Author's Forum on Urbanism – Recast Your City:How to Save Your Downtown With Small-Scale Manufacturing

i'm gonna mute i'm going to give people a minute or two to come in and then we'll get started we're going to get started very shortly here so welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing issues of the day uh the author's forum is a series within on the bar bench and it discusses recently published books by urbanists or of interest to urbanists the author's forum is produced by dura tadani architect and urbanist who works behind the scenes to put these together today's author's forum is recast your city how to save your downtown with small-scale manufacturing with author ilana bruce and a discussion with interviewer dan sloan share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and register for coming webinars september 28th is confessions of a recovering engineer with author charles marone an interviewer jocelyn gibson and tuesday october 12th also at 12 noon restorative cities urban design for mental health and well-being with authors jenny rowe and layla mckay go to cnu.org resources slash on the park bench and don't forget to save the dates for cnu 30 oklahoma city which is being held march 23rd through 26 2022 and it's going to be cnu's first in-person congress since 2019 i'm really looking forward to that connecting with all of our colleagues and urbanists from around the country uh learn how a clear commitment to urbanism careful financing and resident engagement can spark a city's renaissance in oklahoma city learnmorecnu.org cnu30 ilana prus the author of recast your city how to save your downtown with small-scale manufacturing she is the founder and ceo of recast city and her book was released by uh island press in june of 2021 she previously led the technical assistance program at the u.s epa smart growth program and was vp at smart growth america dan sloan our interviewer is an award-winning attorney with over 36 years of experience in the world of creating sustainable walkable communities he's the author of a legal legal guide to urban and sustainable development well known in the new urbanist community and he is also the author of fantasy novels i founded that recently the most recent which uh one of which stepping into the fairy rig was published in july i'm rob studeville i'm editor of cnu's public square recast your city how to save your downtown with small-scale manufacturing shows how communities across the country can build strong local businesses through small-scale manufacturing reinvest in their downtowns and create inclusive economic opportunity the book gives you a five-step method of success and case studies to showcase concrete examples from our work in cities around the country get your copy from the publisher island press for 20 off discount with the code recast to check out today we're going to have a presentation from ilana followed by a discussion with dan and alana followed by a q a from the audience so please use the q a function of zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you and now i'm going to pass this along to ilana to start today's webinar thank you so much rob and i am really excited to be here with everybody today so um i'm i feel like a lot of you who are joining a cnu event like this know probably a lot about what i'm talking about so i'm gonna touch on a lot of different things maybe do a little defining of the terms to make sure we're all on the same page if you've heard me talk about small-scale manufacturing before that part will be familiar but the meat of what i want to talk about today is really those five steps because the work that we all do in our communities is really of course about place right and it's about how place is showcasing the personality of the community but also the challenges that that community has faced and the challenges that we have faced are really compounded right now we know because of the pandemic and it's obviously a tough place to start just to sort of take a step back before we dive into small-scale manufacturing in the book and i actually have a better discount code for you guys because you're cnu um right if we look at this past year and a half we know that last year nearly every business had to close for some period of time millions and millions of people filed for unemployment but that even before covet hit us we were in an age an economy in this country where our demographics were rapidly changing and were rapidly different from 40 50 years ago and we were at a moment where income inequality even before the pandemic was the highest we've ever recorded it so we take all of that on top of the kinds of information that you probably are very familiar with like the impact of vacant properties and the impact of vacant storefronts on our communities and it sort of all comes together in we are both in a very challenging time but we are also in a in a very transformational moment right now because of where we are in the pandemic and honestly because of the money flowing to our communities through the american rescue plan act and those dollars and their transformational potential and one of the things i want to talk about today is really our responsibility in all of this because i do think that as urbanists we have a significant responsibility not only to think about how we're designing places or the mix of uses in a space but how are we building an inclusive and strong community an inclusive and strong economy in that place as we are developing it and who has access to it so the big sort of pieces to think about at the very beginning are things that are obvious right we know that downtowns bring people together we know people want to feel included and part of that success we want a place that looks and feels cared for and people want to be a part of that success none of that is rocket science it's sort of the basis of what a lot of us do in our day-to-day work but if you take a step back and think about who has access to these opportunities right now who has sort of who has been excluded from these opportunities in the past the systemic racism that's baked into our planning and economic development decision making of the past and what can we do now to really not only rectify the wrongs of the past but really invest in a place for the people and with the people who live there who want to be a part of that success that's where the leadership and where our responsibility really lies for those of you who never met me before and i saw a few friendly faces on the participant list as you all logged in so great to see you all my name is ilana pruse and i am the founder and ceo of recast city uh on the left you can see this picture of a dress that my mother sewed for me in high school that was the most amazing electric blue she um she sewed she knit she taught us all how to use drills and put things together um and knowing how to use tools and how to make things was just a baseline of my household um you fast forward to now many years uh later i had the opportunity to give a tedx talk on the economic power of great places and that has really been the theme of my work my entire career both at the epa and at smart growth america the other reason for my existence is these amazing children that i also teach how to use drills and build stuff which is a lot of fun as well but the work that i do with with recast