On the Park Bench - Legacy Cities

hi there everyone we're gonna get started in just a second we're gonna let some folks join the webinar first looks like we're getting folks coming in i'm going to go ahead and get started here my name is mallory batches and i want to welcome you to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism and this webinar series presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries and it provides an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is intended to be a platform for cnu members to engage debate collaborate on the pressing and emerging issues that we're all facing right now and uh let me know if there if you would like to hear about something or from someone that we could line up for future webinars uh we're always looking for new interesting topics and and speakers today's conversation is legacy cities and uh i'm really glad to have joining us dan bason katie shackleford from the loch mueller group in st louis and she's also a cnu midwest board member travis sheridan who is uh also coming to us from st louis he's chief community officer at wexford sciences and technology jason sagitty is the director of planning and development for the city of akron ohio and dan bason who's an urban planner from fort wayne indiana ah let's see sorry about that not getting my slides to share there we go uh so i before we get started i want to remind you to share your thoughts on on the park bench we have uh the website here on the screen uh on the park bench feedback is really helpful to us like i said lets us know new topics that we can talk about new speakers new voices for uh cnu audiences and i wanted to bring up that our next webinar won't happen until the new year january 12 2021 it'll be at noon eastern and i'm really excited about this topic uh the it's entitled case studies and retrofitting suburbia urban design strategies for urgent challenges this is an author's forum uh it is going to feature gene williamson and ellen dunham jones interviewed by david dixon talking about their new book so be sure to tune in for that again that's january 12th 2021 and with that i'm going to turn this over to dan bason who is going to introduce the panelists a little more and start to talk with you all about legacy cities dan thank you so much mallory appreciate it and uh really excited to be here with everybody today um and joining us today uh and i'll just go and order the photos here but katie shackleford who's on our cnu midwest board she's with the loch mueller group and she's in st louis um katie and i just want to give a brief uh overview um katie and i started following each other on twitter a while ago and uh we talked about legacy cities constantly and uh so we had a chance to meet in fort wayne i think a year ago or two years ago and uh just instantly connected and wanted to talk more about how can we make these cities um stronger and uh better for the people that currently live there um katie then introduced me to travis sheridan uh with wexford science and technology also in st louis and um both katie and travis have been part of a small core group that's focused on uh building legacy cities through um legacy labs which is going to be an initiative of cnu midwest and then finally jason is somebody i've probably followed on twitter for i don't know four or five years and um he's truly an inspiration and has been a mentor in understanding the roles and situations of legacy cities and um he is the uh planning director at the city of akron so we're looking forward to having uh some smarter people in the room than i so i'm really excited to talk about talk legacy cities here in just a few moments uh i am going to share my screen let's see if this works and um so i want to give just a brief background of what legacy cities are there's a lot of text on here and there's not going to be a quiz at the end so i don't expect you to remember all of this but this is kind of a general definition that they're known as post-industrial and shrinking cities which have experienced population loss and economic stagnation or decline over time so what we've seen with legacy cities is there's decades of decline disinvestment population and job loss severe urban stress manifests physically and socially through multiple different ways you know such as deferred maintenance lowered civic capacity segregated neighborhoods and jurisdictional fragmentation this is kind of uh i like to call this the chickenpox map of the midwest but it's a kind of just a dot map of where some of our legacy cities are it doesn't capture all of them but it uh i tried to do the best i could to to get a quick overview from you know 30 000 feet but as you can see it really does impact some of our core midwestern states pennsylvania ohio michigan indiana illinois missouri west virginia and wisconsin also western new york um legacy cities have uh seen their peak population and then now they're in decline um from that peak population and so this is just rough estimates um but you're looking at johnstown is about 70 percent east liverpool another small city about 67 percent youngstown at 60 percent flint 50 and buffalo 45. um alan malik who is a um [Music] highly revered uh author on legacy city says about 15 to 20 percent of the entire united states population lives in legacy cities and that's why it's really important to have this discussion population and economic contraction has empty municipal coffers of much needed tax revenue while federal assistance continues to decline and that's by another um relatively well-known researcher who's uh hollander and i just forgot his first name but um you can find out much of his work online another issue that we see with legacy cities is there's concentrated poverty in poverty and this is just some statistics from 2019 youngstown we're looking about 35 percent concentrated poverty um adults under the poverty rate uh cleveland at 33 percent children in poverty is another big issue and youngstown 57 where cleveland's 50. but it's not all bad about legacy cities actually there's a lot of positive that's happening and