Last November I was privileged to be able to speak at a community conversation event in Franklin, Indiana – a town of about 25,000 people south of Indianapolis that is an old county seat on the edge of suburban expansion – sponsored by Indiana Humanities and Ball State University’s Bowen Center for Public Affairs.

The topic of the evening was quality of space and what, if anything, Franklin should do in this area. There had recently been some big disputes over downtown redevelopment projects I believe.

I gave a talk that set the stage for this conversation.  In it I make the case for why high quality of place is of importance to a community. I root it in a business case analysis based on globalization and structural changes in the economy, the impact of that on Indiana’s competitive positioning, and a real life example of the potential payoff. I then talk a little bit ways to actually make quality of space happen.

Before the video though, I should mention that I am for hire to speak at your event. For details, arenn@urbanophile.com. As you’ll see from this, I work to create something custom and compelling for your audience, not a canned talk. And I basically treat it as a mini-consulting engagement to drive more value for you.

The video is below, followed by an outline of the talk. I hope you enjoy. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

I. The Case for Quality of Space

A. History of Globalization and Structural Economic Changes: Indiana has gone from competitively advantaged to competitively disadvantaged.

B. The Impact of Economic Change: Indiana has trailed the country in jobs and incomes

C. Implications of the Situation:

1. If nothing changes, expect more of the same poor results. This means real change, not just tweaks.
2. Indiana cannot be competitive purely on a cost basis ever again. Even domestically, there are cheaper locations like Texas, and overseas competitors are much cheaper. Cost control and quality regulations are still very important, but cost cannot be the sole basis of competition.
3. Indiana must compete today at least in part by creating a civic product people want to buy on its own merits, not just because it’s the cheapest thing on the market – because it isn’t.

D. But Doesn’t Franklin Already Have High Quality of Space/Place?: Yes. Yet consider:

1. Much of what makes the high quality of a community like Franklin is the people who live there and their shared history. Newcomers can’t judge a community by this yet.
2. Much of what makes our communities physically great was built a long time ago. The question is how we build on that legacy to meet the challenge of the 21st century.

II. The Benefits of Quality of Space: Columbus, Indiana Case Study

A. Why a Case Study of Columbus?  It’s nearby for locals to check out themselves, it has a strong and comprehensive commitment to quality of space, and is closer to a typical blue collar community than say a Big Ten college town.

B. Columbus Economic Performance: Outperforms all non-Big Ten college town Indiana peers and also has outperformed the nation as a whole on jobs and income.

C. How Much Did Columbus Pay for Its Quality of Space Plan?

1. Columbus tax expenditures per person are higher than most peers. They did spend money on this. Not free.
2. But Columbus tax rates are among the lowest of its peers.
3. How is this? Columbus has the largest tax base.

D. Two Fallacies of Government

1. Democrat Fallacy: The only thing that determines government revenue is the tax rate.
2. Republican Fallacy: The only thing that determines tax bills is government spending.
3. Both claims are based on short term thinking. Need to evaluate the life cycle implications of policy choices. Columbus spent more but pays less now because they understand total cost of ownership.

III. Bringing Quality of Space to Life

A. Four Planks in a Quality of Space Program

1. First Class Public Buildings: We used to build them this way, so doing it today is following an old tradition, not doing something different.
2. Focus on Value per Dollar: It’s not always about more money. A bit part of it is making sure the money you do spend gets the full value per dollar.
3. Find Low Cost, Fast, High Impact Items
4. Build on Unique Qualities: In Franklin’s case, Franklin College

B. Closing Caveats

1. Quality of space is a long term game. You don’t see immediate results from a trail. Columbus took 60 years to get where it is today. Indy’s downtown sports strategy started 40 years ago, but it is just now getting to host the Superbowl.
2. Make sure that whatever you do is specific to your community. Don’t let somebody else sell you an off the shelf solution that merely copies what others are doing.

Anti-Memphis suburban politicians –the political equivalent of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight – have done it again.

They regularly manage to yank defeat from the jaws of victory.  Driven by narrow partisan agenda and conversations in the Nashville echo chamber, they lose all perspective of the consequences of their actions and they forfeit the objectivity necessary for them to consider a scenario that isn’t about their own meretricious grandiosity.

Webster: Grandiosity, as in psychiatry – having an exaggerated belief in one’s importance, sometimes reaching delusional proportions, and occurring as a common symptom of mental illnesses, as manic disorder.

Where’s Dr. Phil when we need him?  He could pioneer a new branch of his profession – political psychology and intervention.

Anti, Anti, Anti-

Once again, the anti-Memphis gang has tried to change the rules in the middle of the game – this time about annexation agreements – and once again, the results of their interference invoke the law of unintended consequences.

Intent on responding to the squeaky wheels that have always characterized the Eastern Shelby County community of Fisherville, the Norris-Todd gang tried to upend the 1998 binding, legal agreements between Memphis and every other government in Shelby County that identified the reserve area for each.

At any rate, the gang was shooting at Memphis, but they’ve ended up hitting the people of Eastern Shelby County, because the legislative meddling pushed the fast forward button  for Memphis City Council to begin the process to annex an area that might never have otherwise been taken into City of Memphis.

Because the Nashville gang only talks to each other, they tend to assume that everyone must agree with them and that they are cleverly pulling one over on Memphians.  So, the people of Fisherville can thank Norris-Todd for putting them at risk for annexation.

Decisions to Make

If Norris-Todd had, God forbid, deigned to talk to city officials, they would have known that there have been serious conversations in City Hall about the wisdom of Memphis’ annexation policies and even if city government should de-annex some of its area.

The problem for the city is that as usual, it doesn’t have the data or analysis to clearly weigh its options.  Memphians have been subsidizing the decline of their own city for decades.  There are serious questions to be answered on the wisdom of more annexations and on shrinking the city’s size as some other struggling mid-sized, mid-U.S. cities are doing.   The best way to do this would be methodical and thorough, but faced with a state bill that removes an option from Memphis before it can even evaluate these issues, city government had little choice but to fight back.

That said, City of Memphis needs to consider all of its options, and they extend beyond annexation.  There’s little doubt that city government should not have build the interceptor sewer to Gray’s Creek.  It was another gift to big contributor developers.  When the city showed some reluctance to the sewer, county government swung into action with a resolve that would lead someone to think that the future of the region hung in the balance.

Truth be told, it was the white votes that allegedly hung in the balance, and this was the underlying, unspoken political dynamic for most of county government’s sprawl-inducing plans.  It was thought that these suburban expenditures would keep Republican voters in Shelby County and give Republican politicians their only hopes of remaining viable candidates for countywide elections in the future.

Other Hammers

As for the final balanced growth agreement signed between City of Memphis and Shelby County in return for extension of the sewer, we believe that county government did not live up to the full terms of the agreement, which included, for example, funding for city programs like commercial demolition of eyesore properties.  City of Memphis should review the history of this agreement and the payback requirements for the sewer interceptor.

In addition, Memphis has extraterritorial jurisdiction outside its boundaries, so it has a major say in zoning and development in this area.  In the era of developer dominance in local government, developers were always able to get approval by the city administration and City Council for their strip centers and sprawl-causing developments.  It does not have to be so and there may be threats that the city can make to bring more reasonable minds to bear on the annexation issue.

Whether it ever intends to annex Fisherville, the annexation reserve area agreements should remain in place.  They brought stability to and eliminated conflict about the annexation issues, and as we wrote earlier this week, during the negotiations about the annexation reserve agreements, Memphis gave back 150 square miles of county land that had previously been in its annexation path as a show of good faith with the other cities.  In return, it now gets the legislative back of the hand as the Norris-Todd gang once again snip the threads of trust.

Tangled Logic

Meanwhile, Collierville Mayor Stan Joyner continues to add two plus two and get seven (so much for that county school education).  In his mangled logic, the vote to merge the school systems and treat all Shelby County children equally are part of a giant conspiracy that included a vote on city-county government consolidation two years ago.

It would be laughable except for the fact that he really believes it.  In his world, the consolidation debate emphasized that the schools would not be merged as part of city-county government merger.  Somehow, in his tangled webs of illogic, merging the school districts and the government consolidation vote were part and parcel of the grand Memphis conspiracy.

Except for one inconvenient fact: Government consolidation would have kept the school districts separate.  Only if Shelby County Schools agreed to merge with Memphis City Schools would it have happened.  In other words, in their zeal to build a wall around their towns, the towns gave up their best chance of “protecting” their schools.