city is really about how are we working with communities to bring small-scale manufacturing into existing and new real estate projects to bring this diversity of business type into our storefronts build vacant properties but also to create more economic opportunity for more people as part of that strategy and usually yes it's about round sitting up about sitting around a table but um the park bench will be as close as we can get at least until march and cnu so i want to take one pause and just recognize that most communities are actually stuck in this very weird economic default model and i want to just take a sort of a pause before we jump into small-scale manufacturing to talk about what we need to do and how we get there um and i'm not going to go into the all of the different details of this but i really want to be clear about the need to ditch this default model that a lot of places are really chasing it's an economic model left over from the 70s and 80s it is really about um sort of big business or big tech is king and build something once and figure it out and keep replicating that vanilla is what we have in so many places in this country in economic development authorities across the country they see their jobs as recruitment and marketing only they're not looking at small business they're not looking at retail they're not looking at place making yes there are a whole bunch that have moved in that direction but it's still not necessarily what a lot of what a lot of them are looking at and so we have this default model that we're really working hard to break out of and one of the things to think about is what does it mean to invest in a better way none of this is going to be shocking to urbanist right that the quality of a place is going to be key to its economic strength that a place that is unique that has something special about it not just in the way that it's designed but in the stores that you get to see there and nowhere else that that actually helps its economic longevity and that the social connections the connections between our business owners and there's great research on this are really key to economic resilience that the business owners that have strong social connections to other business owners are twice as likely to survive some great catastrophe and we know that moving forward in these unpredictable times that that in fact is part of how we have to build out places and yes small-scale manufacturing is all a part of that but to get there we really need to do it with intention and purpose and think about not only what we're doing but who's going to benefit from the investments and the group and so the new path forward and this is all in the book um is really about how do we invest in the people who live in a community now how do we invest in that place with those people what kind of structure or infrastructure are we building to support both those people and that place and what are we doing to think long term but act right now what can we do right now particularly for small businesses in that location or bringing businesses to that location to really change both people's lives and the way a space is being used this is where small-scale manufacturing fits into all of it so i call them the hidden gems um but small-scale manufacturing for those of you who aren't so familiar with them really do a lot of different things for our community they give us reasons to gather this is the events the holiday markets the festivals where people come out and shop at vendors that have made things in the community it gives people a reason to come out and be a part of these events and be proud of their neighborhood it also gives us an opportunity to build a more inclusive business community oftentimes when we're working with a community they're identifying small-scale manufacturing businesses from scratch they don't have a standing list there isn't an existing committee there is no council and so it means that we are in fact building a table from scratch and we can very purposefully make sure we are building equity and inclusiveness into that outreach and bringing together business owners because we have people who make things across every single demographic that we have in the community additionally we have an opportunity to fill storefronts with these businesses people can sell a good and make a good in that same storefront generally we're looking at consumer goods um where that's going to be the best combination of retail and production in a storefront some of these businesses might need really tiny spaces some use larger ones but it's a wonderful way to fill a storefront because these businesses aren't going to be dependent necessarily on the foot traffic which may not be that strong in a location because they're going to sell in person and online and maybe even a wholesale all out of that one location i'll give you and then by filling in these vacant properties obviously they're starting to increase our property values and stabilize maybe a neighborhood that's seeing an increased number of vacancies zeke's coffee is a great example of this you walk in the front there's a coffee shop there's a roaster in the back the roaster does the production of a wholesale distribution for the entire region right this one storefront not only filled the storefront and then helped attract other users for other storefronts in that neighborhood but they are nimble because they have a diversity of revenue sources coming into this one space and then when we do take care of our small business owners our small-scale manufacturers word gets out and we attract more business owners we attract entrepreneurs more people in the community recognize the opportunity around this as well so these are all pieces of a thriving place i just want to briefly give you a little bit more detail about who these businesses are these might be artisans in your community craftspeople maker businesses one to five employees uh some of them are what i call lotions and potions textiles wood metal food product businesses but also our advanced manufacturing and prototyping they're all part of this sector anybody who replicates and packages what they make is part of small-scale manufacturing then we have businesses that are prototyping but also scaling to small batch production maybe they're making hundreds of things or even thousands of things but they're still working in a smaller footprint or maybe up to five thousand square feet where they're gonna fit really well into a neighborhood or a main street and then we have production at scale this is a brewery that moved into an old brewery building in cincinnati it's called ryan geist they moved into a building that was 120 000 square feet and use it as you can see not only for the brewing but also as a gathering space this picture was pre-coded just so that everything's clear um then we have different kinds of shared spaces a makerspace you might be familiar with this is where um people can come and learn how to use tools they are uh taking classes or they're a member and they're they've already been certified to use a set of tools it's for people who are hobbyists but also potentially for small businesses to have access to tools they wouldn't be able to afford on their own maker spaces are generally more focused on education and outreach but some of the larger ones also have space for small businesses to