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Monday, September 29th, 2014
Thoughts On My Neighborhood Post-Ferguson
Some folks asked me to comment on Ferguson, MO. I don't have anything to add to the massive amount that has already been written, but it did get me thinking about my own neighborhood and the racial dynamics that exist in America.
I live in a mixed race neighborhood on the North Side of Indianapolis called various names, including South of Broad Ripple (SoBro) and Keystone-Monon. It's a racially diverse area, mostly featuring wood frame 2-3br/1-ba worker cottages built around wartime. It's likely always been working class or starter home housing as the smallness of the homes limits their value in a city where there are near infinite tracts of similar building stock.
If asked to guess at the racial mix, I would have said 70% white/30% black. Clicking into the NYT census viewer, I discovered that my census tract is actually 49% black/42% white. Here's a screen shot (click to enlarge):
As you can see, my tract lies along a diagonal transition area from predominantly white to predominantly black areas. The tract immediately north of me is 82% white. The one immediately south is 62% black, and south of that black population percentage runs upwards of the 90s. It's easy to see how difficult it can be to eyeball the makeup of the area.
Just to the west is Meridian-Kessler, one of the city's most desirable residential neighborhoods. About a mile and a half north is the core of Broad Ripple, a commercial district known for its nightlife aimed at the 20s set.
One might think this area is primed for gentrification, but that's not the case. As it happens, those more desirable neighborhoods I mentioned themselves have had a lot of challenges such as abandoned homes and commercial vacancies. There's virtually nothing that could be considered gentrification in Indianapolis generally, and certainly not at extensive scale.
Because of its city location proximate to desirable commercial nodes, the area has seen an influx of young families, often in their 20s with one young child. Some savvy rehabbers have also purchased. But the backbone of the neighborhood remains the black and white working class, often homeowners.
Because there's longstanding integration and little gentrification pressure – and because unlike Ferguson this area is embedded inside of a large and diverse municipality, I haven't sense much in the way of racial tensions. People seem quite friendly to each other to the most part. Personally I think it's a great neighborhood and love living there. So does everyone else I've talked to.
On the surface, this would appear to be a successful integrated neighborhood, by American standards especially. But everything is not as it seems.
I've only lived here about eight months, but what I observed is similar to what I previously saw in Fountain Square, a type of parallel societies. In Fountain Square I called this "Artists and Appalachians." In that case both groups are white. They share the same neighborhood geography, and even patronize some of the same establishments such as Peppy's Grill and the Liquor Cabinet, but there was little social interaction between them apart from surface pleasantries.
I see the same here, only with a racial dimension. Blacks and whites get along, and even patronize some of the same stores, but there does not appear to be much in the way of real social capital that has developed between the two groups. This leaves the neighborhood extremely vulnerable to racial divisiveness if anything goes wrong.
This was illustrated to me by our local neighborhood group on the Next Door platform. This app is very popular in my neighborhood. However, judging from the avatar photos, it appears to be overwhelmingly white people who use it. Here's an application that is building social capital in the neighborhood – I used to it meet my neighbors at the corner when I needed to borrow an extension ladder – but which has developed along racial boundaries. It seems to be spreading by word of mouth, and since existing social networks seem to be predominantly intra-race, it's no surprise the online manifestations of them are as well.
There have been some property crimes in the area recently. This is sadly ubiquitous in all urban neighborhoods these days. My building (especially the garages) in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood was burglarized many times and we had to spend a lot of money to install high security doors and locks to try to stop it. My aunt and uncle just had their car stolen in the heart of Lincoln Park and even before that happened they told me theft was out of control there. These are two of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Chicago. Even in my rural hometown theft is a common occurrence.
In short, I have no reason to believe the activity in my area is that unusual, either compared to other neighborhoods, or maybe even compared to the neighborhood's own past. But thanks to apps like Next Door, we now know about every single incident of anything that occurs, whereas before that we would all have just gone about our business blissfully unaware of a lawnmower theft a couple blocks over unless it was we ourselves or someone we knew personally that got hit. (A neighborhood old timer posted a thread on Next Door to this very effect, saying that this ebb and flow of theft has been happening since he moved in during the 1970s)
As it happens, various neighbors believe believe they identified the culprit behind many similar incidents. As it happens, he's an 18 year old black man from the neighborhood. I don't know if he's guilty or not, but apparently there's a warrant out for him and he posted pictures of himself on Facebook pointing a pistol at the camera and such.
While people were zeroing in on their culprit, I noticed some started viewing any young black guy pausing too long in front of their house as suspicious. This was only a brief blip until such time as the specific person of interest was identified. However, this adds an instant racial dimension to matters, like it or not.
This wasn't motivated by racial animus, but rather fear of being burglarized in a place where such burglaries were in fact occurring and where there was evidence that a particular black male was committing it. People in Lincoln Park and Lakeview can afford to take a philosophical view of theft. They are wealthy enough that having say a bicycle stolen is more annoyance than threat.
By contrast, in my working class area, not everyone can just whip out their debit card every time something goes wrong. In a response to an NYT piece extolling the virtues of minimalism, Tumblr writer Vruba suggested that living with minimal possessions is luxury for the well off:
Wealth is…having options and the ability to take on risk. If you see someone on the street dressed like a middle-class person (say, in clean jeans and a striped shirt), how do you know whether they're lower middle class or upper middle class? I think one of the best indicators is how much they're carrying….If I were rich, I would carry a MacBook Air, an iPad mini as a reader, and my wallet. My wallet would serve as everything else that's in my backpack now. Go out on the street and look, and I bet you'll see that the richer people are carrying less.
In a neighborhood where some people are only a few rungs up on the ladder that provides stability in life, vigilance over your stuff is important, because it's not easily replaced. Only half of American households could come up with $400 in an emergency. Replacing a lawn mower probably means going into credit card debt (or more credit card debt) for them.
Nevertheless, what this illustrates to me is the potential racial powder keg that lies under the surface of even seemingly placid and well-integrated communities. Race is simply an inescapable subtext to any interaction that crosses the color line, no matter how much we try to avoid it, and it adds contingent risk to social stability.
Why do I say this? Because I believe there's little to no interracial social capital in these places that can withstand a hit to neighborhood cohesion. There's no genuine solidarity that comes from genuinely living life together in a way that goes deeper than everyday pleasantries. Thus the risk that racial tensions can end up erupting in some way is ever present.
This is not unique at all to my neighborhood, which, as I said and want to stress again, is a great place full of great people. For example, a couple weeks ago I had drinks with someone in Cincinnati whose neighborhood had nearly identical demographics and dynamics, right down to the use of Next Door. We have tried to solve racial problems in America through institutional solutions. As important as many of those are, they are not a substitute for the human connections that allow us to weather the vagaries of life together.
How do we create interracial social capital? It's not easy. Earlier this year I had dinner with a resident of Over the Rhine in Cincinnati who wanted to create a personal connection to his black neighbors, but wasn't sure how. Frankly none of us at dinner had any great ideas. I suggested perhaps joining a local black church, but that only works if attending church is something you do.
As the Next Door case shows, the path of least resistance doesn't work here. Our default pathways for building social networks follow the color lines. And heck, books have been written about the decline in social capital within white America itself. Crossing the color line is even more difficult and requires a high degree of intentionality.
I spent some time in the Walltown neighborhood of Durham, NC last week. Walltown is a historically black neighborhood adjacent to Duke University. While gentrification and university encroachment are issues, again the housing stock type limits upside on pricing. There has been some influx of white resident as well as Latinos, but a strong black presence is still there.
I visited with people from a black church there as part of a tour led by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgove, a white resident who co-founded Rutba House, a Christian intentional community (their term is "new monasticism"). Half of their spaces are allocated for those in need of transitional housing (the homeless, ex-offenders, etc), mostly people of color. I'd guess Jonathan is to the left of your average Boulder resident. He named Rutba House after a town in Iraq he was at during a private 2003 peace tour of the country during the war, which should give you an idea.
A big part of what the various faith groups there are doing is trying to do is figure out a way for blacks and whites to actually exist together in real community in Walltown, not just live in the same geography. I think he'd be the first to tell you that they've had at best partial success. This shows the difficulty, even with lots of people of various races committing to make it work.
What's the answer? I don't know, but I do believe a big part of the problem is lack of social capital at ground level. Again, this isn't necessarily solely a matter of race, as the Fountain Square example illustrates, but in multi-racial neighborhoods the racial dimension is always present to some extent and certainly amplifies things. So it shouldn't surprise us that even in places where everyone does appear to get along, it doesn't necessarily take much to set things off. I think most Midwest cities could easily have social unrest with the right triggering incident. While there are some unique aspects to Ferguson such as the political geography of St. Louis metro, no city should feel superior just because it didn't happen there.
While I don't pretend to have all the answers, I think we ought to spend some time thinking about the ways technology can actually make things worse. Not only does social media fan the flames of every debate – Twitter and Facebook may be great for many things, but substantive discourse isn't one of them – but apps like Next Door that are designed to create social capital may actually have the unintended side effect of deepening racial divisions. This despite the fact that the one person I know who works for Next Door is passionate about creating the kind of interracial social capital I'm describing.
This perhaps should be a cautionary tale when it comes to technology-centric views of solving urban problems. There's no app for solving America's persistent racial gaps.
PS: I will be aggressively moderating comments or disabling commenting on this post if necessary.
