Here are 4 different types of stress that can help our cities become strong towns.
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As small cities make their way back toward a former glory, they face a unique set of challenges in contrast to larger urban growth movements. However, they also enjoy some seldom-realized advantages that might not be obvious to the average onlooker.
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Good restaurants are essential to neighborhood success, and here are four reasons why.
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We took a system where gentrification was a positive force for wealth creation among the underprivileged and, under the guise of improving their situation, changed the system in a way that now primarily benefits the wealthy, where it benefits anyone at all.
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We're about to unwind a huge experiment and it's not likely to go smoothly. Anything we want to accomplish is going to require extraordinary creativity, resourcefulness and political prowess. That's where the Incremental Development Alliance comes in.
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Aaron Brown -- author, college instructor and radio producer from Minnesota's iron range -- joins the podcast to talk about the history of the Iron Range, economic development issues and cultural obstacles to change. You can get Aaron's book, Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range, and read his regular blog at his site, MinnesotaBrown.com.
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None of the incentives for a productive development pattern are there to make it happen. We're just throwing more money at failure. Why?
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Jobs and growth are the results of a productive system, not a proxy for one.
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I've explained before that I spend my days as the designer and coordinator for a business accelerator program, based out of our provincial university. It is a great privilege for me to have been able to shape and grow this program. In a nutshell, we provide funding (including living expenses) and coaching for talented people who want to turn their skills into a business. Being a city builder, this has been an amazing opportunity to work side by side with the people who fill storefronts, hire local people, open workshops and factories, and change cities through their presence. This week has been uplifting and exciting for me because our applicants for this summer are finally in, and we are now selecting our new cohort for the program.
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The problem with modern capitalism is that there are not enough capitalists. We need a system that encourages diverse ownership of capital if we want to build and support the middle-class.
Read MoreThirty two new jobs (projected), a million dollars in direct subsidies and millions more in transportation funding later, we’ve managed to move two businesses from one Minnesota community to another. And we call that “creating” jobs and businesses.
Rome (AD 56): They make a desert and call it peace.
America (AD 2014): They relocate a business and call it growth.
Have we fallen so far that telling ourselves lies is the best we can do?
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Due diligence: Running the numbers, running them again, and predicting the future outlook against all known variables. Then, be skeptical still.
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The real estate entitlement process is like walking a tightrope. How can we get more developers safely across?
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What's the first task in a risk-oriented economic development strategy?
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What's your economic development lure: lower risk or higher reward?
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We shouldn’t build infrastructure for the sake of creating jobs. Jobs and economic growth are a result of having a productive system in place, not the other way around. We need to create real net wealth that benefits not only the local communities, but the region as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, jobs are great. But, building infrastructure with the primary purpose of creating jobs, with little consideration to context, is setting a bad precedence and setting up communities for unexpected liabilities.
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For a city to get there, current priorities need to be realigned and everyone -- from the mayor, the city engineer, the maintenance worker and everyone in between -- needs to be working to get more value out of our existing investments.
Read MoreIt seems like you can’t get anything developed downtown without some sort of tax deal. Whether you politically agree with these tax subsidies doesn’t matter, what matters is we acknowledge that we can’t keep this as the status quo for much longer.
The new economy, which I argue that were transitioning into, will require multiple players who can produce small-scale, incremental development. This is how urbanism will be accomplished in the next 20 years, but it will probably need to occur outside of contemporary channels. This means creatively circumventing tradition lending methods, bypassing euclidean zoning and approval processes with out-dated bureaucratic methods and by avoiding the single developer mentality.
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