really expand there as well and then we have shared facilities shared commercial kitchens might be something you're familiar with there's also shared wood shops shared welding shops shared 3d printing spaces textiles you get the idea it's a specific vertical and the tools that you need in that vertical of that specific set of materials and it's only open to small businesses it's not open to the hobbyists um it's a different kind of space it's only for small businesses and these are really important because they remove a barrier to entry somebody might be doing a business at their dining room table full-time or in their kitchen full-time and be bursting at the seams and these kinds of spaces allow them to grow and access more efficient tools without having to put down the capital ahead of time to be able to move and build in their own space so how do we do all of this that's what the book is all about um or at least the majority of it and there's five steps i'm going to run through them briefly happy to answer questions about them i'm going to best that you're familiar with all of these different kinds of steps but maybe not in the way that we work with them with small-scale manufacturing so the first thing that we talk to communities about doing are being really clear about what outcomes are we working to achieve and who should benefit from the investments that happen out of that those outcomes so um one of the questions i ask them is what is it going to be what do you want it to be like in this target area let's say it's a main street what is it going to be like to walk down the street at three o'clock on a saturday or tuesday at six what do you want it to feel like what do you want to see as you go down the street and who should benefit from the investments that are made to get to that outcome the question of who benefits is really important because we have a whole history of just saying well we want the community to benefit which is great but actually perpetuates a lot of the systemic racism that we have baked into a lot of our systems so at the very beginning if we say we want to make sure that um business owners who have been shut out from loan programs or haven't been able to get into storefronts in the past or um lower income individuals who have businesses can move into these spaces all of these different parts are obviously part of a public good in a project but in fact impact how we design a space the size of the spaces um are we putting in micro retail spaces at the end or are we just putting in generic 5 000 square foot spaces all of these questions about who should benefit and what outcome we're trying to achieve all impact those pieces and when we work with a community that has existing spaces we're also looking at how can it be reused what kinds of spaces are there how can it be subdivided and all of that is going to be dependent on the outcomes and the benefits that the community has established at the beginning the second step is about finding and connecting with new people obviously a lot of what we talk about is small-scale manufacturing businesses finding the people who will benefit from this work and finding connectors connectors are really important um and organizations to help make it happen connectors are individuals who help you connect with different populations within the community where you don't have the personal relationships these might be partner organizations cultural leaders faith leaders all different people who are known and trusted within their community and believe in the future of their community and of their population and can help make trusted introductions for you and be a connector we know that there is broken trust in a lot of our communities and it's something we need to acknowledge and honestly honor and work to build these new honest relationships with people to get there and so we have a whole system to not only find individual small-scale manufacturing businesses but ensure that we're reaching the demographic diversity of our community as we do that outreach and think about also who needs to be at the table at the beginning of this engagement to have buy-in for implementation at the end probably an obvious point but really thinking about how are we going to implement these actions at the end because to me it's all about the actions and part of that might be a big meeting with a big crowd from the community but it's also going to be having one-on-one conversations with people so those one-on-one conversations are really the third step it's about starting a conversation and we do it in two ways one is one-on-one conversations really interviews with business owners small-scale manufacturing specifically in this work and property owners but also targeted small group discussions and one of the things to think about with the small group discussions is thinking about who are the small business development service providers what kind of services are being supported how does that impact who is in fact ready to go into storefronts if we want to make sure that the storefront does represent the community but also when we're working with business owners from the community going into their spaces of production meeting them in a space that's part of their neighborhood so that they feel comfortable and that you can learn from their experience the next step is really all about understanding what we're getting out of this and this is really the assets and challenges mapping but it's all based on those outcomes and the benefits that we identified at the very beginning and really thinking about what assets can we build on in the short term but also what gaps are most critical to address to achieve that outcome and those benefits with our target audience and it might be something that's completely different than what you might imagine at the beginning yes hopefully there's going to be a ton of assets after you've interviewed a whole bunch of people and honestly there's been going to be a lot of challenges but we know that we can't take on all of those things at once so we think about all of it in relation to the outcomes and uh in the outcomes and the benefits some of the questions that come up in a lot of communities right are lack of affordable space for producers if our storefronts cost x per square feet and our producers are paying y per square feet there's a gap and so then the question is will we make will we make as a community will we make the commitment to affordable space for businesses that have good paying jobs middle-income jobs as a public good just like we make a commitment to affordable housing how do we factor that into our the incentive programs in our community what kind of business development support will we provide so that these businesses can grow their revenues and afford the spaces long term there are so many different ways that we are messing with real estate and with business development support already this is just asking the question of what's most important to us and can we align those pieces as we move forward and then it's all about picking near-term actions that you can make things that will make a difference right now i always encourage folks to look at what can you do in the next six months six to nine months at the moment at the most really thinking about how you're building these small wins that make a big difference but also help you build