that's why we have this discussion today there's balance opportunity affordability authenticity resiliency and proximity to nearby markets so you know there's times and especially the urbanist community as we see on social media that we like to write some places off and unfortunately i think that's the case with some legacy cities we see a lot of opportunity here and that's that's really what we're here to talk about today um and why is this important to new urbanism it goes right back to the charter uh one of the points is we stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within uh coherent metropolitan regions so we need to take care of these communities i put together just a short book list so if anybody wants to research some more and read some books this is not comprehensive by any means we are part of a book club katie started earlier this summer and we've read uh i think two or three of these so far um but probably the one that stands out the most and i think as a must read for everybody is why the garden club couldn't save youngstown it's definitely something you should add to your christmas list if you haven't yet and a couple of websites you may want to consider as you're looking to dig up some more on legacy cities um notes from the underground which we're going to be hearing about from jason here in just a moment also the corner side yard is a great blog west south bend belt magazine does a lot of work and then cnu midwest we have made that our one of our missions and our focal points as a chapter is to really focus on legacy cities and how we can help support them uh over the next several decades and with that i'd like to introduce jason with uh the city of akron well thanks so much dan and it's great to be here with all of you and with this esteemed group of panelists um i'll just give you a quick background on myself and i just had a couple remarks to kick off the conversation um that are going to be in the realm of of housing and land use and then i'll kick things over to travis but i've been the planning director for the city of akron for the last five years and prior to that um the bulk of my planning career has been spent in the mpo world so i was the director of our uh metropolitan planning organization here in akron for close to a decade and i'm a lifelong resident other than my two-year stint in grad school in north carolina of the city of akron so for good or for bad i've been a legacy city resident my whole life basically and i think it has been an important experience you know i try to look at our planning here in akron not just as a planning director but um as a citizen and a couple of the thoughts i was going to share this afternoon or morning depending on what time zone you're in um one that i think is really relevant to today's conversation is what i call a more inclusive urbanism so i think as a lot of you know a lot of the national policy discourse on cities i i would say not all of it but much of it presupposes a level of affluence and community development capacity that just isn't present in a lot of legacy cities or at least is not as present as it is in some of the uh quote-unquote superstar cities i think in some urbanist discussions you know the assumption is is generally more people more capital more jobs more retail um but what i've thought about a lot is what about when those things aren't true or maybe some of those things are true uh and others aren't what i think is really interesting um unfortunate but interesting today is you know with a lot of the social and economic disruption from covid i i think this is maybe more than just a a legacy city conversation you know some of the contraction of the economy and uh disruption to our neighborhoods you know the real questions about uh what's the future of office what's the future of retail um i'm sure we could do a whole webinar on that i won't even presume to be smart enough to know what the answers to those questions are but i think it's fair to say a lot of urbanists thinking um especially the stuff that doesn't involve design so i think a lot of the cnu work is pretty transferable you know good design is good design maybe you tweak it slightly depending on the context but i think some of the issues that are raised um i would say you know maybe uh somewhat uh i would say an ignorance and the non-judgmental sense of that word just a lot of people don't necessarily know a lot about legacy cities if they've spent a lot of time in some of the you know superstar cities like san francisco or um dc but uh some of the concerns there uh whether that's stratospheric housing prices or displacement um or even you know rail-based tod and things like that it's not that they're completely irrelevant but i think some of the conversations are not as transferable so one thing that i've always tried to uh put my point of view out there about is you know when you have a weak real estate market it does make some of the playbook that's often thrown out their um something that at least needs to be adjusted um not necessarily discarded but adjusted because i think it's fair to say a weak real estate market makes a lot of things in urban development harder you know the comps aren't necessarily there the return on investment is more difficult um as dan said earlier the legacy of um displacement or marginalization of people could be greater um in some of these legacy city areas the dynamic between the suburbs and the city is often uh different you know i look at a lot of demographic data you know a city like seattle in many cases outpaces its suburbs you know most legacy cities very much don't outpace their suburbs in terms of whether that's educational attainment or incomes and and so forth and just one other thing i wanted to touch on real quickly related to that was zoning and so you know i see a lot of discussion about is zoning good or bad and uh my answer to that is always it depends you know it's a tool it is a hammer good or bad it's great to pound a nail it's not that great to fix a watch so i think a lot of discussion about zoning and this is more i wouldn't i