Sunday, August 10th, 2014
Replay: Suburbs and Sacred Space
[ I'm doing a three part mini-series this week on sacred space and architecture. I start off today with one I wrote last year based on remarks I have at a conference in Anaheim - Aaron. ]
This post originally appeared in New Geography on June 7, 2013.
Suburbs are often unfairly maligned as lacking the qualities that make cities great. But one place that criticism can be fair is in the area of sacred space. There most certainly is sacred space in the suburbs, but usually less of it than in the city both quantitatively and qualitatively. In fact, the comparative lack of sacred space is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the suburb that makes it "sub" urban, that is, in a sense lesser than the city.
Lewis Mumford put it this way:
Behind the wall of the city life rested on a common foundation, set as deep as the universe itself: the city was nothing less than the home of a powerful god. The architectural and sculptural symbols that made this fact visible lifted the city far above the village or country town….To be a resident of the city was to have a place in man's true home, the great cosmos itself.
Mumford was onto something here in positing how great temples and such distinguished the city as unique.
What Is Sacred Space?
Mumford also hints at what makes something truly sacred space. We should clearly distinguish between what is merely public space and truly sacred space. The key to sacred space is the linkage to the transcendent. That is, sacred space connects us to something beyond or bigger than our surroundings, our present existence, and even ourselves.
Here are three ways sacred space can do that. It can:
- Connect us to a larger spiritual or religious reality, as in our Mumford example. This is the most obvious case.
- Serve as a locus or repository of the culture and traditions of a people.
- Be a temporal connection between the present and the past and/or the future.
As one example, consider the Indiana World War Memorial in downtown Indianapolis.
This building is of course a symbol of the bedrock American values of that community and the willingness of its people to die to defend them yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Thus it is both a cultural repository and a temporal linkage.
Also note the use of neoclassicism. The use of neoclassical architecture anchors Indianapolis and Indiana firmly within the 2,500 year history of Western Civilization, as a link in a chain of peoples connected by shared, timeless values and extending backwards and forward throughout time, thus achieving a sort of immortality. This building is a statement of the permanence of this community, its people, and their values.
We can also think of a radically different space such as Times Square, and how it has played host to so many civic celebrations and traditions over the years such that it has become not just a local but a national repository of our culture. The ball dropping on New Year's Eve is an obvious example. But consider also this iconic photo.
This is one of the most famous pictures from the war era and I don't think it's any surprise it was taken Times Square.
How Suburbs Are Comparatively Lacking in Sacred Space
Let's apply the definition of sacred space to the suburbs. Yes, suburbs do have war memorials and culture and traditions and churches, but in general these are qualitatively different from what is found in the city core. Here are three reasons why.
1. Suburban traditions and spaces are often ephemeral and generational. When I was in high school, everybody liked to go to a place called Down Home Pizza in Corydon on the weekends. And that was something kids from every high school in the area did, not just those from mine. Today that place is long gone. And the kids are doing something else, whatever that may be. In fact, it's amazing how many of the places and traditions from my high school days are already gone after only 25 years because of physical and economic changes in the community such as restaurants and stores going out of business.
This happens in the city too, like when the department stores went under, taking their white-gloved tea rituals and the like with them. But to a much greater extent than the city, suburbs rely on commercial establishments as focal points of shared experience, and by their very nature those tend to come and go. And suburbs have not to nearly as a great a degree established truly trans-generation rituals and spaces.
2. Lack of transcendent scale. This is also something Mumford hints at. The "human scale" is a big buzzword in urbanism today. Contrary to what many say, the suburbs actually do a pretty good job of the human scale, especially from an automobile era perspective. But a unique essence of urbanity and often of transcendent experience itself is what we might call the "anti-human scale." British writer Will Wiles put it this way:
The "human scale" only tells part of the story of the city – after all, this can be found in villages and small towns. All cities need sublimity, a touch of holy terror, a defiance of human scale that asserts connection to the greater urban whole.
The sheer scale of something like the Indiana War Memorial, which is a very imposing structure inside and out, renders it qualitatively different that your average small scale suburban memorial. This is true not just physically but also in terms of the humanity represented. That memorial stands for an entire state, not just a single town. Which is the same reason there may be more suburban school kids who have visited their state capital or the US Capitol than their local village hall. There's a reason the US Capitol and Lincoln Memorial and such have such powerful resonance. They represent an entire nation and a vast sea of humanity. Cities also participate in this scale effect.
3. Low quality religious architecture. When it comes to the most obvious category of sacred space, the religious building, the suburbs also fall flat. That's because Protestant Christianity, the largest suburban religious strain, has itself become unmoored from the transcendent. This is clear, for example, from the rise of what has been dubbed "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" as a dominant worldview, especially among the young.
The average suburban megachurch is an architectural horror show. The best of them generally rise to the level of an upscale corporate conference center. The worst are like "That 70's High School".
Someone once said that all sin results from failing to believe one of the "4 G's" about God, namely, God is great, God is good, God is gracious, and God is glorious. Applying that to religious life generally, in modern Evangelical churches, God may be very good and gracious, but He's doesn't seem all that great, and He's certainly not very glorious. This is religion that can inspire good works, but not great ones. There's no trace of the overwhelming glory of God in nearly any of these structures. There's no longer a faith like the Lutheranism of Johann Sebastian Bach that can inspire the greatest works of human artistic achievement. Because modern suburban church architecture is so poor and so disposable, it diminishes the impact of sacredness in the space.
The recent stories about the sale of Orange County's Crystal Cathedral, designed by Philip Johnson, brings to mind an exception that proves the rule.
Unsurprisingly it was the Catholic Church that bought it. Unlike Protestantism, Catholicism has always had a theology of place. And they've always used architecture and art as a way of telling the story of the gospel. Though obviously not in this case, they've also used Gothic sort of like neoclassical architecture as a way creating a sense of permanence and linkage to an everlasting, eternal church.
So sacred space is one area where the suburbs really are deficient versus the city. But how important is this? Metropolitan areas today are mosaics. In an ever more complex and competitive global economy, every part of a region, city and suburb, needs to know its role on the team and bring it's A-game. Just as there's no need for every job to be located downtown, there's no need for every major piece of sacred space in a region to be replicated in every suburb. Downtown does just nicely. However, this is one reason that while economically the core may no longer dominate a region, a healthy center still plays a key role in overall regional vitality. That's because it remains home to things like the major pieces of sacred space such as war memorials and cathedrals that bind a region together and give it civilizational permanence, meaning, and purpose beyond the mundane.
This article was adapted from remarks at the No Place Like Home conference on June 3, 2013 in Anaheim, CA.
Monday, July 21st, 2014
Why Does Louisville Have Better Restaurants Than Indianapolis?
I was briefly back on the homefront earlier this month to check out the now fully opened Big Four Bridge pedestrian path across the Ohio River in Louisville. While there I spent some time in NuLu, a retail and restaurant district centered on Market St. just east of downtown, and had dinner at a French bistro type place called La Coop. This place focuses on what I'd call the basics – it's not trying to be a super high end kind of place. But I'm not going to lie, the undistinguished frites aside, the meal was spectacular front to back, and my date agreed.
Louisville is known for its many high quality restaurants. I doubt La Coop is tops on many people's list, nor does it aspire to be. Yet preparing to drive back to Indy I was struck that La Coop is better than any restaurant in Indianapolis. My meal at La Coop was probably better than any one I'd had in Indy since L'Explorateur closed in 2009. And that's a not uncommon occurrence when dining in Louisville. What's more, La Coop was bustling by 8pm on a Tuesday night. While tables were certainly available, you can't assume you can just walk in to a top restaurant there without a reservation, even on a weeknight.
Louisville clearly values fine dining in a way that Indianapolis doesn't. Metro Indy is larger, better educated, richer, and much less provincial. Given that amenities generally fall along a size-wealth slope, by default you'd think Indy would do better on the restaurant front. But it doesn't. Why is this?
Louisville clearly punches above its weight on restaurants. Part of this is due to the presence of a major culinary school. But that doesn't explain the demand side of the equation. What does?
I see this as resulting at least in part from a cultural divide between the Midwest and the South, which seems to fall somewhere between these two cities. I argue the stronger aristocratic heritage of the South creates the conditions in which excellence is encouraged (or at least respected), versus the leveling democratic social state of the Midwest that anathematizes any distinctions between high and low and thus creates a climate in which excellence is disparaged (or distrusted at best).
Tocqueville is of course the best writer on the differences between aristocracy and democracy. Of aristocratic heritage himself, he recognized the overall superiority of the democratic state in uplifting the common man. The average condition in a democratic social state he would note, is higher than that of an aristocracy. He also saw clearly the many flaws of the aristocratic state. Yet he also realized that with the passing of aristocracy, things would be lost, especially in the realm of fine arts and refinement more broadly construed.
Tocqueville (among others) noted that the South was the most aristocratic region of the United States. That doesn't mean he approved. In fact, he was not a fan of the US South, and wrote of its many manifest flaws, including the injustice of slavery and the many pernicious effects it had on the character of whites as well.
One of traits of aristocracy that seems to remain present in the South is the existence and embrace of an aristocratic class or caste. In many cases this is family based, such that, for example, you could never become fully part of the elite of Charleston as an outsider no matter how much money, talent, or class you have. But carpetbaggers and the nouveau riche are able to assimilate to some degree.