It’s all poetic justice at one level, but on a more reasonable plane, it’s just plain sad.  As they enjoy their ever-present victimhood, they seem oblivious to the reason they now find themselves as part of a new, countywide school district.  In last year’s referendum on consolidating city and county governments, they vehemently denounced the pro-consolidation mantra: “Doing Nothing Is Not An Option.”

It Was Your Choice

Well, they chose “doing nothing” and because of it, they now have the unified school district.  In taking a shot at Memphis with the government consolidation vote, they in fact wounded themselves, and their best case to maintain their own walled-off school district. Instead, they stand on the verge of ushering in an era of double taxation for public education and climbing tax rates as the realities of funding the new districts become clear.  (The present tax projections for a school district are a classic case of low-balling the numbers to encourage approval at the polls.)

They did get what they wanted.  They killed off the new city-county charter.  At the same time, however, they breathed life into the movement to instead force the consolidation of the two school districts.

Meanwhile, all of this school and annexation rhetoric has cranked up the normal screeds against Memphis.  As usual, the first victims are the facts.   Unified school board member Vanecia Kimbrow put it best: “We are being driven as a community based on our fears and misinformation…Those fears, at this point in time, are unfounded, and I think as rational adults, we have the sensibilities to wait for the facts and not be pawns on anyone’s political agenda.”

If only.

For too many people in the towns, all the ills of our community come to rest at the feet of Memphis.  All the problems are caused by Memphians.  All conflict is created by Memphis politicians.

Here are some of the myths about Memphis:

Memphis’ tax rate is soaring.

It’s the same that it was in 1993, and that’s despite increased public safety budgets.  The truth is that it’s Shelby County Government’s tax rate that’s climbing, driven over the years by the cost of sprawl outside Memphis.  In fact, Shelby County Government would not have more than $1.5 billion in debt except for the cost of infrastructure and schools in the suburbs.  Because sanctimony knows no bounds, those were the days when Mark Norris, then Shelby County Commissioner, voted against tax increases although it was his district that was causing them.

City of Memphis is too wasteful and corrupt.

City government delivers its services on a per capita basis cheaper than Shelby County, Collierville, Millington, and Germantown governments.  And it’s done it despite increasing its land area and reducing its densities.  More to the point, if the last two years of the Wharton Administration have shown anything, it is that he is intent on rooting out waste wherever he finds it.

Memphis is dangerous and crime-ridden.

Memphis has seen dramatic decreases in crime and even if the memos written in the Memphis Police Department were converted into reports, it still would have done so.  But here’s the truth: all of us know which parts of Memphis are risky and if we don’t go there, our risks as a victim of violence are minimal.  The high crime areas unsurprisingly coincide with maps of Memphis poverty, and if suburbanites want to attack crime, they should roll up their sleeves to remove families from neighborhoods where kids are taught where to hide when gunfire breaks out.

Memphis teachers are no good.

The top schools in Memphis City Schools are a match for the top schools in Shelby County Schools, but here’s the big difference: city school teachers are teaching moving targets. Each year, roughly 15 percent of city students move, disrupting learning and creating toxic stress that has a negative impact on brain development.  The majority of Memphis students are dealing with a web of issues that teachers are addressing every day while county schools prove conclusively that socio-economic status is the greatest impact on student achievement.

Memphis City Schools has gotten a windfall for years.

There is widespread belief that the ADA (Average Daily Attendance) laws in Tennessee have produced a windfall for Memphis City Schools every time a new school was built for Shelby County Schools.  It is true that all school spending must be proportioned in accordance with the number of students in each district, but over the decades, city schools never got any capital funding from county government unless the county district needed construction money.  It was the tail wagging the dog, but it created the conventional wisdom that Memphis City Schools had no needs and was just squandering money flowing from a slot machine; however, the capital needs for city schools (eight schools are more than 100 years old and 30 are more than 80 years old) is $488 million.

Memphians are poor and uneducated.

The number of people living in poverty in Memphis has been about the same since 1980 (which does not diminish the need to address the city’s most malignant problem), but for every person living under the poverty line, there are three who are not.  In terms of educational attainment, Memphis’s numbers are better than the MSA’s.  As for the poverty rate, it’s the level outside Memphis that forces the Memphis MSA into the top five.  Memphis on its own is not in the top 10 for highest poverty rate.

Memphis doesn’t really matter.

Memphis remains the economic and job center for the entire region, and with more than 75% of the people in the suburban towns commuting to jobs outside their borders, the health of Memphis should be uppermost in their minds, because so goes Memphis, so goes their paychecks.

Memphis is the next Detroit.

We have no patience with this oft-made derogatory – not to mention racially-charged – comment.  Memphis’ percentage of people with college degrees is two times Detroit,Memphis has 40% more in the labor force, the poverty rate in Memphis is 30% lower and household income is about 25% higher, the number of vacant housing in Memphis is about half of Detroit’s  (although Memphis is almost three times larger in land area), Detroit’s city budget is three times bigger than Memphis’, and its debt is 20 times bigger than Memphis.

Memphis is a backwater city.

We are home to FedEx, one of the top 10 most respected companies in the world and global commerce was invented by it.  In Sir Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, he cites 16 cities that shaped the world.  Memphis is on the list, along with Athens, Vienna, Tokyo, Paris, Florence, Berlin, Rome, New York, London, San Francisco, and Stockholm.   It’s easier to say we have backwater suburbs than to say we are a backwater city.  Hall writes: a remarkable event in human history took place: cultural creativity and technological innovation were massively fused…The       special reputation of the place, free and wide open, helped it all to happen…the music of an underclass could literally become the music of the world…This was a revolution in attitudes and behavior, as profound as anything that has happened in the last 200 years.”

It’s time to set aside the myths, but the current climate calls on mainstream Republicans to stand up and say enough is enough.  Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell has shown before that he may be the grown-up in his party to do it, the person to say that the current hostility level is unacceptable and the constant drumbeat of anti-Memphis venom is in the end unhealthy for all of us.  We hope he’s up to the task.

First, I would like to thank the tireless, hard-working, and often overlooked teachers in our districts, who meet our students where they are and bring them their best. As a classroom teacher for five years in MCS, I know very well the significant demands – mental, emotional, and physical – the job brings. I also know that a key component  of any teacher’s success is working in a supportive environment that has high standards and holds everyone accountable to student outcomes.

However, in a recent Commercial Appeal article, there was some push back against a district meeting intended  to bring together teachers from MCS whose students persistently scored in the lowest quartiles on standardized tests. And, although the means of communication used by the district may not have been the most tactful, the  purpose of the  gathering was very clear: these meetings are necessary to address the performance gaps, to discuss specific plans to improve the effectiveness of these teachers in order to increase student achievement. And with the new data generated as a result of the Teacher Effectiveness Initiative (TEI), Memphis City Schools can now develop customized programs of support and development aligned to teacher need.

The data is helping the district identify and better support teachers on both ends of the spectrum, the high-performing teachers as well as the low-performing teachers. Indeed, identifying and supporting teachers is a key strategy of the TEI work; and, after a semester of observations, and years of data, is it not the right time to apply this information more appropriately for the benefit of our students? The response to the article challenges that assumption but raises some additional interesting points.

The idea that ‘privacy’ was violated by using data on how students are performing under a given teacher’s guidance warrants the question as to whether what happens in a classroom is a private or public matter. Of course, certain issues must remain sacred, like personal information, students’ names and classification, etc. However, several recently published studies show us just how public the work of teachers really is, and how it affects as all.

The first report, written by Harvard and Columbia economists for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), finds that elementary and middle school teachers who raise their student’s test scores also have an enormous impact on those student’s future: predicting things like college matriculation, future earnings, even teenage-pregnancy rates. Are these not some of the fundamental issues that plague the stability of our community and our economic growth? Are they not also significant pieces of our public life? Should we then, not take seriously what we know is happening inside of our classrooms, and address it? How can we permit any further delay in addressing inadequacies in our classrooms?

Their report tracked 2.5 million students over a twenty year period, and is the most in-depth report on linking student outcomes to value-added data to date. Linking the work of teachers to such striking long-term outcomes speak volumes to the urgency that the district is acting on, through the work of TEI. It also links the dreadful impact inadequate performance by teachers can have if left unchanged or unchallenged.  One finding in the report equates the effect of a bad teacher to missing 40 days of school during the year.

Furthermore, the economists’ research indicates that replacing one poor teacher with an average teacher would increase a single classroom’s earning by about $266,000.  Although money is not the only measure of what great teachers bring to our children, it is a significant determinant of life chances and generational outcomes. You can read the report here, a solid summary of the findings in the NYTimes here, and a column by Nicholas Kristof on the findings and their policy implications here. This research adds to our growing knowledge about just how important teachers really are.