towards bigger harder investments in the long term and then how do you make it all visible and celebrated one of the big projects that's featured in the book is columbia missouri i've got a chance to work with the community investment district in columbia missouri that is a corridor that's a four-lane road big wide parking lots buildings a few buildings that are there and they're full but it's been rezoned for mixed use um they the property owners got organized as an improvement district and said we know we can be so much more but they hadn't really done enough about what it is they hadn't done much about sort of what's the vision of what they wanted to become and so we worked with them on bringing the discussion around small-scale manufacturing to their corridor and the executive director sort of hit it on the head as we as we worked through it that there were tons of small-scale manufacturing businesses all over the city in the region and it was this sort of a hidden economic engine that they could capitalize on really quickly and really bring the diversity of business owners into the community so a couple of the actions that we helped them make really quite quickly was one that they identified a need for a commercial shared kitchen a mission-driven non-profit commercial shared kitchen in the community particularly to help black and latino women in the community launch businesses or expand businesses that they had at home and that in fact launched during covid which was pretty amazing it got delayed by about six months but i was still pretty impressed and the other thing that they did was they went back into their actually quite new zoning code and added artisan industry as a permitted land use to their existing zone so that as development happens or as reuse happens this isn't a barrier that this is an allowable use because this quarter is really an area in between a light industrial area a highway a light industrial area and then a residential area south of this area and by being able to bring in these different kinds of uses really creates a lot of opportunities for the community so it's all about making something happen um and you can start by getting the first chapter for free if you're interested you can go to the book's website recastyourcity.com and you can download the first chapter for free in it it'll give you the sort of a whole overview of the story but to me it's really all about creating great places and and saving our small businesses and helping grow other ones um and if you want that free chapter you can go get it um i also invite you to come find me on linkedin and connect up with me on linkedin because every time other communities share their best practices or some great win around this and they have a great model that's where i share the things that i see going on in the world um and then just to think about what does it mean to your community what are the spaces that you want to fill what are the what are the meaningful outcomes you want to create for the people who live in your community what's the impact you want to have with all of this and the ability to help people build businesses that they're proud of and that are bringing more good-paying jobs to our community in a time where we really need that and the leadership the political leadership we need to make these things a reality within our community to make the great places that people are proud to call home so with that um i have one other thing i promised you i had a better discount code for you so if you do want to buy the book from island press go use the promo code cnu25 and you can get 25 off not just 20 but it's also available on bookshop.org or if you want the kindle version you can get it on amazon.com and i will stop sharing my screen so dan what do you think you're still muted yeah that was great that was great take a breath that was excellent you did a wonderful job i really appreciated it uh uh congratulations on publishing the book that's great thank you uh i wanted to unpack just a little you mentioned it in your book but unpack a little you had lots of choices where to plug in as you with your background where to plug into the world of change what drew you to working with this particular section of industries these types of businesses it's a great question um i was working at smart north america and i ran a series of events in dc in 2013 i think it seems a long time ago right now um that was called in the city and it was really an opportunity to engage the community in a conversation around what kinds of small businesses make the biggest difference for neighborhood resilience and inclusive economic outcomes and vibrant places and it was really honestly my exploration of knowing that what i wanted to do in the world had something to do with these pieces and we did tech in the city it was when tech startups were really just starting to explode in dc although that's hard to imagine we did transportation in the city it was uber and lyft and all of them had just hit the city and then we did food in the city and then production in the city and when we did production in the city we did an artisan's market in partnership with it it was a holiday market and i started to do all this research around who was looking at this business sector and at the time for a city which now is brookville um forest city was looking at this use as a core use for their pure 70 project in san francisco and when i interviewed them about it they said having small-scale manufacturing and artisan businesses as a part of their central building that was going to sort of be the living room of the whole neighborhood would create a brand would create a presence would draw people to the place and after that they would then go vertical on the other pieces which i thought was sort of brilliant right and that we could do that on main street we could do that in downtown you can do that in any place purposefully and and that it really could be sort of the linchpin of the why of a lot of places where it's not going to be it doesn't make sense they're going to have the national retailers there or maybe they don't want them or they don't have enough foot traffic and they really have to draw them in um and then i started researching them and found that these businesses pay 50 to 100 more salary than retail or service jobs there's diversity of ownership right they fit into all these different kinds of places and so the benefits just sort of kept compounding um and that when i took off with it that's super you you mentioned some words in there that i want to come back to and and looked at a little more one of them was resilience and and i'm not sure that for me small businesses and this is spoken as the parent of somebody who opened a small business on a main street uh at first glance seem resilient i mean they they have trouble accessing capital they uh uh they for the landlords they're not necessarily credit worthy so it makes it difficult to get financing for buildings when covet hit they were some of the ones that had trouble making the rent because people just stopped showing showing up uh they particularly the ones that lean toward artisan uh they often sort of meet stereotypes of not having business skills uh you know needing uh needing some skills to to come in and they're often time starved so some of the things you talk about in the book about loving the