certainly wouldn't say this is cnu level discussion but popular press punditry discussion um i i find as a practitioner a lot of zoning discussions get a little bit theoretical um what i find a lot is planners get blamed a lot for bad zoning and well um i won't completely absolve our profession of any blame in that area by any means i think a lot of planners very much want to reform zoning codes and one of the things that i think is a real world issue that people don't always think about is it's it's inherently a legislative and political process so that's not to absolve again technicians or planners from doing what they can but i mean just a quick real world example we're trying to push through a form-based overlay right now in the city of akron and it's been hung up in city council if any of them are uh are watching they should pass this but um it's been hung up for about two months with concerns about we're eliminating all the mandatory parking minimums and we've actually done that in other neighborhoods in akron before but for whatever reason this one is kind of hung up with concerns from council members about you know is there going to be enough parking so we've been trying to work through that in sharing materials including from cnu about how other cities have done this and lived to tell the tale and had great success but i think it's just a reminder that you know politics is real and uh legislative processes are real and so um and a final thought on that i think also with the citizenry that uh you know what i find a lot of times is that um a lot of americans are very uh in favor of harsh government regulation of other people's property not necessarily their own and so i think and this is what i really commend cnu for and i'll leave uh leave with this thought is i think one of the best ways we can educate the public on good design is to do it and cnu's got a great legacy of doing that because i think when people can experience what walkable mixed-use urbanism looks like they generally really like it and so uh that's another thing i think we can do to take it out of the realm of theory but anyway with that i will kick things over to my uh compatriot travis for his thoughts let me unmute there thanks jason uh i'm gonna i'm gonna quote you because you used one of my favorite uh statements and so i'll get to that quote in a moment uh you know my i i approach this from a maybe a different perspective i approach very a lot of the discussion around legacy cities uh within the umbrella of talent uh attracting retaining growing talent uh you know we the reason we we think about population decline is that people are moving out of these legacy cities and where are they going and and what does that mean i uh you know and i'm in st louis i've lived in a number of either legacy cities or second-tier cities it's hard i'm from california so it's hard to refer to anything in california as being a legacy city because it's also young but you know these these you know flyover country part of california and uh the argument about or the concern about talent is is very real uh when i first moved to st louis in 2012 so i've been here almost uh nine years now uh shortly after i moved here the mayor at the time wrote an op-ed about what it would take to grow the population back to half a million people uh and i thought that was a pretty weak op-ed i thought and i challenged him on it nothing like a new guy in town uh especially a guy coming from california the cha the challenge the mayor on something but his i understood his premise uh he wanted the he wanted the population right now in st louis is just barely over 300 000 i suspect that when the 2020 census numbers come out we will probably dip below 300 000 for the first time uh in a long time which is which is terrible uh and his premise was look if we get to half a million people that grows the tax base we could do a lot more things we could address infrastructure we can address schools and my argument to him was what if we can make the 310 000 people what if we can improve their station in life their quality in life their earning potential to a point that it generates the tax base of what a half a million people might generate or half a million people might generate because if you put the infrastructure in place to create wealth within your city guess what people will move there and then you become an importer of talent instead of an exporter of talent uh that wasn't very popular because the popular thing is attract a a large business that's going to put to create 200 or 2000 manufacturing jobs or retail jobs and let's count that as a win but uh the talent that i look at and this is where i'm going to quote jason uh is how these legacy cities can really uh focus on attracting boomerangs back to their city as as jason said you know he grew up in akron spent most his life in akron other than that stint in like boomerangs have that statement in their life other than that stint in they they've lived in boomer they've lived in uh their their legacy city or their hometown um i've run boomerang strategies in in fresno we did a small pilot project in st louis and there's some things that i really appreciate about boomerangs one they're generally between the ages of 28 and 42 when they boomerang back they bring it they oftentimes will bring a transplant with them meaning they will bring a spouse or a partner of equal education earning potential talent back with them so it's a net positive on talent they often are not burdened by the status quo because they've lived in cities like in austin or a san francisco or a seattle and they've said hey that bodega was really cool we don't have one in st louis maybe i can try to help somebody start a bodega on this corner and so they come with this uh this air of possibility instead of a burden by the status quo of things can't getting done and they are the first to acknowledge that their city is not perfect but they want to play an active role in helping improvement uh they often get involved in politics or in activism movements uh or work for planning departments because they they've