As with a feudal landholding, this aristocratic class exists as part of an integrated system with the lower classes. Thus the lower classes not only recognize the rights of aristocratic class to homage and such, the elites can even be a source of pride to ordinary residents of the community.
In this system, the upper class can cultivate high end tastes without incurring the opprobrium of the community. They are literally a class apart and are expected to depart from the average resident in terms of tastes and manners.
We see this clearly in the case of the so-called "Millionaire's Row" at the Kentucky Derby. Actually, many Louisville locals never even attend the Kentucky Derby, instead attending the Kentucky Oaks, which is held the day before and is known as the race for the locals. (The Oaks itself attracts over 100,000 attendees). Most of them will certainly never visit the Derby's more elite precincts. Yet, seeing the presence of celebrities and local elites in their finery on TV doesn't produce resentment, but rather pride. The conspicuous consumption and lavish traditions of elite Louisville are something the average resident sees as reflecting well on their community as a whole, and hence to some extent even on themselves.
In terms of how this affects restaurants, Louisville's elite can patronize high quality, high status establishments without shame. There is nothing seen as wrong in the community with them pursuing aristocratic tastes. Again, the high quality of Louisville's restaurants can be a source of pride even to those who don't patronize them. There are, of course, class tensions in Louisville such as the East End-South End divide. But class conflict itself implies multiple classes of people.
The situation is totally different in Indianapolis. In Indiana, the idea of an aristocratic type class would be viewed with hostility. There's a democratic social state norm in which anyone who is viewed as too uppity is seen as having a moral defect. There's only supposed to be one class of people. This has its virtues, but has debilitating effects as well. Take for example the classic line "He might have book learning but he doesn't have any common sense." You literally hear this in Indiana. Admittedly, in my case it may have been true. But the moral system underpinning it clearly explains why education is held in such low regard in the Midwest. It's not just that education as such is viewed as not worth it; the pursuit of education indicates a type of moral deficiency.
So take a look at the traditions of the Indianapolis 500. Obviously US auto racing has a different culture than horse racing. But it still aligns with the social state. The 500 is a classic everyman's type event, with a blue collar ethos, in which actual attendance by locals plays a major role. There are some celebrities of course, but celebrity/elite culture plays a very limited role there in contrast to the Kentucky Derby and certainly than international auto racing such as Formula 1. (The biggest personalities at the 500 are those with a particularly local traditional appeal – like Jim Nabors and Florence Henderson – versus contemporary celebrity star power).
This bleeds through into nearly every aspect of the civic culture in the state. I've long noted that there's no culture of connoisseurship in Indianapolis. This is true for pretty much everything. Restaurants are but one example. While much better on average than they used to be, and certainly not bad by any means, Indy's restaurants don't measure up to Louisville's with the notable exception of breakfast places. As the case with the aforementioned L'Exporateur shows, when Indy chefs do decide to put out a world class product, it isn't patronized because it isn't valued. It's not about culinary talent, it's about the customer base or lack thereof. The chef behind L'Ex opened a pizza place next. It should be no surprise that Indianapolis Monthly once had a cover story dubbing the city "Chain City, USA."
My understanding is that there is a group of hardcore food and wine folks in Indy, but they do most of their consumption at private dinners and out of their private cellars. Public displays of refinement or luxurious consumption in Indianapolis are simply not acceptable.
This is but one example of how the pursuit of excellence in all varieties is disparaged and subject to active suppression in the state. This is hardly limited to Indiana and is a near universal Midwestern trait from what I've seen. Chicago offers the major exception, and I'll exclude Minnesota as well for now since I don't fully grok the culture there.
It's been said pejoratively that "Indiana is the 'middle finger of the South' sticking into the Midwest." And while it's true that parts of Southern Indiana such as my hometown, being in Louisville's orbit, have a heavy Southern influence, the state is not Southern in my view. It's very different culturally and here we have one example. I easily see the same dynamic that exists in Indiana to various degrees in Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
That this is a cultural value is most clearly seen in the exceptions that prove the rule, like Columbus, Indiana. Columbus is by far the most successful small industrial city in the state, and home to a world-renowned collection of modern architecture among other distinctives. In a major essay on that city, I noted that "in Columbus, excellence is not a byword." This was perhaps imposed externally by local business magnate J. Irwin Miller, but appears to have been stamped to some degree on the character of the community. As local business owner Tony Moravec put it, "We do things first class here." Whether the value will be retained or dissipate now that Miller is dead remains to be seen, but it's still there for now.
But in a state replete with struggling communities, has anyplace ever looked to imitate Columbus? Has it been held up as a model? No. Why not? It's because Indiana as a whole rejects the values that made Columbus successful. J. Irwin Miller famously said that "a mediocrity is expensive." True, but that misses the point re:Indiana. Mediocrity isn't an economic value in the state. It's a moral value. People aren't choosing mediocrity in the mistaken belief that it's cheap. They think aspiring to better is a character defect. That sacralization of average is why many of its communities are willing to martyr themselves in its honor. And if a place tries to aspire to better, don't worry. The General Assembly will soon be introducing legislation to make sure that doesn't spread.
This produces an enormous cultural headwind that is an impediment to even the cultural elite in their attempts to create high quality things, from good architecture to good restaurants. The attempts are compromised both via the internalization of this value, and external forces expressing it. As Paul Graham put it:
How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that.
The restaurants of Indianapolis are well beyond mediocre, but they have clearly been affected by this characteristic of the social state in which they are operating.
One exception to this rule about the pursuit of excellence is in sports, and it's a telling one. Hoosiers and Midwesterners want to see their teams win, but they want to see them win the right way and with the right kind of people that reflect the character of the state's residents. In the South they just want wins and they don't care how they get them.
Do you think anybody in Kentucky cares about the Calipari Way as long as UK is racking up wins and championships? Is it any surprise that it's North Carolina where athletes get A's in fake classes? Nobody cares in the South as long the wins come and behavior doesn't get so bad it brings national publicity.
By contrast, Big Ten schools by and large expect their players to get an education and graduate, to demonstrate good character, and there's a lifelong commitment and bond between coaches, fans, and players. When IU tried to import a UK style into its program with the Kelvin Sampson hire, the fanbase rejected it almost immediately. (By the way, I'll never consider Penn State a Big Ten school, and Pennsylvania is not the Midwest). It's similar in the way that the brawl era Pacers saw their fan support vaporize.
In Indiana particularly, from Milan High School to Steve Alford's Indiana Hoosiers, the self-effacing, fundamentally sound, clean cut, small town type of player and team had big success. (Oscar Robertson was a player in the same mold. Though he never got his due at the time thanks to racism, he shows that even black Indiana players exhibited the same character traits). This perhaps convinced Hoosiers that their preferred style of doing things would bring success as well.
Unfortunately that hasn't played out much recently, either in sports or economically. This produces cognitive dissonance and a sense of bitterness about a world that seems to have gone wrong. As I wrote re:Columbus and about how that city's embrace of excellence paid economic rewards in a world where cheap places to do business are a dime a dozen:
It isn't just something that affects architecture….This is a place with high standards for itself. This pays huge dividends in the economic development sphere. In a competitive world, only firms that deliver excellence can survive the brutal global competition. Which workers are more likely to produce excellent products, ones that demand excellence in their own communities, or ones who disparage it? How can any investor believe that residents who tolerate a run down, mediocre community for their own family to live in will suddenly start taking pride in the products coming off their employers' production lines? It makes no sense at all.
I'm not sure the Midwest understands this lesson, or would take heed of it if it did. Rather there is, I detect, a martyrdom complex. People in the Midwest believe they are entitled to success the way they used to enjoy it because they live the right way. But if they don't get it, at least their communities can die with their values intact. If this is in fact the case, it's impossible to gainsay the decision. It's even admirable in a sense. I myself would never adopt the values of UK basketball no matter how many championships it would bring. But then again I'm a Hoosier so of course I feel that way.
In any case, as Richard Longworth put it in his book about the failures of the Midwest in the age of globalization, "The first task is to tell the truth." Simply stating the obvious truth that Louisville has better restaurants than Indy may generate blowback. But the larger and more painful truth is that Indiana and the Midwest have embraced mediocrity as a value in a way that hobbles the pursuit of excellence there, and has terrible economic and other consequences that go far beyond restaurants. Unless and until that truth is faced and things change, which may require something like an influx of outsiders not wedded to the status quo, the enormous potential of this region and its people will continue to be squandered.
Sunday, June 29th, 2014
Columbus: Getting Fit For the Competition Ahead
This is the last of my entries prompted by my recent trip to Columbus. I've noted before that Columbus and Indianapolis are twin cities in many ways, though with some important differences.
One of those differences is that the civic discussion in Indianapolis today is heavily driven by the urgency of reversing the decline of Marion County as the city of Indianapolis increasingly loses out demographically and economically to its suburbs. In Columbus, by contrast, I didn't sense nearly the same concern about suburban competition. While again I only have limited data points to go by, what conversations I did have if anything suggested to me that the city of Columbus thinks it's holding most of the cards in the region. I suggest letting Indianapolis be a cautionary tale, and that Columbus should be much more focused on how to manage future suburban competition than it presently seems to be.