In our current situation with so few of our students in the city (5%) and in the county (20%) prepared for college the essential work of recruiting, identifying, supporting, and retaining great teachers must be a priority for the current administration, the school board, and the Transition Planning Commission. We cannot be squeamish about the realities of low-performance. Our children deserve better, and our community will be better off, if we make strategic use of the invaluable date the TEI is providing us.

I believe this is the message the district is sending by beginning these conversations with teachers, and I hope with principals and district officials as well, about how to address low-performance. I expect as also that the district will pursue the same types of meetings with those professionals meeting expectations (3‘s) and those surpassing them (4-5’s) in order to understand what support is needed and what the district can do to maximize their effectiveness.

This work is founded on the continual research being done by the Gate’s Foundation to understand what makes an effective teacher, and how best to identify, and support them.

The Gates Measure of Effective Teaching (MET), is the most comprehensive study to date on teacher evaluations, and provides a crucial analysis of the effectiveness of three types of evaluations: classroom observations, value-added data, and student surveys, all of which play a key role in the districts evaluation tool the TEM. This research should give the district and parents even greater resolve to follow through with the strategies of TEI. Their findings suggest that:

-          Value-added data is more powerful than any other measure in predicting a teacher’s long term contributions to student success, (and the score reflects students’ mastery of higher-level thinking skills and school enjoyment, not just high test scores). 

-          Observations help teachers improve their teaching, but have limited value in predicting future performance.

-          Combining several performance measures is key for accurate evaluations.

You can read a summary of the report from The New Teacher Project here and the entire report here.

Finally, the fact that teachers are so crucial to student achievement and other significant long-term outcomes must find its way into our discourse about equity. We must provide an equitable education to our students, this is not only a legal mandate of the State but more so an issue of justice. Research has shown over and over again that our most disadvantaged students are more likely to be taught by our lowest performing teachers. A recent study conducted in the Los Angeles Unified School District looked at the distribution and performance of teachers there for over a three year period. What they determined was that, indeed, the more effective teachers were concentrated in more affluent schools and that highly effective teachers were more likely to leave low-performing schools.

Now, more than ever, we must entrust all children, regardless of where they live, if they are optional or honors, or if they have special needs, to the best teachers, with no exceptions. We must also work, however, to support our teachers in every capacity and remove all barriers to their success, from our lowest performers all the way to our highest. To do these things, it is necessary to follow through with the four key strategies of the TEI, 1.Use a common, agreed-upon process to define and measure effective teaching, 2.make smart decisions about who teaches our students, 3. better support, utilize, and compensate our teachers, and 4. improve the surrounding contexts for teachers and students to foster effective teaching. We must follow through with these strategies with fidelity even when the conversations are difficult. Our students will benefit from our commitment, and so will we.

Apparently, there is no hunger more intense than being power hungry.

It’s proven on a daily basis by Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris and his sycophant, Tennessee Representative Curry Todd.

Hardly a day goes by that an action of the Norris-Todd cabal doesn’t leave us wondering if they ever bother to tend to state government business.  Clearly, they prefer to meddle in the affairs of local government, to mandate their biases as local policy, and to make sure there is no level playing field when it comes to local intergovernmental decisions.

They play regular role as the playground bullies, asserting their dominance over any issue that deepens their power base and strokes their unquenchable political egos.  As we’ve said before, at least Mr. Todd has an excuse: we think he had too many basketball balls hit his head during his stellar career as a local hardwood legend.

Quest for Power

But Mr. Norris doesn’t have an excuse.  He’s intelligent and gifted, but he’s turned into our very own Newt Gingrich, captured by his own grandiosity and undone by his own egotistical belief that he’s always the cleverest boy in the room.  It’s been sad to watch Mr. Norris’ fall as a relatively effective member of legislative bodies to a shill for narrow partisan leanings that undermine the qualities that made Tennessee great in the first place: generosity, pioneer spirit of camaraderie, compassion, and a sense of a shared and better future.

Along the way, he sacrificed his principles on the altar of his own quest for power, and as a result, today, there is no local decision that he isn’t willing to interfere in and there is no pandering so demeaning that he’s unwilling to do it.

The latest example is the Norris-Todd bill which suggests that their political interests trump legal annexation reserve agreements negotiated by the county mayor and every mayor of every city in Shelby County and ratified by every city government and by county government.  The Norris-Todd duo introduced a bill in Nashville to remove a large area of Memphis’ annexation reserve area in east Shelby County.

It’s an unprecedented interference by the Tennessee Legislature into the agreements reached in 1998 in the aftermath of the “tiny towns” controversy following the passage by the Legislature of Chapter 1101 mandating the establishment of growth boundaries in Tennessee counties.  State law said: “In any county with a charter form of government, the annexation reserve agreements in effect on January 1, 1998, are deemed to satisfy the requirement of a growth plan. The county shall file a plan based on such agreements with the committee.”  In that way, the annexation reserve agreements that existed at that time in Shelby County became the starting point for additional negotiations to satisfy Chapter 1101.

Good Faith

The ultimate annexation reserve agreements resulted from a process that involved the Shelby County Mayor, the mayors of every city in Shelby County, and representatives from the largest utility, the largest school district, the largest Chamber of Commerce, the soil conservation district, two people appointed by the county mayor, and two people appointed by the mayor of the largest city.

It was a process characterized by difficult negotiations, but in the end, all governments in Shelby County came together to enter into an agreement that set the future boundaries for each city, ending conflicts and lawsuits between governments.  As part of the process and to show its good faith, City of Memphis relinquished 150 square miles of land that were in its annexation areas and those areas were taken by the smaller cities.

It’s the kind of good faith now lacking in the actions of Mr. Norris and Mr. Todd.  That said, some think it’s possible that neither of them expect their conniving about the annexation reserve agreements to become law.  Instead, they may be throwing out this abhorrent bill as a tactic to make their upcoming bill more attractive, the one to give schools owned by the county school system to the towns when they set up their own municipal school districts.

That bill was already floated by Mr. Todd, but Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell said the bill was “inappropriate” and it was tabled.  For now.

Here, we think this bill is aimed at giving the municipal districts even more taxpayers to prop up their walled-in community schools.  All in all, it has a certain putrid smell that’s becoming familiar with the Norris-Todd wheeling and dealing.

Councilmen Nailed It

There is no doubt that, regardless of what Mayor Luttrell thinks, the bill to give county schools to town districts is going to be resurrected in a matter of weeks unless Norris-Todd get their way on the disposition of the schools. Until they, we expect even more of their good cop (Norris), bad cop (Todd) routine, because it is aimed at forcing their will on the broad-based transition planning group that has been doing a remarkably good job in considering the future of a unified school district.

As for the annexation reserve agreements, member of Memphis City Council said it well:  Chairman Bill Morrison said: “If Mark Norris wants to run the county, he should probably run for county mayor.  It’s kind of ridiculous that Nashville, with all the problems we have in the state, wants to run Memphis and Shelby County, and they want to run them into the ground.”

Councilman Myron Lowery referred to it has a “stunt” from people practicing “the self-serving politics we’re getting out of Nashville” these days and from people who regularly change the rules in the middle of the game.  Councilman Jim Strickland said he was “old-fashioned” enough to think that “agreements should be honored…and local folks should be allowed to handle local issues” without the interference of “Big Brother.”

It’s Mr. Norris’ behavior that makes it absurd that he is chairman of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, whose mission is to serve “as a forum for the discussion and resolutions of intergovernmental problems.”  As the chief intergovernmental problem for Memphis and Shelby County, it’s even more ironic that he leads a “think tank” whose purpose is to identify smart policy for the future.

Bend Over

In one of its reports, TACIR wrote that the need for a dependable and consensus framework for annexation is because “at times, the powers of the legislature could be abused.  This abuse could take the form of the passage of annexation acts against the wishes of local government officials and citizens.”

The Norris-Todd annexation reserve bill is proof positive that TACIR got it right.

TACIR has been a driving force in applying the growth policies encapsulated in the 1998 state law, and it seems only logical that if Mr. Norris is now taking aim at destroying the legal intergovernmental agreements entered into in 1998, he should step down as TACIR chairman.

It’s hard to think of anyone in Nashville who has been more detrimental to intergovernmental relations, because when he talks about intergovernmental relations, it usually starts with making the City of Memphis bend over.

