  • Units of Civic Progress
  • Leadership as “a Kind of Genius”
  • How to Read a Flawed Book About Cities
  • A Mayor’s Test for Good Decisions
  • How to Manage a Crisis Before It Happens
  • Lesson Seven: Process and Results

Categories

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.

Follow Us on Mastodon

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