neighborhood they would love to love the neighborhood but they're busy trying to stay alive but you think they uh they make a neighborhood more resilient can you explain how that happens absolutely so all those things are sometimes true right i mean that's going to be true with any business of any type the reality is though is that we've been have to build a business system that works against our small businesses the banks see them as high risk just like you said even if they're not actually high risk they're just not familiar with them right real estate has been designed at a size and scale that's not supportive of small businesses micro retail space of 500 square feet is nearly impossible to find in most cities right so if we think about sort of how the deck is stacked against these businesses it starts making a different kind of sense we also have all these tech incubators and accelerators that blossomed all over the country over the last decade um there are few and far between programs that are for non-tech let alone for small-scale manufacturing and i can name most of them at this point right um and so um i think it i look at it really as this business sector is in every community and i swear i mean it's i've worked in the tiniest places and in the biggest cities this business sector is there if it is in fact a business sector that you believe can create more opportunity for more people can fill the storefronts in your community can fill the main streets in your neighborhoods then the question is what's what investment are you willing to make there's business development programming that can help every product business not only bring in more revenue but grow if that's what they're interested in there's real estate design that we can not only create incentives for but we can create matching funding just like matching facade grants to retrofit spaces so it's really this question of are are we deciding that it's a public good to make sure that we're removing the barriers that we had built into these spaces before and and acknowledging that it's not about saying well it's the developer's responsibility or it's the city's responsibility like each entity has a responsibility in this and part of what our action plans do with communities is really help them understand all of the different kinds of roles that different entities can serve in creating that outcome the resilience opportunity especially in storefronts that i'm most excited about is that these businesses draw people in they help build foot foot traffic you can look in the window and you can see something being made and boy is that a cool thing um it draws people out but especially when you're identifying the ones that are already selling online either direct to consumer or wholesale they have different revenue sources coming into that one space so if you're thinking of that business as compared to a retail store or a traditional retail store where it's only people walking in the front door then it's going to have a much higher chance of surviving because it has this diversity of revenue sources coming in cool cool you said something else in that uh that stimulated the thought and that you talked about the developer strategy of bringing them in and then expanding on them but doesn't that run the risk of beginning the gentrification cycle of uh ultimately pricing them out and replacing them with chains as yeah everything's successful and going but they can't keep up with the rent increases yes it's definitely a possibility i mean one of the things to think about is who's getting the spaces right so if we think about a lot of our big city main streets particularly in our traditional black neighborhoods or latino neighborhoods where there might be a significant amount of vacancy on the old commercial corridor by working with existing property owners and existing people in the neighborhood to move businesses into those storefronts they're going to benefit from what's going on is that enough no probably not just like with housing right there's a whole bunch of other steps but if we start with that and then also provide business development support so that business can continue to grow as the neighborhood grows um they can benefit from it and even better if those businesses can ultimately become some of the property owners in the in the neighborhood if they're successful and then they can not only have space for other businesses but they can ultimately decide that they want to sell their property and invest that in their family or in their business as well so um it is to me about filling the vacant spaces it's about bringing more energy maybe because a downtown might have a lot of service businesses and a new development it's really about reverse engineering i don't really know another word for it but saying who do we want to be in those storefronts who should benefit from this development and what does it mean to say we want 20 of all the storefronts to be able to be for locally owned businesses and that means that the storefronts should only only be a thousand square feet right there's there's there's a whole design and development element to this um that's important to think about there's a great example from cincinnati um 3cdc the community development corporation out there when they were started doing the work in over the rhine which i know is in fact controversial now for the displacement conversation um but when they started doing the development and there were there was vast numbers of empty buildings um they were working with developers to build out commercial spaces that were about 700 square feet and the rationale was if we can and it was on percent right it was on percent revenue basis and they said if we can host enough events in the neighborhood and drive a ton of people into those storefronts and that business can be wildly successful they can be so successful that maybe they'll use a second space in the neighborhood right and so so really incorporating those business owners into the solution and into the beneficiaries yeah there's so many strategies people have played with artists equity so that they can participate in the rise of the entire area i love those small occupancy strategies and using them to incubate businesses that can grow into into others nantucket actually ends up with some of that in its old space there uh and uh they expanded it with larger businesses that needed space but didn't need frontage behind those those small businesses so it's a great do you think um when you speak a number of different models come to come to mind uh one of them uh the goat farm in atlanta that i love uh and uh those models often use the fact that they've got a lot of underused space a lot of emptiness and something that would be seen as a liability but they've got places so that if something cycles up and everything's going great there are other places for for manufacturers to move to continue to uh to to expand is there a is there a design model that you like best you you you mentioned the small spaces but what do you think what do you think are the design models that work best for small-scale manufacturers well that's a really good question um well the answer is it depends right it's all context specific you guys know that um i do the way i think about it um is that it's not one size fits all so that small scale manufacturers and this is true