Attacks on Planned Parenthood patients in Tennessee have intensified.  I received notification on December 28 from the Director of the Tennessee Department of Health that although we had been informed that we would receive HIV prevention and Syphilis prevention funding to provide these services to our clients, we were suddenly not approved and would not receive any of the grant monies previously promised for 2012.

We have been providing HIV testing, counseling and education with these federal funds since 1999.  The United Way administers the grant in Shelby County and when I asked them why, they had no reason.  When I asked the Department of Health staff supervising this area why, they had no reason.  It seems this was an entirely political decision designed to hurt the people of Shelby County by denying them their most qualified and most trusted provider of health care.

This continues what seems like a concerted effort in Tennessee and Shelby County to hurt Planned Parenthood and the patients we serve.  And we want you to know THE TRUTH.

Please continue your support in all its various forms. This latest news of our HIV and Syphilis prevention funding loss will not hold Planned Parenthood back. We’re here.

To donate online, click here.

Barry Chase, CEO Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region

If you have any we can post, please email them to tjones@smartcityconsulting.com.

From Governing:

During his five years at the helm of New Jersey’s largest city, Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s work could provide fodder for months of columns on energetic, innovative and responsive government. For starters, he has overseen a stunning reduction in violent crime. In March 2010, Newark had its first month in over 44 years without a single murder.

More recently, Booker has turned his attention to another side of crime control: Newark’s recidivism problem. Nationwide, nearly two-thirds of the 700,000 prisoners released annually are back in jail within three years. In New Jersey, more than half the offenders released from state prison are rearrested for a new crime within nine months.

Each year, 1,700 people return to Newark from state prison. Many more Newarkers—1,400 a month—are released from the local Essex County Correctional Facility. At any given time, more than 6,500 of the city’s residents are under county or federal probation or state parole. While there is no citywide recidivism data, the state and national numbers don’t paint an encouraging picture of what lies ahead for these individuals.

In 2008, the average annual cost of incarceration in New Jersey was $46,880. But that represents a fraction of the toll that recidivism exacts as a result of factors like family destabilization and economic disruption.

To address these challenges, in 2009 Newark established an Office of Reentry. Characteristically, Booker didn’t just create another government bureaucracy. Instead, he teamed with New York City’s Manhattan Institute to insure that best practices would be used to combat chronic problems.

The Office of Reentry’s biggest program is the Newark Prisoner Reentry Initiative. The city was the first in the country to earn a grant for this kind of approach from the U.S. Department of Labor. The two-year, $2 million grant was leveraged with a match from philanthropic partners.

NPRI has provided more than 1,400 former prisoners with job development, job retention, case management and mentoring services. More than 900 have been placed in jobs at an average wage that tops $9 an hour, and the six-month retention rate is 70 percent. Most important, the one-year recidivism rate among program recipients is below the New Jersey state average.

The office takes a “work first” approach to recidivism, under the theory that finding a job fast and staying employed are the best ways to avoid a return to jail. The Office of Reentry develops and manages programs to help former prisoners find and keep jobs by overseeing a data-driven performance-management system of reentry-service contractors. The office regularly reviews process and outcome data, and providers are paid based on their success helping clients find and retain employment.

Booker understands that good social policy is also good for the bottom line. In less than three years, his integrated approach to battling recidivism has emerged as a model for efforts to confront countless other social ills in an environment of scarce resources.

Another week goes by and yet another CA article about service cuts at Memphis International…. With theAmsterdam flight generating over two billion in economic impact since its inception, do you think Smart City could do a round robin with local stakeholders taking about the service cuts and ideas for saving our International flight which has more of an impact than some of the companies that are located here…. (on another note it would be fun to read round robins of local leaders and progressives on other Memphis issues).

A few thoughts on saving our international service that other cities have employed.

1) Asking our business and civic leaders to make it a company / city policy to use the flight for employees traveling to Europe and beyond. The Cincinnati business community did just that the save their Paris service.  Make the commitment public so the flying public understands they need to use the service or loose it.

2) The chamber should bring together Delta and FedEx to see if FedEx can make use of the flight for cargo. I am sure they do this to some extent but can it be increased? Keep in mind that FedEx has for years lobbied Air France for non-stop Paris service. They should be willing to put their money where their mouth is to save Amsterdam service by placing additional cargo on the Amsterdam flight.

3)  During the first year of the fligh,t we did C&VB advertising. Promoting the city and the flight through web banner ads is inexpensive. C&VB should have a partnership with Delta to do joint web banner ads across Europe and beyond. Think Elvis sites, Music sites,  anytime someone in Europe does a goggle search a Memphis via Amsterdam flight banner ad should come up, etc., etc.

4) Mayor Wharton should appoint a community of ambassadors between Memphis and Amsterdam. In the many years of air service can we point to a single cultural exchange?  How about a trade and cultural mission. Amsterdam is a capital of finance, high tech, culture – we should be forging cultural and business relationships. Those relationships will not only help us keep the flight they will enrich both cities. The mayor really could help drive business and cultural relationships and I bet people would be thrilled to serve. Are we even sister cities with Amsterdam?

“Once a city loses international routes — as Portland did in 2001, when Delta ended Portland-Japan flights — they are difficult to restore.”

“Since its launch on June 27, 1995, more than 2 million customers have flown Tennessee’s sole nonstop flight to Europe, generating more than $2 billion in statewide economic impact.”

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_597442.html

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/06/ports_gamble_on_delta_pays_off.html

Wayne Risher – The Commercial Appeal:

I was wondering if you could talk about the Memphis-Amsterdam flight and how it’s performing, now that it’s down to four days a week? And also, could you speak to any plans for further reductions in the frequency of that flight in the near future?

Glen Hauenstein:

We are looking at the financial performance real time on this. And it seems to be doing better with a reduced frequency level. And so we’ll continue with that and analyze that as the data comes in. Of course, we’re not really in the peak yet. We’ve got December and January to come in and I think it’d be a better question to ask next spring.

The vision for the “greening” of downtown Baltimore is taking shape after city leaders proposed ambitious steps to keep and attract businesses and residents by making public areas more inviting.

An open-space plan unveiled last February by the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore calls for a network of spaces that link neighborhoods to the downtown by offering “visual cues,” pleasant streetscapes and activities to propel pedestrians from one block to the next. The plan, the first of its kind for the downtown, envisions new or enhanced parks and plazas, as well as livelier streetscapes and public spaces that feature regular activities.

Though it may be years before funding is available for the bigger projects, work is under way in several areas. Hopkins Plaza is to be upgraded this spring, and Preston Gardens on St. Paul Street will get a redesign over the next couple of years.

Meanwhile, new landscaping, as well as features such as tables and chairs, have been added outside office buildings and in plazas around the downtown. City officials, working with private property owners, are continuing to make the Inner Harbor’s Pratt Street corridor more pedestrian-friendly. And the Downtown Partnership has hired a staffer to focus solely on bringing programs and activities to downtown parks.

“What’s important is they aren’t just waiting to do the big projects,” said Tom McGilloway, a principal with architecture firm Mahan Rykiel, the lead planner for the city on the open-space plan. “They are starting to do little things that can make a difference. These short-term successes … build confidence in people and the credibility to do further investment. … The potential is for downtown to be much more vibrant than it is right now.”

Cities have come to recognize that public spaces can generate not just activities such as yoga classes and poetry readings, but also economic activity, said Ethan Kent, a vice president with the New York-based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces. Research in other cities has shown that more attractive and active public spaces have boosted occupancy rates and rents for nearby buildings, for instance.

“We’re seeing increasingly this idea of ‘placemaking’ becoming a central strategy for many outcomes, and economic development has been one of the focuses,” Kent said. “Cities don’t have the budgets to plan as much anymore, but they’re looking at more practical ways to leverage resources and seeing how placemaking is a common-sense approach.”

The Downtown Partnership has been adopting recommendations from the open-space plan where it can, said Kirby Fowler, the group’s president. Some of the latest efforts are possible thanks to a 2010 increase in the surcharge to downtown property owners that funds the Downtown Management Authority district. The increase generates more than $1 million annually, and much of it is used for open-space projects and programs.

“We had a lot of work under way [before the open-space plan], but we’ve been able to move to a new level in terms of improving our public space,” Fowler said. “Many are short-term projects, such as pruning trees, adding new fountains and better landscaping. There is a whole range of improvements we can make to these parks, and one of the appealing aspects is you can start right away.”

Fowler and others contend that for decades the city’s public and private sectors have failed to pay enough attention to public spaces.