seen things in other cities that other than a stint in is a really important time i think in uh in a person's life you know we we think that the only way to protect legacy cities is to avoid people moving out uh my belief is the way to protect legacy cities is to give people a reason to move back what is that narrative that's going to give them that's going to compel them to move back and this is not a narrative around a slick branding campaign and everybody wants to be iheart new york or keep austin weird like everybody you ask the civic leaders in st louis it's currently stl made and that's like it's not a civic branding campaign it's acknowledging the broken parts of your city and almost treating it like an rfp and saying here's how we're broken people can be a part of helping it get fixed if it's infrastructure if it's racial injustice if it's a fractured arts community whatever it is if we the more explicit we are about our brokenness as legacy cities and legacy cities are broken because they're old right things break over time they just do uh so let's be much more explicit about that brokenness and use that as the the way to attract people back and so that'll be my approach to a lot of this conversation today is really focusing on the talent and the authentic transparency of our brokenness in these legacy cities and i'll hand it over to my friend katie who i also met on twitter uh so dan you and i have this katie the same katy connection to twitter and i think we've seen each other maybe once or only once face to face but we did do quiz a pub quiz together so we're kindred spirits katie over to you thanks travis and i will say anybody else wants to be my friend just tweet me um because that's how i make all my friends uh i apologize to get everybody here i do have a little bit of brain fog i'm coming out of the covid so bear with me if i forget my words it happens um my my approach to legacy cities is a little different from travis and jason although we have had lots of great discussion via twitter about our different opinions and we should have a separate session after this um just to discuss hillbilly elegy and our strong feelings for and against it um but my my approach is a little different than our other gentleman here and uh it comes from you know in addition to my my career really focused on legacy cities i've this has been my lived experience um grew up as a coal miners daughter in the midwest i traveled throughout the midwest because you know mining changed over time but it is uh you know i've lived in appalachia i've lived in legacy cities and i've lived elsewhere where i've seen uh the power of place and i think that's really what i want to bring to the table today is place matters and so i kind of started this discussion with why do legacy cities matter that was the prompt we were given and legacy cities matter because places matter and because people matter i started out my career as an architecture student graduated in 2009 so i really like you know getting beat up by the economy but a really important thing we learned in architecture is that buildings can't lie buildings are uh they tell the story of history and our cities tell that same story and one of the things i think that makes people uncomfortable about legacy cities is that they are a mirror of our values and the way that we have chosen to live and i see a lot of head nods on our panel here but i think it's really important that we acknowledge that they're they're uncomfortable because they are a reflection of ourselves and our values and the way that we are spending and disposing of land and people so when i look at legacy cities my my real asset my my focus is on assets um you know living in appalachia i did my graduate work in blacksburg and my professor john provo who if you follow him on twitter he always has lots of great things to say but we we really honed in on the difference between growth and development growth is not great uh development is different than growth and you don't have to grow to develop so we look at you know the the things that made cities into what they were you know that that peak point hasn't changed um these legacy cities still have all the assets that they they came with in the beginning uh they're logistics hubs they're natural ports they're they're places that growth happens because it's it's meant to be there uh it's just a natural fit but we have neglected them over time and um you know this winner take all approach has has not been helpful for the midwest or for our legacy cities but one of the things i found um the things that mattered that made them cities that thrived are have not changed um and the ability to bring those things back in the future is really critical i think that we are seeing as assets as as critical elements like access to opportunity becomes more mobile the idea that the places that that exist in the midwest and throughout legacy cities uh they're becoming more and more valuable and we look at that as the climate changes you know things that fresh water available land those are all uniquely midwestern things that aren't going to go away um the the access one of the things i've learned over my experience is that we grow great talent we just don't give it a great place to thrive and so one of the things that i'm seeing is more opportunity coming back to allow our our residents to thrive in the places that they love is is going to be critical for our future so um i don't want to go on any more diatribes or down any more rabbit holes i think we've got some great discussion ahead of us so but i do think that you know our overbuilt assets are our assets they give us more opportunities than other places we have the room to grow we have the room to develop and do things right and i think now is an opportunity to take advantage of that so with that i'll hand it back over to mallory thank you all so much that was a great introduction and i know that um uh this group is has in the past and uh will hopefully today get into some really good dialogue um uh katie you hit something that i want to sort of tee y'all up on which