of all different business types we've just learned how to build it for other business types small-scale manufacturing needs different size businesses when they're starting up when they're sort of growing and when they're scaling and i put those sort of growing because they're they're very small still um and we've done that for tech right we have co-work space right we have dedicated larger spaces and office buildings we have larger tech that buy out big old industrial buildings and turn them into cool text walls right so we we have that whole trajectory on that side we don't have it in small-scale manufacturing and the reality is is that we're starting to see an interesting part of the sector react to it there's venture capital um going behind all sorts of really interesting pieces of this so we need we i do think that communities need micro retail space spaces that are between 400 and 800 square feet it could be a subdivided larger building or it could be retail frontages in a narrow street front um there's examples of that all over the country um there are inexpensive ways of subdividing larger older industrial spaces to to mean that it doesn't have to be a huge investment of being able to put a whole bunch of smaller businesses in there um co-work small-scale manufacturing buildings uh are all over the place if you have a chance to go to philadelphia you can go look at makin studios in the kensington neighborhood or bach which is an old an old school vocational school um bach is fascinating it's not just small-scale manufacturing it's all sorts of other businesses but it's an old vocational school and she didn't what the owner didn't develop or didn't want to put in a ton of money up front so she started fitting individual businesses to the existing spaces that were already there so it's quite literally if you're a woodworker you might be in the old woodworking wood shop in that vocational school or um the art studio is where you know it's a hairdresser now because that's where the water was running already so i think sometimes we just have to get ahead of what we might expect sort of traditionally if we're doing something whitewash versus how do we reuse a space in in an interesting way and i do think that real estate for these businesses from a design perspective we need the microspaces we need one or two thousand square foot spaces and then some of them will need five thousand square foot space or bigger but the vast majority of these spaces are either going to want to be in a shared tenant building or in these spaces that are much smaller sure i wanted to remind everybody to use the q a function of zoom to ask your questions uh being conscious of time you might want to get to some of the q a although at your discretion dan you can always ask more of the ones you had prepared sure now i actually want to segue into into one of them and it goes right off of what you were just saying elena uh uh laura i asked whether the book talks about the types of zoning and regulation changes that are needed to enable that small businesses of manufacturing just the flexibility that you're talking about yeah yeah definitely it's in there um just you know if people want to look at a great land use definition for artisan manufacturing you can look at nashville um they have a really great one that a whole bunch of other cities have now copied right because that's the best form of flattery in the world of zoning is somebody's figured out some chunk fairfax county virginia we worked with the nashville one predated my work it's all them we worked with fairfax county virginia on theirs theirs is a lot more involved they needed to have a lot more details for whatever reason that they need theirs includes parking criteria and all sorts of other stuff um but there's a whole bunch of models out there and and san francisco has a really interesting um i can't remember if it's an independent zone or an overlay zone that's specific to small business enterprise that requires new development to have some or all of the ground floor subdivided into smaller spaces i think up to i'm gonna get the numbers wrong i think it's 2500 square feet but it's more or less a requirement to make sure that some of the ground floor space is smaller so that it's not just for large national tenants another segue into one of the questions is you know most storefronts are privately owned in your book you talk about storefronts and lighting them up but you also talk about community centers and community kitchens and a number of different devices to get people into the marketplace stephanie asks small business space versus public space investment what is the most crucial in your experience yes and i mean i i think that there is a it is often easiest to start with something that is municipally owned right if there is an existing space i'm working with euclid ohio they have an old school that the city owns they are looking at the old kitchen in the basement of the building to turn into a commercial shared kitchen right if you have an existing asset and you're making an incremental investment on that asset you're going to get to the outcome much faster the reason that columbia missouri could launch their commercial shared kitchen so quickly was because they partnered not only with their economic development authority but with mizzou with the university of missouri who had an existing building has an existing building on the corridor with an existing commercial kitchen on it that just needed some upgrades so i think it's really important to think about those publicly owned spaces that can be invested in and turned into storefronts quickly or shared spaces quickly but i also think we have a responsibility to work directly with with the property owners and interviewing property owners in our target location is a big part of what we do to understand from their perspective what works and what doesn't work and honestly to educate them about the opportunity around small-scale manufacturing we don't need all of them up front to say yes i'm in we just need a few and we need to then help and show those successes there's a great example in ithaca new york a developer named john guteridge who developed a project called press bay alley and he created micro retail storefronts um on an alleyway in a building that was originally then the local newspaper press and because it had been the newspaper press he could put manufacturing in it so the basement got a maker space and the store fronts some of them down to 150 square feet which were not production spaces but were super affordable for local businesses to get out of their homes get into a storefront build a business and then honestly as he's building additional spaces are now starting to scale into his larger spaces he's growing his own tenants over time which is i think exactly how we need to think about this i love those i love those microspaces and you're seeing them emerge in different cities now uh you know if you want to go study them and you can get to melbourne and see the laneways in melbourne they're they're amazing most of them are are probably not maker spaces but they're ideal for that that sort of stuff and you know uh deru has shown us examples throughout india of similar sort of small spaces where maybe the you know it's the same people who are making them on another site are showing up there and you get a chance