By the late 1960s Indianapolis had, like most cities, been steadily losing ground to suburban development. The response was a city-county merger called Unigov* that in effect annexed all important contemporary suburbs are well as most of the empty land that would be urbanized in the next two decades. This allowed Indianapolis to capture that suburban tax base and avoid many of the problems that plagued other older cities during the 1970s.
Fast forward to the present and it's clear that the Unigov model is out of gas. Marion County is now largely full apart from some areas in the southern parts, and has a fairly flat growth curve in population. Most the growth is now in the collar counties. What's more, there's been a huge employment shift as well, with the city losing 41,000 jobs since 2000 and the suburbs gaining 78,000. I gave an overview of the dynamics in a previous post.
Today Indianapolis has a serious problem on its hand. How did this happen? It's pretty simple. Unigov bought he city 40 years. But what did it do with that time? It built up its downtown to one of America's best, a legitimately impressive and important accomplishment. But beyond that it was basically business as usual. Unfortunately, the 5.5 square miles of downtown can't carry the rest of the city's nearly 400. The city should have been aggressively preparing for the day when Unigov would reach exhaustion. But it did not.
Columbus utilized a similar technique to Unigov by aggressively annexing suburban development. And it had fairly similar results, doing well and avoiding the problems. But it seems to be widely accepted in Columbus that the city is nearing the end of its growth by annexation phase. While unlike in Indiana, Ohio makes it fairly easy to annex across county lines, and Columbus extends into multiple counties already, annexation has slowed to a crawl. In part I'm told that they are now reaching into territories that have other sources of water than the city of Columbus water utility, and thus the city has less leverage to annex than before. While technically not hemmed in, Columbus has less room for growth than before. This raises the question of when the dynamics of decline will set in within the newly stagnant city.
Columbus appears to be in better shape than Indy right now. I'd say this is for a few reasons. First, Franklin County, Columbus' home base, is geographically bigger than Indy's Marion County, giving Columbus a larger area of natural historic dominance. Columbus is also home to newer office/retail suburban development than Indianapolis. For example, Indy's Keystone Crossing area is based on edge city and power center templates that are dated, while the corresponding Easton area in Columbus is newer and built to a lifestyle center type template that's a bit more up to date. Columbus similarly has the relatively new Polaris area inside its borders.
What's more, Columbus' suburbs are comparatively underdeveloped and thus aren't rivals as of yet. Indianapolis has five suburbs with more than 50,000 people – two of them with more than 80,000. Columbus has none. Only Dublin, which has 43,000 people, 9.5 million square feet of office space, and major downtown development ambitions, appears to be a full scale competitor at this point. Most other suburban municipalities are much smaller (e.g., New Albany has less than 10,000 people) and/or enclosed by the city of Columbus and thus limited in growth. Favored quarter suburban Delaware County has 185,000 people (some of which are in the city of Columbus) vs. nearly 300,000 for analogous Hamilton County, IN. What's more, Hamilton County is far ahead in infrastructure vs. Delaware County. Delaware County has next to no upgraded east-west or "crosstown" arterials. Two reservoirs there make developing them difficult, with one of them separating I-71 from the developed parts of the county. Thus the county is even lacking in north-south "radial" movements.
These factors and others have essentially kept Columbus from facing any significant suburban competition. But unless the city wants to somehow double down on annexation and try to restart that engine, at some point these dynamics will change and the city of Columbus will find itself physically constrained and competitively disadvantaged vs. newer and now more powerfully developed suburban entities. Dublin is likely a preview of coming attractions.
I don't have any particular policy suggestion in mind here, nor am I saying that anything the city is doing is necessarily wrong. But given what has happened in Indianapolis, I would certainly encourage the future prospect of suburban competition to be top of mind. The city of Columbus should be aggressively scenario planning for how this will play out, and use the runway that it has left to be preparing for the era of more intense intra-regional competition to come. Better to err on the side of paranoia, because the risks of waiting until you've got a serious problem on your hands are too high to ignore.
* Unigov also ensured a white majority in the city
Thursday, May 22nd, 2014
When Sprawl Hits the Wall
I've long argued that the real reason sprawl, or suburban development as we've been practicing it, is a problem isn't because it's ugly, environmentally damaging, racist, or some other form of evil. The more fundamental problem is that it's a long term financial loser. The numbers just don't add up over the long term when you take a lifecycle view of it.
As I outlined in "The Power of Greenfield Economics" and elsewhere, new suburbs look attractive for a number of transitory reasons: everything is new, state of the art, and exactly in line with current market tastes; no legacy costs; no legacy institutions, deals, political dynasties, etc; few low income residents and thus low social service costs; deferred infrastructure development; the efficiency of large lot development; and scale economics in public service provision in a growth environment.
Eventually though, your shiny new suburb fills up and so growth comes to a halt, then often about the same time it gets old. This send all of those positive factors into reverse, triggering a cycle of decline that will ultimately cause major problems in vast tracts of suburban America that aren't either a) wealthy communities or b) in markets that have tight restrictions on new building (which preserves these communities at the expense of rendering them unaffordable).
The perfect display of this is happening before our eyes in Indianapolis as the Indianapolis Business Journal reported this week in a major story called, "Aging suburbs face long road back" which sadly is likely behind a paywall at this point.
Like many places, the old city of Indianapolis found itself losing population to suburban areas further out in Marion County due to a variety of factors. Their solution to this problem was city-county merger, a system called Unigov. In a sense, it was regional government in which the city annexed its suburbs.
Problem solved, right?
No so fast. The problem is that growth at a rate of 200,000+ people per decade plus further expansion of the urban footprint sent growth out past the boundaries of the merged city and into the surrounding counties. As this happened, the old suburbs of Marion County themselves got old and fell out of favor, and are increasingly zones of suburban blight. The city is now close to being right back where it started. Unigov bought Indianapolis 40 years, but other than using that captured suburban tax base to build up downtown – a legitimately important and impressive accomplishment – it otherwise continued with business as usual. The result is that vast tracts of the city are now behind the 8-ball, with no plan or prospect for near term change. Per the IBJ:
Poverty is encroaching on the outer townships of Marion County, adding to their handicap in the competition with doughnut counties, where houses are newer, and sidewalks, sewer connections and bike paths come standard. Now, Marion County's suburban neighborhoods also face the flight of national retailers and poverty-driven challenges for their school districts. Spreading poverty makes it even more difficult to market a four-bedroom, two-bath house on a suburban lot in, say, Warren Township on the east side against a similar product over the county line. "That's a tough nut to crack," said John Marron, an analyst at the Indiana University Public Policy Institute. "To me, it's easier to sell the authentic urban experience."….. For decades after Unigov merged city and county government in 1970, Marion County's suburban townships propped up the city's tax base. Now they could become a drag.
Wayne Township has the largest low-income area outside of Center Township, with 20 square miles and 62,327 residents. Many of those neighborhoods are inside the I-465 belt. One encompasses a cluster of apartment complexes just south of Ben Davis High School. Marron thinks the changes in Wayne Township stem from its concentration of homes built in the 1970s or earlier—a less desirable housing stock than is available farther west in fast-growing Hendricks County….The median Wayne Township sales price in 2013 was $66,505…"We have not seen any significant economic development here on the west side for some time" [says Wayne Township schools Superintendent Jeffrey Butts].
This was entirely predictable. Given that Wayne Township's officials, no matter what they might say in this article, are dead set against change (such as merging their independent fire department with IFD), don't expect much change in the results.
One thing the IBJ didn't highlight but represents a big overhang in these aging suburbs is the aging in place population. A lot of these places skew older as there are baby boomers and up who bought and have simply stayed put. On the one hand, this is great. On the other, that long term population masks the fact that there's no next generation moving in, so as the older generations start to die, the situation is going to continue to degrade. We already saw this happen in a lot of the inner city.
But the most telling quote in the entire article was from West Side Chamber of Commerce President Rick Proctor when he said, "There's probably never going to be enough money to retrofit all of Indianapolis with the amenities all of us would like in our neighborhoods."
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
The bottom line is that the type of development that's been ongoing in Indy and most American communities can't ever generate enough tax revenue to pay to provide the infrastructure, amenities, and services necessary to support it. To show you what I mean, I'll show you a picture from the old city, the supposed "urban core". This is my block:
As you can see, the infrastructure here is minimal. Not even curbs much less sidewalks. Spend any time in Indy as you'll immediately get it that this place has always been cheap. Even the old city was never built right to begin with.
What would it cost to retrofit this street with real infrastructure? What would it cost to perform routine maintenance and basic services like street lighting (currently provided at minimalistic levels), street sweeping (not performed) or snow plowing/salting (not performed either, unless there's over six inches of snow)? Let's just say it would be a huge amount of money. Now ask yourself how much in property and income taxes these mostly 2-3 bedroom, one bath worker cottages are likely to produce in taxes. It's clear the math will never work. And this is in a neighborhood that still has a lot of pull to younger families thanks to its proximity to the urban commercial districts in the area.
I wrote an entire series on building suburbs that last, but one thing is clear. You have to at least build the infrastructure up front if you wait to have any hope. Because if you want to provide basic streets and arterials, etc. until later, then you're not going to be able to afford it. If your development can't support the cost of full infrastructure, that's a powerful market signal that it's not viable. This is a government concern because it's the government that's forced to come in after the collapse and pick up the pieces – or try to anyway. Of course, that would be the same government that got us into this mess in the first place.