uh right there at the end of your comments which was about uh the this this idea of the built assets being assets even if they're overbuilt assets that their assets and it reminded me i also went to architecture school and um and i remember one of our professors talking about the most difficult design challenge as a blank page because there's nowhere there's no bounds to start from and legacy cities offer us this incredible you know kit of parts to to work from if you really love design if you really love you know reinvention and and in in in lifting up what already exists they're the this great sort of palette to work from and i i would love to hear each of you come with such different perspectives on you know sort of what you have how you've incorporated that sort of opportunity into your work and and what you think some of the future challenges ahead for legacy cities are in terms of you know facing that opportunity that exists well i guess i'll kick it off for me these these over-built assets and the the ability to not the blank page is is really difficult like you mentioned but the ability to respond is important and places also have history you know just because you you tear down a building doesn't mean the history of what happened there goes away and i think that's important that the assets that we have acknowledge the history that we've been through but they also respond to our new challenges so some of the things that we've seen um is just the idea that a road is more than just a road it's a it's an asset it's a way to revitalize community and so when we were in peoria a lot of what we looked at was how do we use our overbuilt right-of-way to do more to be more and to have a bigger impact so can can the road also be a tool for improving walkability and bike ability we made some pilot some inroads and pilot projects of just using it as a method of green infrastructure kind of fixing the problems of our past by incorporating new technologies and making places not only more beautiful but more livable and then more sustainable keeping pollutants and and that sewer that cso problem that we were dealing with um so we look for co-benefits this is kind of like lit if you're if you watch a lot of kitchen or cooking shows um there shouldn't be any tool in your kitchen that only serves one purpose however we built our cities with a lot of one purpose tools and now is the time that we can make those tools more they can do more and be more and i think this is a great opportunity moving into the 21st century of making these things smart making these things sustainable and and doing more with them than they've been used for in the past i'll i'll add to that uh you know i i think i just look out the window of where where i live in st louis and uh but i think there needs to be a folk equal focus on stabilization right and this is stabilization of the built environment and also stabilization of the fabric of neighborhoods and the stabilization of people the people that live within these these communities and it really takes the elect the the city leadership to understand that stabilization is a long-term investment and it's not as cool and sexy right like boarding up something and weatherproofing a building is not fun or sexy but it maintain uh that that building's ability to stay intact over winter means that the building next to it won't suffer you know any harm uh or the property values will not decrease as much uh so i think that you know we there there needs to be a culture of stabilization uh of a pause uh of trying to make that investment and then also as i said looking at what does it mean to stabilize either stabilize the stabilize the community this could come from you know trying to read to katie's point improving the quality of life by repurposing some of the assets that are that are already existing so that the the surrounding community and i and i would say again uh for a lot of communities especially under resourced or underserved communities stabilization is an is an investment that they recognize uh when uh when uh when a city takes the time to mow the green spaces uh that gets that does get uh so that the kids can actually enjoy them that does uh that adds to the overall quality of life i i would just add i think the conversation about the uh legacy of buildings and urban form here is really great because again kind of going back to what i said in the lead and i think sometimes we have these very dichotomous urban discussions where it's either manhattan or it's sprawl and uh you know uh when i lived in my stint that travis referred to was in charlotte so that was a great i wouldn't trade that experience for the world because you know living in northeast ohio my whole life i kind of got to see sun belt uh development and there was a lot charlotte had to recommend it i don't know if you can see that it's snowing behind me but that's uh one thing that was great there you know the weather was really good but it really was an eye-opener for me of just how new a city like that can be and how places in akron i didn't really think were that old um relatively worse so the house you can see behind me was built in 1945 which i don't really think of is that old of a house but i think to a lot of americans that's a really old house and i think a lot of the the built form we have to work with um in contrast to maybe at least some of the sun belt is you know i would say for any given legacy city the level of civic assets or urban form um is probably greater than a similar sized sunbelt city uh and that's something that we have to work with you know it's it's not east coast urbanism necessarily but it's not um cul-de-sacs you know my neighborhood here is mostly single family houses there's a uh eight or nine story high rise two blocks away there's retail that's a quarter mile away and it's not super urban but it's also not um monolithic sprawl either and i think a lot of cities uh detroit flynn erie akron uh i think st louis is very fortunate because it's a it's a very old city for the midwest and has a lot of great you know granular urbanism but i think