Not everyone can have a waterfront view. So how do we bring value and appeal to other parts of downtown? Through creation of better public spaces,” Fowler said. “Everyone wants some location near a building where they can escape for a quick bite or to enjoy a gorgeous day.”

The open-space plan makes specific recommendations for nine areas of the downtown, including the Inner Harbor/Pratt Street, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Centre/Monument streets and Charles/Light streets.

The plan also offers ideas for two future parks. One would be built on the site of the current 1st Mariner Arena if a new arena is eventually built elsewhere. The other would be a “linear” park next to Lexington Market, a plan that would require the demolition of a 1980s-era arcade.

For now, one of the bigger projects is a redesign of Preston Gardens in the median between St. Paul Street and St. Paul Place. The downtown’s largest green space, it boasts historic fountains and staircases. The partnership plans to shore up a wall directly below a parking area, which will be eliminated.

The work, funded with a $1.7 million federal transportation grant and matched with city, Downtown Partnership and private dollars, should start in the next 18 months. The physical redesign will follow other changes made recently to attract people, such as the addition of regular yoga classes and poetry readings, and the reactivation of long-dormant fountains.

Posted June 1, 2011, and unfortunately, even more relevant today as Tennessee Representative interferes in local affairs yet again to serve a narrow – and narrow-minded – special interest group:

It’s hard to think of anything that’s uglier about life in Memphis than the self-loathing that passes for normal daily activity.

It shows up regularly in The Commercial Appeal in comments from readers who default unfathomably on any subject to race and hate about all things Memphis .  It also shows up in the stereotypes that form the foundation for letters to the editor from towns whose very existence owes to the city they so often despise.

It shows up frequently in the code words and proxy issues used by suburban Republicans – particularly when they 200 miles away in the state capital – but which every one is able to translate correctly.  All of the symbols and code words refer to evil African-American city where most of them earn their livelihoods.  We see it in Nashville when Republicans like Sen. Mark Norris can vote against the funding to attack  Memphis’ third world infant mortality problems.  We see it with the Curry Todd mentality of the suburban legislators produces guns in parks and bars legislation.  We see it when state officials wrestle with funding for The Med while our suburban legislators stand around fondling their gun barrels.

Stand-ins

All of these issues are stand-ins for anti-black sentiments that drive so much of the politics outside Memphis.  No, they’re all too polite these days to come out and say they  dislikeAfrican-Americans, but every one knows that when they talk about being safe in parks, they’re alluding to the threat from Memphis gang bangers.  When they talk about us carrying guns as we engage in our daily lives, we know that they mean that it’s not safe in this majority black city.  It’s all a game of seeing who can come up with the best code words for blacks and then hammer it over and over to make sure that their white constituents are fearful and see the politicians as protectors from a city that’s just too poor and too black to trust.

In the past eight years, the African-American population in Shelby County outside Memphis has almost doubled, as has the percentage of the black population in DeSoto County.  It’s further evidence of Memphis’ imminent history-making event when it becomes the first American metropolitan area with more than one million people that is African-American.  In other words, if bigots set out to pick the worst place in the U.S. to live, Memphis would be that place.  What’s amazing is that so many of them managed to do it.

Like the driving force for the tea party movement, much of the suburban angst is driven by fear of the “other” and the reality that the tide has turned and the world is being transformed.  Memphis just got there early, but more and more, white men will become the minority in all parts of the U.S.  as the change becomes more real, so will the shrillness of the rhetoric.

Why Are White Men So Angry?

In a meeting last week, we were killing time by looking at the macho videos by candidates from the white candidate for Alabama commissioner of agriculture complaining about thugs and brandishing his rifle, the Ron Ramsey ad in which he stomps his boots and pretends that Tennessee doesn’t need federal money and the fringe candidate for Tennessee governor who’s running to attack the “mental illness” of liberalism.

An African-American colleague in the meeting brought down the house by asking the most pertinent question.  “What are all these white men in the South so angry about?” she said.  “They think they have it bad.  White men in the South.  Unbelievable.”

And yet, it’s hard to laugh about this strain of absurdist politics because it clearly resonates with so many people in our community.  More to the point, it’s a primary reason that state politicians privately joke about sticking it to “black Memphis” and portraying it as a city that is beyond solutions to its problems.  We admit that many of the Democratic politicians that we send to Nashville fall right in the trap and behave in ways that convince the rest of the state that “Memphis is nothing but trouble,” as a Democratic government once said.

The 70% Solution

A Commercial Appeal poll a couple of years ago concluded that 70% of Shelby Countians thought race relations in Memphis was good.  It begged the question of why it’s the other 30% who seem to get regularly on the ballot, win election and shape our local politics.

But back to poor and black Memphis.  We’ve written often about the 151,000 poor people who live largely out of sight in our midst.  There are places in Memphis where the infant mortality rate is higher than Haiti or Afghanistan, and while suburban Republican politicians wring their hands over women’s reproductive choices, they don’t feel as strongly about funding programs to make sure fetuses are born healthy to mothers who want them (as proven by the funding cut for infant mortality programs).

But such is the life of poor people in Memphis.  They get much more attention as political symbols than they ever get when it comes to solving their problems.

American Dreams

Here’s the thing.  The link between race and poverty in Memphis (and the South) is obvious and overdue for serious attention and action.  And contrary to convention wisdom, for every poor African-American in our community, there are two African-Americans who are not.  They simply go to work, buy their homes, raise their family and hope to live in a city that shows its greatness by its concern for the poor and needy.

Somehow, in all the political posturing and partisan rhetoric, it’s lost on this city by and large that there are 400,000 African-Americans who are not poor and whose ambitions and priorities are squarely in the mainstream.  In fact, if you doubt us, try visiting the cafeteria at FedEx World Headquarters.

It’s impossible to not be struck by two things: 1) that we have a strong black upper middle class and young professionals; and 2) that the coarseness of public life and the ugliness of the political scene keep most of them from plugging in.

The Best Practice We’re Looking For

Memphis is on the cusp of national transformation, and because we are there first, we have a rare opportunity to become the “best practice” that we seem to be perpetually seeking.  Already, for the first time in U.S. history, children of color are a new majority in the South’s public schools.  If we are serious about a competitive future for Memphis, we must also be serious about creating the quality of life, the schools and the public life that engage the diversity that is becoming commonplace in the nation’s workforce.

As long as Memphis is stereotyped as a poor African-American city, we will endure state and federal officials’ lack of urgency in addressing our problems.  After all, one party seems to take African-Americans for granted and the other seems to use them as whipping boys.  In the end, the lack of understanding about the realities of our community results in the worst kind of racism – lower expectations for getting the basics of government right.

It’s the MATA lesson writ large.  Because it seems its customer base as poor and lacking options, it reliably delivers a dismal service, and state and federal officials do nothing to force change.  But it’s no surprise, because after all, Memphis is a poor, black city so we don’t deserve quality programs, quality of life and quality of civic institutions that are crucial for cities today.

Paul Graham has written extensively on this topic in essays like How to Be Silicon Valley and Why Startups Condense in America. Much of his thinking no doubt played into the decision to base Y Combinator entirely in Silicon Valley. Boston’s loss was the Bay Area’s gain and a striking example of why it’s important for mayors to view their cities through an entrepreneurial lens. Paul viewed Y Combinator through that lens and it led him to believe that Silicon Valley simply had more of the ingredients that would make his companies successful than Boston did.

So let’s take a look at those ingredients. Making products and services people want to buy has to be at the top of the list of any forward-thinking mayor. Extensive research by the Kauffman Foundation shows that virtually all job creation comes from companies less than five years old. So if you’re running a city and want to increase the number of jobs in your city, you should be doing whatever you can to encourage more viable startups. It’s something that Ed Lee, San Francisco’s newly-inaugurated mayor seems to understand, telling TechCrunch back in November “I want them [tech companies] to start here in San Francisco, and I want them to stay and to grow.”

Talent is another important factor and lies at the heart of Bloomberg’s efforts in New York City. Creating a world-class engineering campus in New York can be thought of as the municipal equivalent to Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed or Gowalla. By having more talented people in the city, New York is better able to compete with other cities in the same way that Facebook better competes with rivals by having more talented engineers under its roof. (What’s more, Facebook recently announced that it will open an NYC engineering office in 2012.)

Of course, getting top engineers and designers to actually work for a city might prove challenging (with a notable exception to be seen in the success of the Code for America program), but mayors can have a significant impact on helping a city to attract the best and brightest.

I recently spoke with Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS) at Cornell University, who played an integral role in Cornell’s bid for the Roosevelt Island campus (read more about this effort in Eric Eldon’s interview with Huttenlocher).