The most tragic thing about all this? Despite the ample evidence of the catastrophe that awaits, Indianapolis is still doing more of the same. Right now in Franklin Township, one of the few places inside the city limits that is still a greenfield from a development perspective, the city is approving and permitting out vast tracts of low-grade sprawl there. We are building tomorrow's addition to our pile of problems right now. And nowhere in any city initiative that's currently ongoing is there any hint of changing that. The same is true all over America. I might suggest the old adage applies: if you're in a hole, first stop digging.
Monday, May 5th, 2014
Replay: Are States an Anachronism?
This post originally appeared on July 11, 2011.
Obviously states aren't going anywhere anytime soon, but a number of folks have suggested that state's aren't just obsolete, they are downright pernicious in their effects on local economies.
One principal exponent of this point of view is Richard Longworth, who has written about it extensively in his book "Caught in the Middle" and elsewhere. Here's what he has to say on the topic:
In the global era, states are simply too weak and too divided to provide for the welfare of their citizens…The reason is a deep, intractable problem. Midwestern states make no sense as units of government. Most Midwestern states don't really hang together – politically, economically, or socially. In truth, these states and their governments are incompetent to deal with twenty-first century problems because of their history, rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Longworth expounds upon this to identify a series of specific issues, which I'll put into my own terms.
1. States do not represent communities of interest. With some exceptions, states consist of cities, rural areas, and regions that have very distinct histories, geographies, economies, and and event cultures. As a result, it is incredibly difficult for legislators and leaders from various parts of the state to find common cause.
Here's how Longworth describes Illinois:
Illinois, like Indiana, is three states, and for the same reasons. The southern third, again south of I-70, is a satellite of the South – more give to conservative religions, gun racks in pickup trucks, and a deeply conservative Republicanism….Most of the rest of the state is called Downstate to differentiate it from Chicago, even though some of it, such as Rockford, is actually north of the city. It is an unfocused place…what unites this heterogeneous region is a dislike of the third region, Chicago. Chicago dominates Illinois – politically and economically…If the rest of Illinois obsesses about Chicago, Chicago gives the impression – an accurate one, in fact – of never thinking about the rest of Illinois.
Additionally, I might add my observation that this creates a situation where the policies which are right for one area may be wrong for another. Since it is the nature of governments to promote uniform rules, this often leaves one or even all regions of a state with suboptimal rules. In fairness, there are are often some types of flexibility, such as that provided by different classes of cities. But important macro policies remain one size fits all.
Consider Illinois. It's a combination of a global city core in Chicago, a Rust Belt hinterland, and a southern fringe region. State policy is set by the Chicago elite as a general rule, and predictably it follows a big city, global city favorable model: strong home rule powers for large municipalities, a high tax/high service type model, strong public sector unions, etc. This pretty much works for Chicago, but for downstate it puts their communities in a major economic vice since they don't benefit from global city friendly policies and are competing against other places that have optimized in other ways.
Indiana being one example. It is pretty much the opposite. Its largest city region is only about 25% of the state's population, meaning Indiana is dominated by rural and small city constituencies. As a result, Indiana has optimized for a "Wal-Mart" strategy such as through its low-service/low-tax approach, weak environmental rules, and very weak (I'd argue nearly non-existent) home rule powers for even its largest municipalities. This is great if you are a small manufacturing city trying to beat out Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois for low wage manufacturing and distribution jobs (which sounds bad but is realistically the best short term play these places have). But it's pretty terrible if you are Indianapolis and trying to fight to have a place in the global economy, attract choice talent, build biotech and high tech business clusters, etc.
2. Arbitrary state lines encourage senseless border wars. With limited exceptions, the major cities of the Midwest (and often elsewhere around the country) were founded on major bodies of water like rivers, lakes, or an ocean. These were often boundaries of states, thus major cities are frequently at the edge, not the center of states. This means not infrequently you find multi-state metro areas, which creates structural conflicts of interest. The logical economic unit is the metro area, but it matters from a local fiscal point of view (i.e., the ability to collect income, sales, and property taxes) where particular businesses locate. Thus we frequently see the case where localities spend tons of money on incentives simply to get businesses to relocate within the same metro area. You can have bidding wars without multiple states (such as neighboring suburbs competing over a Wal-Mart), but these seldom involve major state level incentives.
Longworth again summed this up masterfully in a recent blog post called "The Wars Between the States" where he documents the incentives being doled out to convince companies to move back and forth across the state border in the Kansas City metro area:
It would seem impossible for Midwestern states to get any sillier and more irrelevant, but they're trying. In a time of continuing recession and joblessness, with crunching budget problems, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and no real future in sight, these states have decided to solve their problems by stealing jobs from each other.
The most recent example is the so-called "border war" between Kansas and Missouri, as the two states compete to see how much money they can throw at businesses to move from one state to the other. The focus of this war is Kansas City — both the Kansas one and the Missouri one, basically a single urban area divided not only by an invisible line down the middle of a street but by a mindless hostility that keeps its two parts from working together.
Competition with "Europe, India, China and the rest of the world" has nothing to do with this juvenile job-raiding. In fact, this "border war" keeps Missouri and Kansas from competing globally — indeed, robs them of the tools they need to compete globally. Some rational thought shows why. It's precisely these states' inability to compete globally that causes them to declare war on the folks next door. In a global economy, Kansas and Missouri aren't competing with each other, any more than Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin are competing with each other. The real competition is 10,000 miles away and all Midwesterners know that we're losing it.
[ Update 5/5/2014: It looks like Missouri and Kansas may be about to declare a truce in their border war ]
3. Many state capitals are small, isolated, and cut off from knowledge about the global 21st century economy. In some states the state capital is a large city that is well-connected to the global economy – Atlanta, Indianapolis, St. Paul, and Nashville come to mind. But often state capitals were selected because they were in the geographic center of the state, not because they were major centers in their own right. Some, like Indianapolis, managed to grow into major cities. But many others did not. Think Springfield, Jefferson City, Frankfort, etc. This means that the state capital of many states is not very large, and often not very plugged into the global conversation. Longworth again captures the implications of this:
There is another reason why state governments are botching the economic needs of their states. Some 150 to 200 years ago, state capitals were picked not for economic reasons, but for geographic ones. Many of them remain in this isolated irrelevance today, far from the real action of any of the territories they are meant to govern…In this era of globalization, with overnight shipping and instant communications, this shouldn't make any difference. In fact, it does. Global cities such as Chicago depend on face-to-face contact, and isolated state capitals live out of earshot of this conversation. The winds of globalization are transforming state economies and generating new thinking about state futures, but the news takes a long time to get to the state houses and legislatures.
4. Metro areas are the engines of the modern economy, but the rules for municipal and regional governance are set by states, and often in a manner that is directly contrary to urban interests. In this Longworth channels the Brookings Institution, which has tirelessly documented the importance of metro area economies to the nation as well as all the ways states, frequently controlled by non-urban legislators who are actively fearful of cities, have often imposed enormous burdens on those metro areas by tying them down with a morass of Lilliputian rules. Again Longworth:
States set the boundaries of urban jurisdictions and decide whether or how they can merge. They tell cities who they can tax and how, whether this helps cities or not. State governments help finance local infrastructure and dictate, from miles away, how that money is spent. State priorities on education and workforce programs leave city residents incompetent to deal with the global job market. Highway funds go to rural areas, not to cities that need them more; job creation money goes to wealthy areas, not to the core of battered cities.
Some urban regions have more or less given up any hope that their state will ever change or be a positive partner, such as Kansas City, as Longworth notes:
When the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation issued a report on the city's future, it pretty much told the state to get out of the way. "Nations and states still matter," it said. "They particularly can do their cities harm. But cities have to take the lead. San Diego did not become San Diego by looking to Sacramento, not Seattle to Olympia." When the authors talked about Sacramento and Olympia, one felt their really meant Jefferson City.
I'd probably go even further than Longworth. I think that historically states imposed rules on cities deliberately designed to hobble their growth. For example, the laws that restricted branch banking in most states until recently had the effect of keeping big city banks from buying up rural and small town banks around the state. The end game of course is that when deregulation occurred, the banks in most big cities were so small because of these rules, they were easy prey to out of state acquirers. Thus most states saw basically their entire indigenous banking industry swallowed up.
Also, states seem to more or less treat their urban regions like ATM machines. Every study I've seen documents how, contrary to popular belief, cities actually are net exporters of tax dollars to their state government. Marion County, Indiana for example (Indianapolis), sends a net of about $400 million a year to the state – enough to cover the entire public safety budget of the city.
I actually don't have a problem with some redistribution as cities are generally economic engines and more efficient to boot, so they should be expected to be donors at some level. On the other hand, when states proceed to starve those cities of the critical funds they need stay healthy and strip them of the powers they need to manage their own affairs, this is like sticking a knife in the golden goose.
Again I can use Indianapolis as an example. As part of a tax reform package the state took over all operating educational funding for K-12. So far so good. But they also imposed a funding formula that severely disadvantaged growing suburban districts by denying them equal per pupil funding. The net result was a major funding problem for the best suburban Indianapolis districts like Carmel, Fishers, etc. Many of these districts had to go to referendums to raise local taxes to make up the difference (which was no doubt the state's plan all along – it simply outsourced the unpleasantries of a tax increase to localities). Here is a state that claims it wants to be in the biotech business, the high tech business, etc, yet it singles out the school districts where the labor force you are trying to attract for those industries is likely to live for outsized cuts. That hardly seems like a winning strategy.