most of our cities do have a lot to work with um and i think even in some cases like like in a youngstown where so much has been demolished which is really sad and unfortunate but a lot of that legacy infrastructure and that street grid um it still remains and so there is a lot to build on that i think people don't necessarily think of at first blush and to follow up on in my opinion um you know when you're talking about the built environment it's neighborhoods we constructed you know in the turn of the century 18 you know 1800s and the 1900s where you didn't drive a car all the way across town it really came down to how far could you walk within a couple of you know an hour or a couple of hours and so we have that fine grain urbanism in these legacy cities that can't be well it can be replicated but typically is not today and the other thing too is a lot of these legacy cities have social assets um social infrastructure that still exists and that's really beneficial and something we need to do a better job at capitalizing on yeah i might just add to the social infrastructure your your physical infrastructure can be used as a way to promote social infrastructure and that's one of the things i hear most from people that i work with there's there's nothing that sorry this is part of the brain fog but one thing i will say is everybody should read why the garden club couldn't save youngstown because it's important these social organizations they play a role and the fact that um bringing people together i think covent has been a really great example of of showing why our public infrastructure matters so much because there's no other place for us to come together um the park system in st louis has been a godsend here during covet i cannot imagine what life is like in the suburbs when you don't have a place to come together so well and that question about social interest or that topic about social infrastructure sort of tease up to something a couple of folks have mentioned in the comments and in the chat about you know the the delicate challenge that exists in legacy cities of uh and and travis talked about this a little bit in terms of shrinking cities but that uh you know the the delicate balance between supporting the communities that are still in legacy cities while still trying to help elevate those cities contribute to those cities uh you know help the communities to to spur reinvestments for improvements that may need to be made and yet not displace those people and and i'm i'm thinking a little bit about you know coming at this as as uh i work on the project for code reform at cnu there have to be tools or there have to be you know uh uh different different things that folks listening to this webinar could contribute or it could be working on or could help to to help support that and i wonder if any of you have found in your own work you know particular things you wish existed design tools or mechanisms or policies or funding uh streams you know what is missing that could help these cities to continue to support the communities that are there while still improving the the future aspect of those communities i i can say we're working with the apa on a legacy cities policy guide right now and and that is the question we keep asking and the first thing that i would love to see is just complete reformation of the funding mechanisms the way that federal government and state governments fund projects right now it it encourages i'm not going to say bad development but it doesn't encourage good development as much um and i think that we need to challenge the way that we fund things and how we value projects you know just because you get it it's kind of that same thing that you see right now you've got lines of people at um trying to get food in texas while the stock market hits the high its highest you know and i think one of the things that's important to notice about that is the way that we measure things matters what we measure matters and if we're measuring the wrong indicators and we're we're funding the wrong projects then it's it has a ripple effect across the board so i would say i would like to see funding reform encourage good development encourage quality development over just straight dollars and um and growth yeah i will let me i'll add to that so uh the company i work for wexford science and technology we are a real estate developer uh we develop innovation districts that's our that's our niche and you know we're working on a project in sacramento california right now uh and oftentimes there's there's a funding gap and so there needs to be some type of public subsidy that comes into these types of to these projects and as a as a as a city dweller and an urbanist i i get up i start asking you know what at what cost right are these monies that aren't going into the schools and whatnot uh and the city of sacramento is doing something quite interesting uh with their uh it's an eifd enhanced infrastructure financing district it's like a tif type of solution where uh 20 of that increment uh is being allocated directly to the neighborhood so it's um you know not not to the developer but to the neighborhood to to look at affordable housing trust fund or to look at rental assistance you know i think we need to look at some of our funding mechanisms in a way that not only benefits the developer or help not necessarily a benefits developer allows the cl allows the gap to close so the development can happen but also puts that money it makes sure that that money stays in the community so the community really can benefit from it the second piece of it is i think that uh we can't have development without looking at uh or redevelopment without looking at the jobs associated with it and the surrounding community and asking ourselves are we are we developing in a way that the existing community can can work at the places that we're building right uh we don't want to build things uh or revive you know quote-unquote revitalize things that are only for a population that's not there yet but it's a population that will move in we want to build we actually want