His observation that Bloomberg’s history as both a technologist and an entrepreneur helped him and others in his office to better understand the need for New York to increasingly be a hub for the best technologists on the planet. Bloomberg is to New York City as John Calipari is to Kentucky basketball, intuitively adhering to Vinod Khosla’s notion that CEOs should be spending a very high percentage of their time recruiting.

Capital is another necessity for a city’s success. In some cases this might mean mayors actively courting angel investors and venture capitalists. The success of the Silicon Valley ecosystem is due, in no small part, to the availability of early-stage capital and its density of investors. Other metro areas have historically struggled to replicate this investment ecosystem but more attempts are underway.

Sergio Fernández de Córdova, the founder of Fuel Outdoor and chairman of New York Entrepreneur Week, pointed me to an effort underway in the state of Connecticut to provide more funding to early-stage companies in the state. In addition, New York City announced $150 million in funding solely devoted to startups in the city as part of the tech campus announcement. While these efforts might pale in comparison to the latest billion-dollar fund raised by a Silicon Valley venture firm, they are a step in the right direction for states and municipalities trying to spur innovation.

A final ingredient is culture which can loosely be translated to livability when we think about cities. This was impressed upon me recently during a meeting with Eric Garcetti, the former Los Angeles City Council President and leading contender to become the city’s next mayor. Garcetti recognizes the challenges that LA has when competing against the Bay Area to be the home base for the next great technology company. Indeed, Los Angeles has lost a number of its most promising companies to the north such as Lookout and Yammer (born out of Los Angeles-based Geni).

Still, Los Angeles is one of the most desirable cities in the country to live in and the recent Silicon Beach resurgence is due in part to this. Listening to Garcetti talk about LA’s strong points reminds you of Larry and Sergei discussing why Google’s culture made it possible for them to attract so many outstanding engineers or Tony Hsieh sharing why Zappos’ quirky, fun work environment helped them retain top performers. By emphasizing LA’s strengths, Garcetti hopes to retain talented USC, UCLA and Cal Tech grads who might not be so keen on spending “Junuary” in San Francisco.

As we roll into an election year, many cities are in a state of crisis. Budgets are a mess and job growth has been minimal for a good swath of the country. Cities in need don’t just need strong leadership, they require transformational leadership. It’s no easy feat but it’s likely that the more that mayors view their cities through an entrepreneurial lens, the better they will be able to adapt to a rapidly-changing world.

Bloomberg seems to be leading this charge with his efforts in New York City and mayor’s offices around the country are taking notice. Others like Ed Lee, Garcetti and Newark mayor Cory Booker appear to be taking a similar tone in their respective cities. Perhaps these are the first examples in what will become a long line of mayor-entrepreneurs.

Decades later, the results are nothing to celebrate. An aggressive demolition policy failed to create a better neighborhood. Instead, it led to a different kind of stigmatized inner city. The chaotic, dirty and declining urban condition of the mid-20th century gave way to the urban prairie of the 21st.

This section of St. Louis, just northeast of downtown, is an extreme but far from exclusive example of the impacts from public policy that heavily favors demolition in neglected areas.

During the 1950s, politicians, planners and architects consistently preached neighborhood clearance. A 1951 article from Architectural Forum titled “Slum Surgery in St. Louis” (pictured left) is accompanied by a map that categorizes almost all of St. Louis’ downtown and inner city as “blighted” or “obsolete.”

The city had two agencies to clear its slums. The St. Louis Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority demolished targeted areas and sold them back to the private sector for less than market value. The St. Louis Housing Authority cleared land as well and constructed new public housing complexes for displaced residents.

A newly constructed Pruitt Igoe and its soon to be gone surroundings. Click here to see an enlarged version (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

The Housing Authority constructed the infamous Pruitt-Igoe complex, but it also built more successful housing projects on smaller scales nearby.Those projects however, were still not enough to stabilize the neighborhood or slow down the clearance of this part of the city. For the Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority, much of the land remained undeveloped, and in many cases, stuck in the city’s hands.

The physical legacy of that era is a neighborhood that hardly qualifies as such. Aided by demolition, nature has slowly taken over the grid with disappearing sidewalks, blocks with nary a building in sight and six-lane streets that drive through green space. Below are a series of aerial images from today that showcase some extreme examples of what comprises this section of inner city St. Louis.

‘Slum Surgery in St. Louis’ photo courtesy of Michael Allen

There was little time for a celebration following the Greater Memphis Chamber’s announcement about $1.2 billion in private investment and 14,000 new jobs.

The day after the Chamber announcement, Brookings Institution ranked us as one of the worst-performing metropolitan economies in the world — #171 of the world’s 200 largest metros.   The report wasn’t unexpected based on negative trend lines for a decade, but putting it into a global perspective was nonetheless jarring.

That said, it’s worth noting that we finished higher than Denver (174), Birmingham, AL (175), Las Vegas (179), Indianapolis (183), New Orleans (186), San Francisco (1987), Atlanta (189), Kansas City (190), and Richmond, VA (191).  But that’s more like a “misery loves company” explanation.  Nashville was #89.

First, the good news.  The total is actually more than the $1.2 billion the Chamber announced.  The capital investment amount was based on a total of companies that created 25 jobs or more and $5 million in new investment.  Unfortunately, only 3,700 of the total 14,000 jobs were within Shelby County, but 90% of those Shelby County jobs were inside Memphis.

Welcome News Cries Out for More Detail

These milestones would hardly be worth celebrating in the 1990s when it was routine for the public capital investment was more than $1 billion a year and new jobs were regularly above 10,000.  But those heady days were pushed deep into our memories when the decade of the new century brought with it the loss of about 40,000 jobs and the Memphis metro economy languished even before the recession made things even harder.

While it’s too early to make broad statements about Memphis turning the corner, it was at least some better news for a change.  If you were paying close attention during the last mayoral campaign, you already knew about the new jobs.  It was part of the Wharton campaign’s bragging points, and although it was questioned by a couple of members of the news media, the Chamber’s numbers validated the campaign’s numbers.

These kinds of announcements are welcome but we always wish for more details.  The capital investment number is always headline-grabbing because it sounds big, but it’s people that matter more to us.  Because of it, it would be helpful to know the average salary for the 14,000 new jobs, the industry sector breakdown for the jobs and the average salaries, and a correlation with the tax freezes and business incentives given to each company (both inside and outside Shelby County).

Also, the statement that 44,000 existing jobs were preserved cries out for more information, because our already loose tax freeze policies were yet again made even looser for the purported purpose of protecting jobs that are already here.  The justification was always up for debate, but more to the point, the loosening of the PILOT rules drove up the amount of waived taxes to roughly $50 million every year and make threats of relocating now pro forma.

Good, Bad and Percentages

The devil is always in the details, but if more details were released, maybe, just maybe, we’d have more things to brag about.  Or a clearer understanding of where we need to concentrate.

Now, the bad news – yet another negative warning about the Memphis MSA’s economy from Brookings Institution.  Then again, it was pretty negative for the entire country.  Only one American region made the top 20: Houston, which came in at No. 19, a notch above Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In Brookings’ list, 90 percent of the world’s fastest-growing economies were outside North America and Western Europe. And 95 percent of the weakest-performing metro areas were in the long-dominant economic powers of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.

In one respect, it points out the pitfalls of dealing with percentages in setting economic indicators.  The economies of developing nations have a tendency to show up in the higher rungs of the listing, because the base number is low .  As a result, when the economies become more of the global mainstream, the percentage tends to be higher than cities that have been operating at their potential for awhile.

It’s the Region, Stupid

The same goes for cities that have bottomed out like Detroit and Buffalo, which ranked #72 and #68 respectively.   Are we really supposed to believe that they are better examples of free-wheeling capitalism than Denver and Atlanta?  If you were buying stock in a city, which would you invest in?

Like the Chamber statistics, the Brookings ranking cries out for more context.  In addition, we would welcome an explanation about why the Chamber’s statistics don’t agree with the Brookings’ statistics although they are essentially reporting on the same period of time.

By the way, from 1993-2007, Memphis ranked #115 in the Brookings Institution rankings.  From 2007-2010, it was #150.  Clearly, we are headed in the wrong direction, and we’ll have to put together sustained progress to get back to the middle of the pack.

The rankings are part of Brookings’ program highlighting the economic importance of regions.  The 200 largest metropolitan economies it analyzed account for nearly one-half (48 percent) of global output, but contain only 14 percent of the world’s population and employment.