Indiana also keeps its cities on a tight leash, with some of the weakest home rule powers around. Indianapolis basically can't do much without legislative approval (a transit referendum, for example, will require specific legislative authorization). And the legislature seems to like it that way. Indiana's property tax caps, which I support generally from a percentage of assessment perspective, include a lot of poorly advertised gotchas. For example, regardless of assessed value, the total tax levy can only grow at a rate equal to the average personal income growth over the last six years. I'll caveat this by saying I haven't studied this in detail and thus may be a bit off base, but the levy cap appears to be a de facto spending cap at current levels regardless in growth of tax base. This may be ok for some, but not others that are growing say their commercial office space base at a rapid clip and need to expand infrastructure and services to support it.
Clearly many of these policies have no real benefit to the Indianapolis region, which is more or less being asked to be the economic engine of the state and finance state government without being given the tools to do that job property.
The list goes on but that should give you a flavor. Similar things occur around the country.
To this list I'll add one of my own, which has also been richly illustrated by Jim Russell. Namely,
5. States can't to much to help, but they can do a lot to hurt. A lot of the national debate seems to center on whether the "red state" or "blue state" model makes the most sense. But to a great extent, policy almost doesn't matter. In Ohio, with one set of state policies, Columbus thrives while Cleveland struggles. Tennessee is a right to work state with no income tax, but Nashville booms while Memphis stagnates. Texas is doing great with its red state model, but Mississippi and Alabama not so much. And even within Texas, there are plenty of places that are hurting badly.
While good policy can set the stage for growth, it can't guarantee local economies will prosper. But bad policies can hurt regions that otherwise would thrive. Extremes of either the blue or red model seem to lead to problems. Witness California, for example, which seems to be holding up a sign to business saying, "Get lost."
This puts states in the difficult position of being almost being able to aspire at best to being a neutral influence on their own economy. But it's easy for them to screw things up.
Wednesday, April 9th, 2014
Indianapolis: The Sound Map Video
I post a lot of city videos. I also write a lot about authenticity in cities and marketing. Last week Indianapolis artist Stuart Hyatt sent me this one that I think manages to be very cool as a video but also provides a very authentic look at the actual experience of Indianapolis.
Stuart is working on a project called the Indy Sound Map designed to create, well, a sonic map of the city. He did this for Washington St. end to end across the city. Rather than stop at that, Jonathan Frey filmed his journey and Forrest Lewinger used the recording to create a soundtrack for the film that's part of a forthcoming album. You can read more in this Nuvo article about the project.
First the video, then more commentary. If the video doesn't display for you, click here.
What I like is that this shows Indianapolis as it really is, not as a fantasy world city of nothing but shiny downtown hipster joints. I also really like that there's a big focus on actual people. That's not to say this is a completely 100% portrayal of everything. The bus is overly stressed whereas the auto dominated nature of the city doesn't come through. But on the whole the feel I think is right.
Obviously this was an art project not a marketing film. But I think it's easy to see how you could take the basic concept of this and adapt it to marketing. Will that happen? Nope. All civic marketing is inherently ultra-conservative, and as someone rightly pointed out about a recent Cleveland video, the funders who underwrite such ventures expect that the end product will heavily feature them and be consistent with their brand values. But this I think shows that there are ways to show cities other than ultra-slick time lapses that can work.
Sunday, March 9th, 2014
Sunday Night Dinner in Indianapolis
Sunday night dinner in Herron-Morton Place, Indianapolis. This is one of three dinner groups in that neighborhood. Photo by Amanda Reynolds (check out the mirror!)
Urban culture varies radically from city to city. Yet to a great extent the culture of the usual suspects type of places tends to get portrayed as normative. In New York, for example, with its tiny apartments, the social life is often in public, in many cases literally on the streets of the city, which pulse with energy. As the ne plus ultra of cities, the street life of New York is often seen as what every place should aspire to. There's a body of literature which attributes all sorts of positive effects to this New York style urbanism, such as the notion of "collisions" and "serendipitous encounters". But while New York's street life and social scene may indeed be engaging, how often does one actually strike up a conversation with someone random on the street or in a coffee shop there that turns into something meaningful? The only collisions I've ever had there were literal.
New York is the most well known and championed style of interaction, though hardly the only one. Think of San Francisco and something clearly distinct will come to mind, albeit with some similarities. LA has its own mythos. The TV show Portlandia does a great job of capturing our idea of the quirky urban life of that city.
Cities that lack the cachet of an NYC, SF, or Portland can often find their own urban culture lacking in comparison. To be taken seriously, the logic goes, they must measure up to the yardstick defined by others. But while I do not subscribe to the idea of value free cultural comparisons, I do believe cities need not judge themselves as wanting just because they don't function like New York City. Rather, they should seek to be the best they can be on their own terms. Since few cities are anything like New York, aspiring to that kind of urbanism would only be a case study in frustration anyway.
Indianapolis cultural commentator David Hoppe once said something to the effect that "the social life of Indianapolis happens in back yards." And this is true. Unlike a New York City, Indianapolis does not wow you just by walking down the street. While I believe in trying to contextualize the facts on the ground in the most positive way possible for moving forward, that doesn't mean reclassifying genuine defects as virtues. In the case of Indianapolis, the generally poor impression left by its built environment and lack of street life can't be denied. There are plenty of great places to go, but you generally need someone to point you in the right direction.
But there are countervailing virtues as well, ones generally under appreciated. Unlike New York, Indy has a far more robust social life in private spaces like houses and back yards. This produces a qualitatively different type of social capital, one with its own unique set of strengths.
One example of this is the emergence of community based Sunday dinners. This was an organic movement and as a result lacks a fancy name, but in keeping with the generally low key and unpretentious character of the city, let's just call it Sunday Night Dinner.
Sunday night dinners are a type of intentional community in which 6-8 families in a neighborhood decide to get together for dinner every Sunday night on a rotating basis. This originated in 2006 on Pleasant St. in the Fountain Square neighborhood when a group of neighbors decided to start getting together regularly for dinner. Here's how Tonya Beeler, one of the founding members, describes it:
When most of us talk about it, we just call it Sunday Night Dinner. It's unassuming, I know – but that's what Sunday Dinner is to us. We've had it consistently for almost 8 years – having only cancelled dinner a handful of times. The majority of the families on the original list are still regular participants and we've added and lost a few through the years.
What is Sunday Night Dinner to us? In this stage in our lives, its sometimes difficult to physically connect to your neighbors, but we know that each Sunday we're going to see our friends. It's also a good time to have newcomers to the neighborhood connect with some of us old timers. We've also had visits from Mayor Ballard (before he was elected) and Melina Kennedy (when she was running) and I still have a fond memory of John Day sitting down to sup with us. But what is it mostly? Just a day in the week where we meet to take a breath, sit down, and eat together. It's my favorite day of the week.
I used to be part of a quarterly dinner club in Chicago. Given the frequency, our idea was to make each dinner "special" in the sense that we went all out with super high-quality food, etc. In Indy, while good food is certainly part of the equation, the regular weekly cadence means it's as much about friends and neighbors as it is special ambiance. It's about regular life lived in the city. In the picture at the top it's paper plates and plastic cups all the way – and that's just fine. Can't stay for some reason? No worries, bring some tupperware, grab some food, and run. In a sense, it's the Kinfolk Magazine ethic (motto: doing things simple sure is complicated – and expensive) in genuine form, shorn of Portland pretense.
Sunday night dinner in the Beeler's backyard in Fountain Square, Indianapolis, Easter 2012. Photo: Cindy Ragsdale
Oh, and typically with children, which actually exist in abundance in Indianapolis.
The idea spread and now there are Sunday night dinner groups all over the city. I'm told there are three in Herron-Morton Place alone, which I can't quite wrap my head around given how small the area is.
I can't help but notice the similarity of these dinner groups to religious small group gathering. In the last couple decades, Evangelical churches have moved away from mid-week services in favor of small group gathering during the week (sometimes called home groups or other names). The idea is to promote more actual community than is possible in a larger assembly format. These dinner groups are in effect secular small groups, ones that help provide the sense of connectedness, regularity, and rootedness that's so often missing from our contemporary world.
Outdoor fun on Sunday night isn't just for summer in Herron-Morton Place, Indianapolis. Photo by Amanda Reynolds.
These groups aren't just walled garden cliques, however. The host generally invites guests to attend. So there's a type of brokered introduction which in my experience is the real source of "serendipitous" encounters of genuine value. An arranged guest invite is one way to get people connected in their neighborhood, or even to help people who are deciding whether or not to take the plunge into city living to get a feel for what life lived in a particular neighborhood is actually like.
In fact, if you are visiting Indianapolis on a Sunday night, or live there and want to check it out, email the City Gallery at the Harrison Center For the Arts and they will set you up. The email address is email@example.com
I don't want to suggest that Indianapolis invented the concept of the dinner club or is the only place such events occur. For all I know, lots of places do this. (Heck, as big as it is, odds are that includes New York City). And as with all traditions, this particular instantiation will likely die off at some point (though it's still growing eight years after starting on Pleasant St). Yet the prevalence of this type of cultural phenomenon is part of the explanation for why Indianapolis has consistently managed to punch above its weight class in so many areas. Although the type of obvious assets and strength evidenced by super-cool buildings or crowds on the street may be lacking in Indianapolis vis-a-vis some other places, the city contains deep reservoirs of cultural capital that aren't as visible and may never be fully understood or mapped, but nevertheless are of profound importance. This is the real secret sauce of the city.