to talk to them about their process and and that storytelling is a big part of the success of of these exactly a couple of application questions and the first is kind of to me a question about if you've got a place that's uh that's already pretty successful has tech offices as high-rise residential and you're focusing on the part of your book that's saying hey that's that's one version of success but maybe not everybody in the community is getting to participate in that success how do you have you get experience in in adding uh small or bringing small businesses to and howard who asks this question cites coastal downtown cities just as an example just as an example because we have a few coastal cities um yes so uh one of the projects that we wrapped up earlier this year was with downtown santa monica california which has an inordinate number of vacant properties at the moment um not only because of the pandemic but because there are national chains left over the last couple of years so they're in a very even though the the market is hot and the city is very hot um they have a lot of vacancies but it's the challenge right so these property owners still want to lease their spaces for close to market they don't want to if they're going to be asking a hundred dollars a square foot they don't want to lease it to somebody who's going to be paying 20 a square foot um and so what do you do about it so there's a couple of ways to think about it um one is to look at the properties that are on the edge of downtown right not in the hottest center the other thing to look is alleyway facing properties which is a lot of what we talked about in santa monica where there may not be storefronts now but it might be a small matching grant program that you can create to create micro retail spaces that are alleyway facing and create a dynamic presence that's alleyway facing that a number of cities have done now but it's also the same question of public good right affordable housing is a definite public good it is something that is vital for us to be investing in but if we don't invest in businesses that create good paying middle-income jobs in our community then we're not we're we're doing half of the we're doing half of the battle right we need to make sure that good paying jobs are in close proximity to the community and not somewhere out at the edge and so i believe that having public programs that in fact help finance or create incentives for these kinds of spaces is another part of what we won't need to do in hot markets the other role is looking at cdc's community development corporations within the community and can in when they're doing development or affordable housing development can they create ground floor space that could be for um these businesses as well excellent so another application uh a question and that is uh in a city stephanie is asking me asking you know in the city where you've already got mixed use rezoning you've already got significant manufacturing but that manufacturing is starting to age out transform and you need to begin moving into something a new form of resilient industry uh what's the process what do you think about as you're taking these existing industrial buildings that may be you know at enormous scale they may have environmental questions along with them they may be spaces that uh you know could be occupied but they might not even be legal to be occupied what what sort of strategies do you think of in those circumstances i i mean i love old industrial buildings i'm the person who like walks or drives down the street in baltimore and i'm like looking that way at the old industrial building while i'm while i'm walking or driving unfortunately to everybody's chagrin um i think that there's an enormous potential in them um to make in studios i was just trying to see if i could pull up a picture while we were talking but making studios took a four or five story old industrial building in the middle of the city and is slowly and did some initial work on the building but slowly rehabbing it piece by piece as small-scale manufacturers can move into the space saying that this is a space for production and they're pulling in people from new york and sort of across the whole region because they're affordable they're on a metro line um but that's the same investment company that's behind it also is investing in the neighborhood they're helping individuals in the community buy and renovate houses so they can afford to stay in the neighborhood um they've helped pioneer an entire land trust in the neighborhood of the commercial store fronts to make sure that they can stay in the neighborhood as redevelopment happens right so they're they're thinking about this at a neighborhood scale even though it's a private investment fund that's a private developer that's behind all of this so there are wonderful ways of looking at our older industrial especially multi-floor industrial buildings to use in this some of them take financing right new market tax credits historic preservation tax credits um there's a lot of different ways that to get behind it in the cooler markets uh you know it might be a struggle because the cost of renovation versus what people are paying for the space might be out of whack and it might take a public role in that as well um but that's going to be no difference for a lot of different uses there one final sort of context application i know in your book you talked some about this but what what happens when you try to do this in a rural area so you've got a small town it's struggling it's a rural application does it work yeah absolutely so i mean we've worked in a small rural town of five thousand people um in heflin alabama and their main street is you know five six blocks long that's all single story or two one or two story buildings depending on which block you're on they still have vacant properties and they still have people who make stuff um we did this work in vassar michigan population 2000. same thing um their their downtown was the three block main street right um even in places that that are looking at needing to create that main street there are people who make stuff and so the question is really um how do you pull all these pieces together and it you really need to look at the three major elements right what kind of business development support do they need and what can you provide what kind of real estate space do they need and then what kind of capital support both for the business and the real estate space it all needs to get wrapped up but it has to be based on the reality of what your small-scale manufacturers need what's going on in euclid is going to be different what's going than what's going on in sacramento california sacramento in fact has done a ton of investment on this in their city so it it's it all these hidden stories going on and a lot of what we do initially is just trying to uncover the sort of the hidden magic that is going on there and piecing it together so that we can make a really clear and understandable and totally achievable set of actions to help not only the business sector but the location where we think that they can go and and really make that place pop because of these businesses it's an interesting question that instead of being contextual is is about a technology so this comes from jamil uh what role do you see 3d printing additive manufacturing