Headlines Bad As Economy

The headlines about the Brookings Institution’s report were so unfortunate: “Memphis economy ranked with world’s weakest (Memphis Business Journal),” “Memphis economy one of world’s worst (Commercial Appeal),” and “Memphis ranked 171^st for economic performance out of 200 major cities (ABC 24).”

It wasn’t the Memphis economy.  It was the Memphis region’s economy.

We’ve said it before.  We’ll say it again.  Our problems are regional in nature, not about a city’s problems.

The poverty, the crime, low educational attainment, and per capita income are Delta phenomena.  If headlines would more accurately refer to “Memphis region” rather than just “Memphis,” perhaps we could create a momentum for regional focus, agenda-setting, and action that is so lacking now.

While success in the past does not guarantee success in the future, it’s sure a lot easier than proving that failure in the past does not guarantee failure in the future.  A good beginning is for everybody in the metro area to get into the game to prove that failure can give way to success in the future.

A month ago the Wire spotted an incredibly intricate rendering of American highways, drawn in the style of a subway map. The work was done by graphic designer Cameron Booth, a Sydney, Australia, native who moved to Portland in 2007. Booth says transit maps are “definitely a passion of mine.”

In addition to his day job providing transportation infrastructure designs for Parsons Brinckerhoff, he runs a blog devoted to transit map design. Inspired by the beauty of the London Tube map, Booth completed a metro-style look at the Interstate Highway System in 2009. The map’s popularity – it’s been viewed nearly 100,000 times on Flickr and included in a book – led to the completion of an even more impressive feat in late 2011: a map of the entire U.S. Highways system.

Atlantic Cities caught up with Booth to discuss the challenge of imposing one form of transportation on the map of another. City-minded viewers of Booth’s work may be confused by some of his scaling. On the interstate map, for instance, the dot marking the city of Dayton, Ohio, is noticeably larger than that of New York City (see the third image in the gallery below). That’s because Booth’s transit-style maps favor major road connections over population or importance.

“Some people have a lot of trouble with this interpretation of a once-familiar road network,” Booth says.

You originally drew the “Interstates as Subway” map back in 2009 — presumably in your free time. What in the world inspired you to do that?

Back in 2009, I ran across quite a few “simplified” renderings of the Interstate system on the Internet — all of which were interesting and very different from each other. Some other commenters were calling these “subway-style” maps, but to my mind, none of them captured the essence of the best transit diagrams. They didn’t use different colors for different “lines,” or show clearly differentiated “transfer stations,” for example. So, taking my design cues from the Tube Map, I set about designing my own vision of the Interstate system. The original version probably took me around 80 to 100 hours of work in Adobe Illustrator (spread over the course of a few months), using Wikipedia and Google Maps as my main sources of information.

Why import a British design for an American highway system?

The Tube Map is a truly iconic piece of information design. These days, with the transit diagram an almost ubiquitous design form, it can be difficult to realize exactly how revolutionary the visual approach taken by the Tube Map was in the 1930s when it was first designed by Harry Beck: thick, brightly-colored, starkly angled route lines with geography reduced to the barest elements.

The diagram emphasized connections and station sequencing over geographical reality and helped make visual sense of a vast and chaotic transportation network.

Originally only grudgingly released by the London Underground as an experimental pamphlet in 1933, Londoners quickly embraced the Tube Map as their own and it now stands as an instantly recognizable symbol of their city, even with all the changes it has undergone throughout the years. In a way, my design is a tribute or a homage to that pioneering work. Very few U.S. transit maps come close to the beautifully clean design of the Tube Map (New York having discarded the diagrammatic look after Massimo Vignelli’s map of the 1970s), so it just seemed the most appropriate choice.

In early 2011 you completed an updated version of the map to correct what you call “poor design choices and sloppy technique.” To the untrained eye things look pretty much the same. Can you explain what you mean by this, and how you improved some of those choices/techniques?

My first attempt certainly doesn’t look bad, it’s more a case of me learning new skills in the intervening two years and applying them to the newer version. I definitely blustered my way through the first one — there’s only a very rudimentary underlying grid and I eyeballed the placement of quite a few elements rather than using the precise tools available to me in Adobe Illustrator. Everything in the second version has its position determined by a grid and mathematical placement of points.

I was more confident in my design choices the second time around and this allowed me to add extra detail without sacrificing the clean, open look of the original. Examples of this are showing the east-west splits in I-35 in Dallas/Fort Worth and the Twin Cities in Minnesota — something I didn’t even attempt in the first version [see the gallery for these details]. These splits are the only ones in the entire Interstate system, so I thought it was definitely worth showing them in all their idiosyncratic glory.

In December you released a new map: this one of the U.S. Highways. That system is much more extensive than the interstate system. What were the some of the challenges you faced drawing this map that you didn’t face in the earlier one?

A lot more roads! While there are a lot of missing numbers in the Interstate system, almost every number between 1 and 101 is used for the (older) U.S. Highways System. And a lot of these routes are long — stretching from border to border in many cases. You might think that would make the network more gridlike and easier to work with, but in a lot of places, the roads twist around and cross over each other  — things start getting really confusing. There are some cities where a lot of highways converge and these were the most problematic. I also decided to show decommissioned historical routings of highways (the thin lines on the map) and these took a lot of research (and time!) to get exactly right.

You write on your site that as a result of these challenges the U.S. Highways map took you more than a year to complete, and at various points you were convinced it was impossible to do.

The biggest frustration was getting started and creating a convincing scale for the map that was going to work across the entire map. I always like to start the map at the most difficult point and work my way outwards from there: in this case, that was Memphis, Tennessee. Off the top of my head, there are seven or eight U.S. Highways that pass through there, some of which cross the Mississippi River to West Memphis. It’s a ridiculously complex intersection, so simplifying it down to a nationwide scale while still retaining some idea of how the roads interact with each other was a tough problem to solve.

Your maps have a clean quality that stands in contrast to the messy design of typical road maps. What are some of the stylistic differences you see between road maps and transit maps, and how do you account for them?

In my opinion, transit maps should really only have one purpose: telling passengers where to get on and off. Transit maps are about connections, not the geographical actuality of the routes. Get on here, change trains here, get off here — shown in a form that’s quick and easy to read intuitively. Road maps, on the other hand, are all about geography — they show every twist and turn of the road, every exit and interchange, accurate distances, points of interest and more. They’re meant for serious, detailed perusal, and give you the accuracy you need to actually navigate along the road system to your destination. Anyone who tries to take a road trip using my maps is going to get lost at the first exit, but that’s not what it’s for!

Highway and transit interest groups don’t always get along. Are we being too bold to view your maps as a suggestion that these two groups put aside their differences and work together?

The original Interstate map was definitely a comment on America’s love affair with the automobile. In a way, the Interstates are our transit system. The car is definitely here to stay, but there needs to be room (and funding!) for transit as our population increases and ages. It’s simply not sustainable to continue building ever-wider highways: there has to be alternative ways to move people around.

This may be like asking to choose a favorite child, but is there a segment of your maps think is particularly well crafted?

A lot of the time, it’s the little things that make me happiest. On the Interstate map, I’m particularly proud of the roads from Wisconsin through Chicago and up into Michigan. It’s a complex area, but it just looks really clean and well-designed. I also really like I-26 from Kingsport, Tennessee, to Charleston, South Carolina — it’s a dead straight line from one end to the other, yet fits into the network around it really well [see the gallery for this detail].

Below, a slideshow of some of the most interesting portions of the map. All images courtesy of Cameron Booth. Images are available for purchase here.

So, let’s take Collierville Mayor Stan Joyner at his word.

His obsession with a municipal school district for his town is not “separatism,” he said, although it does seem Freudian that he picked that word.  Then again, there’s another “ism” that does fuel the rush to judgment on these school districts.

This week, the mayors got a consultants’ report that said, surprise, they were right all along.  But considering that they hired the former Shelby County Schools superintendent, it really isn’t too much of a surprise.

This is one of those cases that has the feeling that the consultants were paid to tell the towns what they wanted to hear.  In fact, back in February at a public meeting in Germantown, Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy laid out what the bedroom community needed to do to create its own school district.   Her observations were parroted in this week’s report.

Politics First

What was clear in her comments was that she (and we’re sure the other mayors) were choreographing their actions with Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, an allegedly  small government conservative who finds it impossible to stay out of the affairs of local governments.

The other thing that’s telling about Mayor Goldsworthy’s comments about the school district was that she never talked about education.  It was all about politics.  It was about counting votes on the planning commission to marginalize any influence by Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, an objective that received warm applause from the crowd.