Copying this idea, locally or anywhere, is definitely welcomed. Should you be interested, here are the "Indianapolis Rules" for Sunday night dinners, courtesy of Tonya Beeler:
1. Dinner is every Sunday night, with six to eight families, each hosting on a rotating basis.
2. The host is responsible for preparing all of the food for everyone. (Work? Yes, but it also means seven weeks of not having to do anything but show up).
3. The host is responsible for inviting all guests. Do not invite guests without checking with the host first.
4. If you're not coming, tell the host as far in advance as possible.
5. At the very beginning of the dinner, the host makes sure all the guests know of any rules for the house (no one allowed upstairs, kids can't eat in the living room, toilet handle needs to be held down for 3 seconds, whatever).
6. If your family will not be coming for dinner, but you still want food, there's no need to let the host know, just stop by early in the meal (so you don't miss anything, food goes fast!!!) with some tupperware and fill it to go.
Sunday night dinner in Fountain Square, Indianapolis. Painting by Kyle Ragsdale.
Sunday, February 2nd, 2014
Replay: Rebranding Columbus
This post originally ran on August 15, 2010. Some anachronisms have been left in the piece, so keep the original date in mine.
It's no secret I'm a fan of Columbus, Ohio, one of those under the radar cities that's a whole lot better than its external brand image would suggest.
That frustrates local civic leaders, who've undertaken a major re-branding effort, as discussed in a recent NYT piece, "There May Be 'No Better Place,' but There Is a Better Slogan:"
Quick, what do you think about when you hear the words "Columbus, Ohio"? Still waiting…. And that's the problem that civic leaders here hope to solve. This capital city in the middle of a state better known, fairly or not, for cornfields and rusting factories has a low cost of living, easy traffic and a comparatively robust economy….What Columbus does not have, to the despair of its leaders, is an image. As home to major research centers, it has long outgrown its 1960s self-concept as a cow town, and its distinction as the birthplace of the Wendy's hamburger chain does not quite do the trick these days. The city lacks a shorthand way to sell itself — a signature like the Big Apple or an intriguing tagline like Austin's "Live Music Capital of the World." As a result, those working to attract new companies, top professors, conventions and tourists have a hard time explaining how Columbus differs from dozens of other cities that likewise claim to be livable, progressive and fun.
As I've said many times, branding isn't marketing. It isn't about tag lines, messaging, or talking points. Yes, there's an element of that and getting your message out. But branding starts with what's on the inside not messages to the outside. It's about who you are, what your values are, what you stand for, what you aspire to be when you grow up. The marketing part just helps communicate that.
I won't reprise my general prescription on branding, but here are a few pieces you can review if interested:
Despite what the title of the NYT piece might suggest, I think Columbus gets it on this:
How do you stoke the imagination of outsiders and the enthusiasm of residents? Columbus, starting from relative obscurity, has found that you cannot just hire an advertising agency, like New York and Las Vegas did, and come up with a slogan. It needs to find something real and heartfelt to trumpet, a task force of business, educational, political and arts leaders here concluded.
Your brand has to be something that is authentic, that's true to the place. It has to resonate with the people who are there. That's not to say it can't be aspirational. That's how we grow. But to simply chuck your past and trying to be something completely different is overwhelmingly difficult and often fails. So kudos to Columbus for trying to find something true to the character of their city.
Apparently they've been at this a while, and one of the techniques has been involving residents in helping to define the new brand: "But this time, three years into their inner journey, city leaders expect to succeed by drawing the whole population into the process and teasing out shared points of pride."
When I read something like "drawing the whole population into the process", alarm bells go off. It's not PC to say this, but too much public involvement at the wrong stage is a bad idea. Clearly, it's important that the public buy in and that the results be shared and genuine input solicited without delivering a fait accompli. But design by focus group almost never works. I've seen a lot of civic visioning efforts that tried to be maximally inclusive – I even served on the steering committee for one – but I've yet to see one that produced compelling results or moved the needle. Think about it. Did Steve Jobs design the iPod by asking people what they thought about music players? No he did not. Apple, and all the best product companies, succeed by giving us the thing we didn't even know we wanted until they gave it to us.
That's not to say you ignore market research. There's certainly an element of archeology and anthropology here. And it certainly has to go beyond simply hiring a fancy pants advertising firm, something Columbus wisely avoided. But community involvement isn't probably going to get it either. Partially that's because people who are too close, who are on the inside, probably have difficulty articulating the uniqueness of a place. I don't have enough personal experience with Columbus to go into depth there. I'd have to get more deeply embedded in the community to really understand the place at a deeper level. But I'm confident that the qualities they are looking for are there to be discovered in Columbus. The city is doing well in a tough region. There have to be reasons why. It's going to require digging deep though.
The Fallacy of Awareness
I gather from the NYT piece that the people in Columbus think they've got a pretty great city, and that if they could only get other people to see how great it is, their standing in the league tables of public estimation would go way up. I believe the first part is true, but not the second.
Wanting to have your city taken seriously is likely wanting to be a member of the cool kids club. How do you get in? Well, it goes without saying that you need to have the qualifications – to be good looking, rich, to suck up to the right people, etc – but is that enough? Sometimes yes, but more often not, particularly for people who don't score overwhelmingly high.
Think about it, the defining characteristic of a clique is exclusivity. If it was too easy to get in, membership would lose its value. So if you think about cities, the urbanists, media types, academics, activists, etc. who are the arbiters to the public at large about what cities are the coolest and best generally all pick the same ones – cliques also enforce conformity of mindset – and it just so happen that those are the places that contain most of the said taste arbiters. Why would any of them choose to champion Columbus, unless they had some personal connection there?
People who are members of an elite clique generally spend most of the time talking with and about each other, and little time about anyone else, even to put them down. To be ignored is the ultimate penalty of being an outsider. This is true of almost any field.
Here's a classic example from the blogosphere. There was a minor kerfuffle a while back about Andrew Sullivan using "ghost bloggers." Fellow Tier One blogger Ann Althouse took extreme umbrage at this in a way I find very revealing about the mindset of members of an exclusive clique:
I seriously believed I was interacting with Sullivan, a writer I have respected for maybe 20 years. I wouldn't have bothered with Patrick (or Chris). I really don't care what they think. If they insult me, they are to me like any number of bloggers who insult me and whose bait I don't take. I would always take Sullivan's bait, because Sullivan is important. Not to know whether it's Sullivan or one of them makes a mush out of the whole blog.
Of course when she says Andrew Sullivan is important, what's she's really implying that she's important, and can't be bothered wasting her time on anyone who isn't also on the VIP list. To have fooled her into debating mere peons – whose writing she admits she can't tell from Sullivan's himself – is treachery of the highest order.
In fairness to Althouse, she does link to lesser known bloggers (including, once, me). The point is not that she's evil, which I don't think, but that this is how the world really works.
If you are the Columbus, Ohio of bloggers, how do you get Ann Althouse, Andrew Sullivan, etc. to care about you? I can actually share a personal story in that regard. The first two and a half years of this blog was almost exclusively about Indianapolis, and I had very wide readership there. But I received very little recognition or acknowledgment in that city. Quite the opposite in fact. As an example, one journalist I assisted with a story told me flat out I wasn't authoritative enough to quote in the piece. While I hope I'm getting better over time, I don't think my content was that much less compelling then than it is today. And it was obviously being read. So why the difference? It's the same dynamic I'm talking about. They might not have known who I was, but they knew who I wasn't – and that was one of the boys. Quality product and awareness had nothing to do with it. Having experienced that end of the spectrum is one reason I try to be a champion for new voices.
There's an industry out there that creates the myth or fantasy of the instant or overnight success who achieves fame and glory when their talent is finally seen by the public or the right people. Susan Boyle for example. I'm sure that does happen from time to time. But is that the way it ordinarily happens? And how much staying power does fame and recognition have in those circumstances?
I'd suggest that this sort of thing happens far less than we are generally led to believe. I read a lot of magazine profiles of people and when I hear them talk about how they got their big break, I'm always amazed at how often there are one of two basic tales. The first is, "I was sitting in my office one day wondering how we were going to pay the rent when my phone rang and it was Frank Gehry asking if I could design some lighting fixtures for his new Guggenheim Museum". The second is, "I just showed up at Vogue and lied that I was sent there by Steven Meisel and they interviewed me and I got the job." How likely is it that most of these stories are true? Or at least that they are the whole truth?
One of my guilty pleasures is the New York Observer. One of the things I love about it is, that due to the gossipy nature of the publication, they always give you the back story on who the people they are talking about are. That 27 year old chief curator at the top tier museum? Yeah, his mom was an heiress. He wouldn't advertise that fact in most of those other magazine profiles. I'd bet most of these stories would fare similarly under scrutiny, though perhaps in different ways.
Clearly, awareness, and awareness by the right people, is critical. You really do have to get out there and knock on Vogue's door – probably getting it slammed in your face the first few times you do it. Everybody needs lucky breaks. I have no doubt that if my personal promotional skills were better, I'd be further along in achieving my own ambitions.