derived products having relative to providing on-the-shelf inventory and just in time built-in order inventory to local storefronts for sell-through to consumers specifically giving consideration to building a local 3d printing service bureau to feed the proposed ecosystem yeah i think it's a lot we're a lot of steps from there i think that there is aspirations for that in a lot of cases there's a lot of rumors that under armour is um creating textile production tools to be able to produce more of their goods in the specific region that is a high sale region so i think we're moving in that direction i think additive and subtractive manufacturing are really an exciting thing one of the most exciting things and all of that is actually the distributed network being produced by a company called zometry starts with an x it's actually based in maryland but they created an algorithm to um immediately price any kind of 3d piece that a major company needs and they produce things for the department of defense and nasa um but also for hobbyists like it's this whole range of stuff but the other part of the magic is that they have built a distributed model of producers from all over the country who can make different pieces up to the quality specifications that they need and so you can have a an additive manufacturing producer in a small town iowa being part of this ecosystem with zometry based in maryland and going to nasa so all of a sudden there is this revenue generating opportunity that is honestly anywhere which i think is the and zometry went up went public this year and their ipo was a huge success so i feel like there's this really interesting funding going on behind the distributed production model as well yeah yeah you've mentioned different developers along the way and and different concepts they've applied uh i go back to the goat farm in atlanta and they mixed up manufacturing and rock bands practicing and artists being able to sleep in their own studios and and and actually developed a model they liked better than redevelopment how what's the role of creativity on the on the owner part in in all of these i mean it's huge right a developer or a property owner that that not only has the ability to be creative but is willing to be creative um i think can reap so much benefit the the guy in ithaca that i describe right there was nothing like that in his market but he saw the idea developed the idea and built it incrementally he didn't build it all at once right it was his first real estate project and ever um you know the creativity to try something new i think is is really important the other thing that i try to do is sort of socialize all these different models like you can do this it's been done in these 10 places already it's not really risky even though you haven't seen it in your own community in that way it feels very similar to when i started in the smart growth world that you sort of have to see it and feel it and touch it to know that it's okay for you to do it um and and that's true of new urbanism and all of our community redevelopment ideas that we generate so i think all of that sort of that creativity has to bake into it too and a willingness to to talk to new people right these are businesses nobody's ever really bothered talking to and um and just being open about what it means to learn about their needs sure i know you've got a hard stop at one uh do you have a moment to tell us maybe when you're talking to these small businesses do you have a favorite place for them to go get a business model how do you talk to them about thinking through the business part so they've got the skills what are the is there a favorite go-to on the business model so my answer is actually i always start with the existing businesses i don't start with the startups we start by looking for the existing small-scale manufacturing businesses somebody who's doing it part-time or full-time from home somebody's in a leased space they know how to create a product they know how to they've already started selling it and then how do we scale those businesses is the question that we always ask um the best the best one out there that's training these businesses is a business out of chicago called 37 oaks university led by a woman named taran smith who i tell you is the most amazing doing the most amazing training for product businesses um and um she's teaching people everything from you know uh sourcing to um e-commerce to distribution and sort of everything else in between excellent that's pretty cool and the discount code somebody just asked about israel 25. yeah yeah recast 25. that's a great and and very generous of you uh that's island press they they love you guys so that's all i'll impress i'm just a messenger [Laughter] there's also uh just a pull out of questions uh something that maybe can be repeated over in the chat and that's uh uh robert orr mentioning susan henderson's developed an overlay code uh for art artisanal's manufacturing section in that and uh in the questions robert gives a a site for that we'll move that over to the chat so everybody can find that uh i want to be conscious of your time and uh so you tell me if you've got time for one more question we can do one more and then i'm gonna have to run i just have another thing at 1 o'clock i'd love to talk with you all day this is totally fun super all right uh that one more question i'd ask you is uh uh your strategies are are taking advantage of the things that are there and helping people uh uh use them we've talked some about zoning how do what do you think about the approach of trying to reduce the barriers to try to allow people to take more risks and in space that historically we haven't let people occupy for businesses so going on into industrial properties but not having them you know go through a bunch of code compliance or things like that some of the pink codes and those sorts of things yeah i think it's with with small-scale manufacturing i think you have to look at it on both sides one of them is that there's this is very much modern manufacturing there's no threat to health fire or safety um if we can streamline the approach for that that would be great um some of these folks are still doing fire and health and all of those different things and um as much as i'd say we want to jump them to the front of the line so that they can get approved faster i think we still have to do that i think the most important thing on the permitting price is making permitting side is making it predictable a lot of communities have their permitting process in this black box so you walk in with a design i have no idea what's going to come out the other side even though the people in the permitting office know if you have nine chairs instead of eight chairs it's gonna kick you into this other bucket we just need the cheat sheet like tell me how i should design the space or what are the places where something breaks one way or the other so that i can decide how to design a space and i think that's just an important piece to think about i wanted to thank everybody and thank all the attendees this was really a great presentation again the book recast your city super important subject for complete communities and for the architecture of community dan sloan his company is vertical vision great job dan thank you everybody thanks a great day thank you bye everybody