One reason communities are sometimes slow to grow and progress is because they lack access to information both within their own community as well as from beyond, such as best practices or new techniques that are taking off somewhere else.
Monday evening, Sarah Woodworth (pictured above) of ZHA, Inc., co-delivered a presentation that offered a lot of raw data which, in the hands of motivated and capable people, could dramatically alter the spinal cord of Springfield otherwise known as State Street. But will the information reach those hands? What other steps might be needed? Is it possible that improved access to best practices and new tools could drive real change for a city—from within?
The Urban Markets Initiative is asking that last question this fall, Thursday, October 18 and Friday, October 19, at a forum hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. (Register online and get more details.) The forum is called, “Connecting Communities: Using Information to Drive Change,” and will also serve as an official launching point for the UMI’s new Web portal, urbanmarketslab.org, which is meant to help communities close the “information gap.”
The UMI is working to make federal data more available to communities at a grassroots level, so they can grab the bull by the horns themselves and make the change they want to see, but often don’t have the data to back up. For example, the UMI frames the need for improved retail and commercial development:
In the past, investment decisions in urban markets have missed the mark for a series of reasons, many of which are related to decision-related information issues: misframing the real issue in defining the decision, a lack of awareness of available data, not knowing how to manage uncertainty, choosing simple decision methods for a complex decision, or ineffective feedback on previous decisions.
When information is unavailable, inaccurate or unused by market actors, an information gap exists. Opportunities for new market activities that will benefit [residents] are lost. The information gap often undervalues the assets of low and moderate-income people and neighborhoods, leading to further underinvestment.
The forum planners hope to give participants an opportunity to connect with peers; discover new tools such as databases to improve response to change in the community; learn about how to use information to drive markets in urban neighborhoods; and learn about how others have fostered a culture of collaboration and vision in a city.
Featured speakers will include Londoner Anthony Williams (pictured left—not the former Washington, DC mayor of the same name), co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, regarding the use of Web-accessible information; and Gus Newport (pictured below right), former executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston and former mayor of Berkeley, California. As Newport describes in an article touching on the subject, the DSNI became the first non-profit in the US to be awarded eminent domain powers over vacant city land. From the piece:
Through a seldom-used statute on the books in Massachusetts known as “special study status,” the community plan became the zoning plan for the area. Having received eminent domain rights over 30 acres of land, DSNI sought a mechanism to assure permanent affordability and discovered the Community Land Trust model. We invited the Institute for Community Economics, the national intermediary for CLTs, to assist us with the process.
What we learned was that the CLT did much more than provide a mechanism to hold the land. It provided a means to stabilize lives and the community through homeownership. As is the case for the majority of the nation’s lower-income inner-city residents, the families of the Dudley Street neighborhood had little or no control over their own housing—the most fundamental aspect of household security. With no opportunity to own their own homes, they were forced to live in substandard absentee-owned rental housing, subject to displacement when and if rents increased beyond their means. In addition to the stability of homeownership, Dudley area residents sought to take control of the neighborhood outside their windows—to deal with abandoned property, to stop illegal dumping, to stop providing havens for drug dealers and other criminal activity.
Dudley Street has become a renowned example of the power of truly participatory community-building for the long term, which addresses the fundamental policies and practices that have caused poverty and decline in cities across the country.
When USA Fund President Kirk Sykes (pictured) came to Springfield last December and delivered a keynote address at the annual HAP, Inc. dinner, he also talked about the DSNI and its accomplishments with eminent domain.
Sykes challenged the audience to think about the potential to attract retailers to the denser parts of the city, where there is indeed demand, he said. “In order to make a city a place for everyone, [ethnic minorities and baby boomers] now have to find common ground on issues of preservation, housing, education and safety. If these needs are not addressed, vitality and the future of the city will be at risk. That common ground can happen here in Springfield.”
At Monday night’s presentation by a team of consultants hired by the State Street Alliance (which could really use a Web site by now) to examine such market potential, there was a push to consider a 70,000-square-foot grocery store located somewhere near the center of the corridor, in or around Mason Square, for example. Much market-potential data was hurled at the audience at a breakneck pace, which I will report separately and in all the tedious detail in which it was presented. (I know readers love the tedious detail as much as I do.)
Hampering the presentation was the fact that brilliant sunlight shone directly on the Power Point slideshow, rendering the data literally invisible, and making it just that much more critical to pay headache-inducing attention to the numbers as they were delivered orally. The corridor’s annual market potential is 1,050 households per year, said Laurie Volk of Zimmerman/Volk Associates, adding, “That’s a lot.”
“67,000 people live in the trade area of the State Street corridor,” said ZHA’s Woodworth, adding that their median income is less than that of the city overall—$27,000 per year compared to $36,000 city-wide. “But this group spends $15,000 per year, per household, on merchandise,” she added, along with the fact that one-third of their income per year goes to food, one-third to pharmacy-like purchases, and about 20 percent to eating and drinking.
In a break-out session toward the end (pictured above), talking with Woodworth and others, McKnight resident Ben Swan, Jr. talked about a grocery store in the area. “But we already have a grocery store,” he said, referring to C-Town, which had been duly acknowledged during the consultants’ presentation. “And it’s a perfectly good grocery store,” he added, perhaps wondering what was the notion behind adding a “bigger, better” one.
Woodworth said there was no wish to make business tougher for C-Town, but the bottom line seemed to be that it doesn’t sell all the merchandise that it could, and the neighborhood could be better served by something additional, something bigger. Given that 42 percent of the entire city population lives along the corridor, the thinking seemed to go, there’s simply the potential for more retail, including a grocery store.
If the surrounding community sees an opportunity for a better store, what are the options? Can someone work with C-Town to improve it? Does it need improving? Will it go under if there is an alternative nearby, or will it try harder to become a better store, or to specialize? If residents are under-served in the category of grocery store options, what will they do about it, versus what they might wait for someone else to do—possibly due to a lack of information?
City Councilor Bud Williams (pictured below, posing upon his request and asking for a photo with Maureen Hayes of the Springfield Business Development Corporation, who was rather busy at the moment) spoke up during the presentation and said, “There’s an attitude in Springfield: residents have failed to try to invest here.”
One audience member, Carol Aranjo, suggested, “Let’s talk about the reality. What’s being done with the designations we’ve had for 15 years?” She brought this up in reference to what she called a federal enterprise zone designation as well as a state-level opportunity zone designation—tools that could be used by and for the community as leverage for its own investment in itself. The consultants responded that it was beyond their purview to address those matters, but also sounded reluctant to dismiss these important topics entirely.
State Representative Ben Swan earlier had said, during the presentation, that people of color in Springfield are not considered an important voice in planning endeavors, and that they must be considered in every aspect of discussions. This had sparked a few additional comments from audience members advocating for retail along the State Street corridor that will suit and benefit the people living in the local community. Questions arose, “What businesses will come in and give people a decent wage? How will it impact the community? Are we setting ourselves up for long-term failure?”
These were wide-ranging issues and questions, and the consultants essentially appeared to need to deliver their initial findings and be able to get some ideas on where to put a grocery store—but so much more can still be addressed, and really needs to be addressed, in giving comments and questions a proper hearing. Communities along the corridor coming together for the purpose of such cup-emptying and brainstorming can yield very exciting results, if the opportunity is created for it.
Indeed it appears as though there is a large degree of untapped potential along the corridor, and the seeds for it lie within the people already living and working in the communities under the microscope. The consultants seem to know this, to an extent. Yet, ultimately, it’s the people of the city who can drive this change: along with badly-needed access to information and tools, and the continuing creation of new opportunities to connect with each other.