But there's a lot more too it than that. You want to be a member of the club? You've got to break the door down yourself. You've got to make it so that they can't ignore you. If Columbus wants to be taken seriously, it's going to have to force itself into the conversation. That takes relentless hard work and creating a product so compelling that the urbanist elite has to respond to it and take it seriously. Simply being a great place to raise a family, having a relatively good economy, high quality of life and low costs – a value proposition virtually identical to lots of other cities regardless of what locals might think – is not going to get the job done.
One Columbus official said, "Candidly, we believe we are one of the brightest stars in Ohio's future." One of the brightest stars in Ohio? I'm sorry, that's not going to cut it. It's like I tell the people in Indy when they get excited about being the "Diamond of the Rust Belt": that sounds an awful lot like bragging that you won the loser's bracket in the JV playoffs again this year. There's nothing wrong with being in Ohio – and Columbus would be ill-advised to try to pretend they are something different from the state. Columbusites can be proud of Ohio and their role in it. But if they want America to pay attention to them, they need a message and reality to match that ambition.
That's what Portland did. Portland didn't get to be Portland through superior marketing and talking points about having the lowest costs and quality of life on the west coast with all those natural amenities to boot. They went out and did nothing less than define a new vision of what a small city in America could be. And they delivered on it through relentless hard work and actual execution over the course of decades.
Staking Your Claim
If Columbus wants to raise its profile, then it has to start setting the agenda. That's not to say they have to try to be the next Portland or anything. But they've got to find areas where they can stake their claim and create something that compels the world to pay attention.
I'll be the first to admit that this section will be unfair to Columbus. I'm going to compare it to its "twin city" of Indianapolis, a place I know far better. So keeping in mind that I just probably know more about what's going on in Indy, and that I'm clearly a partisan of that city, I'd like to note a few things.
First, Columbus just seems more with it than Indy on a host of matters. In fact, when it comes to things like urban design, density, public transit, and many other matters, Indy is almost worst in class. It's hard for me to even name one urban infill project that exhibits proper urban design, for example, while in others cities I tend to note that the majority of new developments do. Columbus, by contrast, just seems to get it on most issues, from urbanism, to pedestrian investments, etc. Yet why is Indy much better known?
One reason is that while Columbus does a very good job of ticking all the boxes, I can't name many areas where it has gone above and beyond the checklist. And therein lies its problem. Columbus is a quality follower and implementer of the right things, but isn't an urban innovator or a place that has carved out a distinct and compelling offering versus broadly similar peers.
A lot of people from bigger cities don't care for Indy much. If you want walkable neighborhoods, tons of independent restaurants, etc. it is not your place. But time and again Indy has gone out and pulled things off that many other cities can only dream about, and put themselves in the spotlight.
The NYT notes of Columbus leaders, "One model they have studied is Indianapolis, which raised its profile by describing itself as the amateur athletic capital of America." The NYT gets it completely wrong. Indy didn't raise its profile by describing itself as anything. Back in the 1970's a group of glum city leaders sat around a table wondering what they were going to do about a city best known, if as anything, as "India-no-place." They hit on the idea of amateur sports. But rather than a marketing program, they instead committed themselves to going out and making it a reality, a process that continues to this day, though not limited to only amateur sports.
Indy built a downtown arena in the 1970's. They built a domed stadium at the bargain price of only $80 million in 1983 without a team to play in it in an era before widespread pro sports franchise relocations. This let them pick the Colts up in 1984 on the cheap. Yes, that was a lucky break, but one they were ready to exploit. They put the domed stadium next to the convention center, not just to help conventions, but anticipating that major sports events would have ancillary activities that would use the co-located space. They created the first of its kind Indiana Sports Corp. to oversee all aspects of luring and hosting events. They saw the benefits of industry clustering, and recruited sporting sanctioning bodies to town, culminating with the NCAA headquarters. They started off with unglamorous events like the trials for the 1984 Olympics. They took risky bets when opportunity presented itself such as jumping in to host the 1986 Pan Am Games when the original host city backed out. They built state of the art facilities for sports few people gave much though to like swimming and bicycling.
In effect, Indianapolis created the entire industry of using sports events hosting as an economic development platform, and they did it in a holistic, extremely intelligent way that involved putting some major chips on the table for projects with an uncertain outcome. And they are still at it today, 35 years later after, as all successes do, everybody and their brother has tried to get a piece of this pie. The competition is brutal, and Indy has spent big – some say too big – to stay at the front, such as by going full out to host a Super Bowl in 2012. Indianapolis is arguably still the best place in America to host a sporting event.
I'm a believer in all the research that suggests sports investment is a bad idea with a dubious payoff for cities. But Indianapolis is an exception. There's no doubt this was a major force in transforming the city – and getting its name out there. How much would the city have had to pay for all the de facto advertising impressions they've gotten from all this sports investment?
Is Columbus willing to stake a similar claim in another speculative area and put big money behind it, staying with it over the course of decades? Is Columbus ready to pile $3 billion in chips on Red 14 the way Indy did?
Indy also conceived many other similar types of programs that not only add to local quality of life, but also get the city's name out. Consider the quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, one of the most prestigious such competitions in the world. Why would anyone take seriously a fine arts competition in Indianapolis? Well, they wouldn't, all things being equal. So when the city did it, they had to come up with an unbeatable package. First, they partnered with the world-renowned Indiana University School of Music to give them musical credibility. And they set up for the winner a year's loan of a Stradivarius violin, a recital at Carnegie Hall and other places, intense coaching from some of the world's best violinists, and more. That certainly got people's attention.
Or consider the Indianapolis Prize for animal conservation. Again, why would anyone think of Indianapolis in this field? They wouldn't – except that they city anted up and made it the single biggest cash prize in this field in the world and recruited a top international nominating committee and jury.
Or look at the currently in progress Indianapolis Cultural Trail, which is taking over 8 miles of downtown street lanes away from cars and giving them to people. It is a unique project, that includes the highest quality bicycle boulevard I've seen, along with an often separate pedestrian walkway, significant green features, and major public art installations. While honestly this has not received the publicity it deserves, it has been covered in Surface, Dwell, Streetsblog, and elsewhere. It's a totally unique project. From now on anyone who wants to undertake a major downtown urban trail project is going to go to Indianapolis to see what it did. Why? Not because they want to, but because they have to. Because at some point somebody is going to ask the question, did you look at the Indy Cultural Trail? – and if they development team says No, they are going to look pretty stupid.
I've also noted how suburban Carmel, Indiana is staking out a claim to be a nationally premier suburb, with 5% of all the modern roundabouts in the United States, the largest deployment of roundabout interchanges in the United States, an ambitious agenda of New Urbanist retrofit, a $150M concert hall, and much more.
You might not know any or all of these, but in their fields, they are known. They are all projects of major ambitions, that attempt to innovate and set the agenda, and which serve a branding function for the city. They were also conceived with a recognition that nobody is going to pay attention to Indianapolis unless the city forces them to. And it has. And it's not just in the traditional civic sphere. Here's a point to ponder: with Columbus' vaunted gay community, why is it Indianapolis that is home to the Bilerico Project, the Huffington Post of the LGBT community?
I could go on and on – best airport in the United States, anyone? – but I think you get the point. Indy isn't in the club yet, and may never get there – but it has come a long way.
Again, if I knew Columbus better, I'd probably be able to give examples there too. I'm sure Columbus isn't totally without these types of programs. But my blog has been traditionally Midwest focused. And I've tried to keep a finger on the pulse of what's going on in all these cities, including Columbus. I read the Dispatch online for over two years and still read Columbus Underground regularly. But I haven't come across that many truly compelling stories of national relevance – and certainly nowhere near as many as I'd expect for a city that's rocking and rolling as much as Columbus is.
Maybe the painful truth is that Columbus today just isn't very different from the other places with which it competes – and that's what this re-branding should really address.
Columbus has most of the blocking and tackling nailed. It's a city that gets it. But to break through at the national level, Columbus is going to have to do a lot more than get it. Columbus is going to have to start playing offense, start dictating an ambitious – and let's face it, risky – agenda around items that are so compelling the world won't have any choice but to sit up and pay attention. Because it's unlikely anybody is going to start giving Columbus the props it craves otherwise. It's just like they told me at my old firm about the secret to making partner – you've got to already more than be there.
Thursday, January 16th, 2014
How Globalization Isolates Struggling Cities
My latest piece is in the January issue of Governing Magazine. It's called "How Globalization Isolates Struggling Cities. In effect, this is a companion piece to my recent post on metro-centric economic development strategies. Here's an excerpt:
In the age of globalization, cities and states would rather build bridges to the world than to the town next door. Some of this is simply the way the economy works. As Richard Longworth, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, wrote in his book Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism, "Chicago probably deals more, daily, with Frankfurt or Tokyo than it does with Indianapolis."
He went on to identify the problem at hand, noting that "Globalization is beginning to isolate cities from their hinterlands: The hinterlands see this trend and are disinclined to do anything to speed it up. They perceive that most of these people—globalization's winners—have never spent 30 seconds worrying about globalization's losers."
This is the two-tier society we see developing nationally playing out at the local level. It creates a tug of war at the state policy level, and it tears apart the whole notion that we are a commonwealth. It creates states that are, as Longworth put it, "hives of warring interests."