Citiwire.net

For Release Thursday, February 14, 2012
Citiwire.net

Legendary Chicago planner Daniel Burnham would like Scott Polikov. No timid plans, no boutiqued, half-done solutions. Polikov – attorney turned town planner and public-private partnership consultant – spoke in mid-January to a roomful of rest estate developers, financiers, planners and local officials at an event sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the Urban Land Institute.

Polikov was bursting with big ideas – even for small places.

He told this audience that the key to better development today is a mindset centered on economic strategy. “We never approach a project and start out by just planning,” he said. “We start with a market study, to see what level and what kind of investment will actually produce good results. Planning, in the absence of examining market conditions, ought to be considered malpractice.” This approach could provide more local funding capacity for infrastructure, to make up for diminishing federal capacity.

Proving his point, he put up slides from a small Texas community. The scene looked familiar to anyone who’s seen small cities with neglected centers. Roanoke, Texas, just north of Fort Worth, has a population of 7,000. Despite a median household income of almost $80,000, the city’s center looked weary and worn. It was a tableau all too familiar: aging concrete spread all over, with the usual eruption of power poles and tacky signs pointing to places people already know how to find. Few pedestrians in sight. And because it’s Texas, a predominance of pickup trucks.
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For Release Thursday, November 15, 2012
Citiwire.net

A couple of summers ago, I invited Pike Powers, the Austin business guru who more than anyone else engineered the economic reinvention of Austin a generation ago, to come to Detroit, a place much more in need of reinvention than Austin.

He and several others associated with the Citistates Group spent a couple of days looking at Detroit’s economic challenges, with the support of the Kresge Foundation. Before the first day was concluded, Pike sneaked off to look at TechTown. Arriving late afternoon, he was told he needed security clearance to look around. Using a patented folksy Texas accent, he talked his way past the security point and took a good look.

I still recall the glow on his face when he returned. I wrote down what came next. “This place they call TechTown,” he said, “is totally the key to a turnaround here.” “Everything is there that they need,” he went on, “from a critical mass of entrepreneurs to a supportive infrastructure, topped off with a clear connection to a good university with major investments in technology and medicine and engineering.”

It turns out that’s exactly the same theory of action held by the leadership of TechTown.
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For Release Saturday, June 30, 2012
Citiscope News

Nowhere in the picture most people have of today’s Detroit is there an image of housing shortages. Mention the city and people think of vacant land and boarded up houses and old factories. Not many people imagine a growing cadre of career professionals scrambling for a scarce supply of rental housing.

But that scramble is the new reality. Our Citiscope team stumbled on to this as we interviewed the young and mid-career professionals moving to Detroit to join the Detroit Fellows Revitalization Program. Rena Bradley, who became one of the 29 selected fellows and who would eventually find a loft apartment she loves in Corktown within biking distance to her job at the Detroit Land Bank Authority, recalls “it took me a few weeks to find an apartment.” She landed in Detroit last August just as Live Midtown and Live Downtown programs were starting and found “there was nothing” where she was looking but hotel rooms.

So it doesn’t matter much that the median housing price in Detroit is parked at around $10,000 or that, as the Detroit Free Press recently reported, most sales of good houses in stable areas are for less than $75,000. Young people moving to Detroit want to rent.

Midtown has become a magnet for young and mid-career professionals. Their search for housing is colliding with 96 percent occupancy rates, which Sue Mosey of Midtown, Inc. calls a “very tight market.” For a while, some businesses (under the Live Midtown push) were offering $25,000 grants to employees who would buy in Midtown. That soaked up some of the supply, Mosey said. And while the pipeline seems clogged with demand, the supply is not keeping up. On the sober side of the credit meltdown, banks became wary of funding housing projects. “You had to look at very creative formulas, often involving foundations or corporate support, or you had a gap you couldn’t fill,” she said.

Olga Stella of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation agrees, describing housing finance in recent years as stuck in “a slump of low confidence.” Asked what might catalyze confidence, she pointed to retail. But retail typically doesn’t show up until there’s evidence of enough buyers. That’s why the decision by Whole Foods to build a store at Mack Avenue and John R Street in Midtown is so significant. “It’s not just a store,” Stella said, “it’s a signal to investors that demand is still growing and isn’t likely to stagnate.” Meantime, meeting demand is “slow, hard work, one project at a time.”

Signals aside, there are stirrings of new supply. Both Mosey and Stella point to the Broderick Towers across from the baseball park downtown and the Auburn, set to open this coming October at Cass and Canfield in Midtown.

Sustainable demand for good rentals is not that hard to imagine. In recent years employers such as Quicken Loans, Blue Cross, and Compuware have moved close to 9000 workers from outside the city to downtown. Cultural and arts institutions such as the Detroit Institute of Arts and the College for Creative Studies line the shoulders of Midtown’s Woodward Avenue. A thriving and large urban university, Wayne State, anchors the heart of the corridor. Vanguard Health System is pouring a billion dollars into the Detroit Medical Center.
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For Release Sunday, April 15, 2012
Citiwire.net

“America’s Surprise Comeback City” read the headline tucked into a tight corner of a magazine cover. I was connecting at the Los Angeles airport after a long flight, ready to board a red-eye flight back to the Midwest, and thought I’d do a quick browse of the newsstand. It was the current edition of the National Geographic Traveler that caught my eye.

It had a Cuba story emblazoned on its cover. That was enough to make me reach for my wallet, thinking back to the people and places I visited in Havana a decade ago. But when I picked up the magazine, curious about the comeback story, I was — well, the tag line was “surprise comeback” — at least mildly amazed that a mainstream travel magazine would be among the first to pick up the changing narrative about Detroit.

What’s not surprising is discovering this article came from someone with Detroit roots, Andrew Nelson. Nelson grew up in Detroit and remembers how, in the mid-1960s, the city was fifth on the charts of the largest American cities and at the “top of its game.”

Nelson’s lived in New Orleans for the past three years, and finds it easy to point out that both cities have French beginnings. Most people from elsewhere don’t know that Detroit’s founder, going back all the way to 1701, is — get ready for longer names than we see today — Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac.
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Originally Released August 9, 2008
Citiwire.net

An historic $14 trillion of public and personal debt, a fourth of America’s bridges deficient, more than a fourth of adults obese, and nearly half of the nation’s youth not prepared for a 21^st century economy – what do these baleful effects have in common?

Each of these effects and more like them show what we got for a half-century of an easy-going, profligate, low-efficiency culture.  Though only five percent of the people in the world, we Americans got comfortable with burning 25 percent of the world’s resources. From corporate practices to personal lifestyles, we shoved the consequences of waste on to the backs of the less well off and future generations. We provided schools but didn’t worry if half the students didn’t succeed.

Now costs along with climate change compel Americans to use air and water and land more efficiently, to rethink how we can arrange our lives less tethered to our car keys, to get serious about creating schools that work for every willing child. Read More »