That in a nutshell does in fact sum up the back story on the towns’ school districts.  It is all about political power, not student performance.  It is about isolationism, and the fulfillment of a derivative and vanilla world that shuns “the other” and clings to a community of the “right people.”

We’re not suggesting that these are evil people, but they aren’t exactly noble either.  As usual, we are disappointed more in Mayor Goldsworthy and Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald because they are smart enough to know how cynical their actions are.

Those People

Over the years, they have extolled the importance of Memphis to their cities and professed to care about its future.  Unfortunately, they regularly default to a myopia that sees the world as “them” and “us” and contribute to the divisions in our county.

Mayor Goldsworthy was right about one thing, not that it affected her opinion in the end.  Speaking of the transition planning commission, she said: “hopefully a very rational, reasonable group of people figuring out how to do this and hopefully they would be receptive to all sorts of creative ideas about how schools might advance in Shelby County.”

In fact, that is a perfect description of the planning commission thus far.  Under the leadership of Barbara Prescott, its members have been thorough in considering alternative structures for the new unified school district. Rather than wait for the outcome, however, the town mayors rush to create a system where they can continue to have as much influence as they had over the old Shelby County Schools system.

It was always a curious feature of the county school system that it genuflected to the town mayors, particularly considering that they never allocated any money to schools within their borders.  Meanwhile, county government always got short shrift although it was the major source of local funding.

Justifications

The potential of losing their fiefdoms seem a motivator for the mayors and their comments dependably demonstrate that they reached a political position on schools before they bothered to search for the research and articulate their justifications.

Recently, Collierville Mayor Stan Joyner said that his town is working to “get education right” although there’s no consultants’ study about academic performance, teacher excellence, classroom size, and other issues affecting school success in the town districts.

Mr. Joyner also said Collierville needs more than just the cookie cutter approach of Memphis City Schools.  Of course, the city schools system has never taken a “one size fits all” approach.  The truth is that there are variations across the city system, and when innovation, principal leadership training, and better teachers are the criteria, the county system has never measured up.  In fact, based on the economic background of most of its students, it actually underperformed.

We predict town district advocates will quit talking about how a 5,000-student system is the optimal size for the best classroom outcomes.  It was always a charade anyway, because if the law allowed the towns to bring all of their students into one district of, say, 20,000 students, they would have done it in a nanosecond.

More Taxes

The consultants’ reports this week proposed that school funding come from an increase of 10 percent in their property tax rate (we still suspect the amount of the increase is being low-balled to keep it from being an issue in a referendum) or the funding would come from an  increase in the sales tax to the legal limit.

Perhaps, Memphis has finally found a slight marketing hook – shoppers there have a lower sales tax rate and Memphians don’t pay twice for schools like residents of the towns.

Most of all, this week, the towns finally got the rose-colored glasses view of town school districts that they have wanted.  They even provided an overly optimistic (they should hope not pollyannish) view about the transfer of the schools inside the towns to the new districts.

Whatever the final decision is, it will likely come from a lengthy court battle, raising the question of whether the town districts can be created before a judge’s ruling, leaving the towns with districts but no school buildings.

Rhetoric Over Reason

Meanwhile, town district supporters continue to promote the mythology that Memphis never had to pay for county schools that it annexed.  It’s a position that’s not backed up by the facts, but as the mayors push aggressively for their very own districts, we look for facts to be their first casualty.

Right after reason.

“Every man in my family has been locked up. Most days I feel like it doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try – that’s my fate, too.”
-11th-grade African American student, Berkeley, California

Washington, DC is finally getting a green waterfront development to be proud of.  A 42-acre redevelopment along the Anacostia River, The Yards will comprise some 1.8 million square feet of office space, 400,000 square feet of retail and cultural spaces, 2,700 rental and for‐sale homes, and a significant riverfront park and esplanade.  With a great in-town location along a Metro line and only a few blocks from the US Capitol, and with some excellent green features, the project has been certified gold under the LEED for Neighborhood Development pilot program.

With government support for the arts on the wane in most places, here’s a city singing a different tune:

“…The mayor has a plan. That plan has been to reestablish municipal support for the arts through the cultural office, and to enhance and expand city efforts that support artists and their organizations. This has taken the form of everything from maintaining the city’s cultural fund, which provided $1.6 million in grants directly to 201 arts groups this year, to rethinking non-arts programs so they might provide support to the sector.”

In 2010, for instance, the city came up with an innovative use of community block grants enabling $500,000 in federal stimulus funding to be used for eight arts-related projects.

Can you guess what mayor, what city? (Not Boston, that’s for sure.)

It’s Philadelphia I’m talking about, and for the third time since I began this blog in 2009, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has won notice from me because of his support for the arts (see here and here).

Now, as the article I quoted from above (in the Philadelphia Inquirer, printed in late December) notes in its last paragraphs, the money Philadelphia devotes to the arts is only $4 per capita, much lower than the leader, San Francisco, which devotes $90 per capital to the arts, thanks to a dedicated hotel tax that dates back to 50 years ago (it’s 5.3% today).

But Nutter is talking the talk in a difficult environment and, I hear, he shows up to support the arts. A while back, Nutter appointed a Cultural Advisory Council to devise an arts plan, with the goal of creating a roadmap to keep creative activity going on in Philadelphia. It recently reported:

The vision plan sets a goal of increasing the city’s investment in the arts from $7 million in fiscal 2010 to $20 million in fiscal 2014. That $13 million increase will bring its public spending on arts and culture up to the per-capita average of $11 found in 20 cities studied by the task force.

Now I have a bigger task for Nutter. I notice that he is vice president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and I wish he’d get the art on the agenda there. In the group’s programs, it’s bad enough that “Arts” is lumped into Tourism, Arts, Parks, Entertainment & Sports.

Worse, that page is bare.

UPDATE, 1/12: Reader Jeffrey Barg reports, in a comment below, that Philadelphia today announced another art-lifting initiative – a two-year marketing campaign supporting Philadelphia’s varied visual arts scene and the many artists who make it the colorful canvas that it is. The highly integrated campaign, the result of a first-of-its-kind partnership among 10 city organizations and cultural partners, will tout Philly’s eclectic art offerings — everything from museum stalwarts to independent collectives to plentiful public arts to popular annual events.

Again, bravo, Philadelphia.

We wrote yesterday about what Tom Lee Park could be…a magnet for recreation and leisure…as opposed to what it is today…forlorn and bleak.   We got an email asking for some ideas of what could be done, and we suggest that anyone interested in possibilities should visit the website of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc, landscape architecture firm that creates environmentally sustainable and experientially rich places across a wide range of landscape scales.

Our favorite project is along the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey.  That said, you can click any of his waterfront projects on this page if you want to see what can be done when an open space on the water is a real park instead of a festival grounds.

Here’s how the firm describes the Hoboken project and it’s enough to give a hint of what can happen when we attract the best and brightest nationally to work with our local best and brightest to get Tom Lee Park fixed:

Pier C Park is located along the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in Hoboken, New Jersey and is part of the city’s ongoing efforts to provide recreational open space at the water’s edge. An active recreation pier designed to accommodate users of all ages, the new park complements neighboring parks in program and form. Pier C represents a new generation of waterfront programming, defined by recreation and public access rather than industrial or maritime uses. The new pier sits within the rectilinear footprint of the long-absent original Pier C, with arcing walkways that capitalize on views to Manhattan as well as the active uses of the pier.

The sculptural quality of the landscape simulates the forms of a barrier beach while the interior breaks open to reveal the play landscape—a whimsical, other-scaled world designed to engage children of all ages and abilities. The playground is separated into a pre-school play area and a school-age play area including structures for climbing and hiding, slides, sand play, water play, climbable slopes, rockers and spinners. A continuous tricycle path loops through the interior of the play area and a park building is situated such that an employee can easily dispense toys to children.

The Promenade, at the eastern edge of the pier, provides recreational opportunities for adults and families. In addition to the introduction of lawn areas for sunbathing and casual games, there is ample seating located along the water’s edge. The park encourages users to experience waterfront wildlife opportunities, including the use of a planting scheme that strongly favors coastal species and the construction of a roosting structure for nesting osprey.

From Hartford Business.

Private cultural and arts programs in Connecticut must play a greater role in revitalizing communities and attracting new businesses to receive state funding under a pilot program. On July 1, the Connecticut Office of the Arts will consolidate four of its local arts funding programs into one initiative; double total funding to $3.1 million; hand out fewer but larger grants; and focus on recipients’ place-making.