to build and create and develop so that the incumbents can can either with modest upskilling or with the skills they already have uh secure employment within these new developments i think that that's where it comes back to being a very conscientious and uh engaged developer and the cities putting some clear standards on what they expect from from development and redevelopment i think it's a great question and some of the questions that are related in the q a that i think have touched on this with issues like um gentrification or questions about who you know who is this for or um i find in and i'll use our city as an example i mean this city has lost a third of its populations since 1960 so in legacy city terms i suppose we're um there are many cities that have lost more people but it's a lot of people and even in my you know almost 50-year life um thinking about all the stores that were in our neighborhood i live a mile from where i grew up uh that have moved to the suburbs to study march of retail uh to the suburbs following wealth and an important conversation and it's a tough one because i think it's another thing that it's easy to get in dichotomous thinking like are those new houses for other people or are they for people that live in the city when i think the reality is is often all of the above you know some of it is attracting people who might choose to live in the suburbs otherwise some of it is retaining residents some of it is um like travis mentioned earlier people who might not live in the region at all um there's certainly you know the legacy of planning and urban development in this country we don't want to minimize at all concerns about inequity but i always try to keep perspective that you know new houses are built all around us all the time in the suburbs and rarely is anyone coming to those meetings talking about segregation or disinvestment and often if anything happens in the city and and i would add it's often people who don't live here you know i was just at a three-hour public hearing on monday with new town homes being built on the edge of akron where almost all the the people speaking were from our neighboring suburb and you know they were questioning this development and i mean i was pretty outspoken i said look i've lived here for almost 50 years i've seen a third of the population leave you know we're going to compete with the suburbs for for development and i i think that's the other side of the coin that it's another example of sometimes that the the coastal you know i'm using coastal shore shorthand it's not every single coastal city but um you know the coastal superstar city narrative i think gets superimposed um unabridged over into legacy cities and you know we don't want to forget about all of the people of color and lower income people that were displaced by all the freeways that cut through our cities and the inequities that exist today but at the same time i mean i often talk to people in lower income neighborhoods and they they want new retail they want development they don't they don't want to have to take the bus six miles to go to walmart to buy um basic goods and i think in the you know the reality of a lot of legacy cities is so much wealth and retail has left it's a true hardship that sometimes people in the core city actually have the longest times on a bus for example to get to jobs or retail um that a lot of other people take for granted so um it's a tough issue though and you know i'll go i want to add something real quick dan um that you know this this discussion we're having has reminded me of um but i i think getting back to the core of you know what are the kind of tools what are the the kit of parts that we need to solve these problems um one of the other things i'd really like to advocate for for you guys right now is reform the rfp we keep putting out rfps for you know we prescribe the solution to the problem we think we have and then half like you know it's just one thing i would really challenge you out there is stop putting out rfps put out a challenge statement let your consultants come with innovative solutions and think about the problem differently don't try to prescribe what you think is already the solution to the problem that you have just define the problem and let's find new ways to solve it i think you know we're we're stuck in an old way of doing things because it's comfortable and it's easy but there are communities out there in reforming the rfp and i would challenge you all to do that let me just tell you dana you're saying but in that reform the rfp let's look at local expertise as well i think all too often uh no offense to the consulting groups that are out uh katie i know you work for a consulting company uh you get enough work you're fine no uh but i think that uh all too often we think the answer is it's the wizard of oz right the answer is gonna be provided by somebody else instead of realizing the answer was within us all along right let's let's look at uh some local expertise uh it's also a great way of retaining and attracting talent again putting a challenge out there and saying come be a part of the solution or if you're here help help with the solution just to follow up on the original question here for me the um one of the things that katie and i have talked about for a little while is this uh idea of a network of legacy city practitioners that's something that i think would be really beneficial because we we you know as much as our cities are facing different things and needs um legacy cities tend to all kind of uh fit a certain mold and an extent of like we have those core issues so how are we talking to each other how are we lifting each other up how are we networking and using best practices and case studies from one another but the other thing too is a mutual understanding from the urbanist world in general is that legacy cities are not portland um i remember driving to uh memphis for a place summit and um uh i in my car i'm trying to figure out how i'm gonna do my presentation i was driving at like three o'clock in the morning i stop at a rest stop and i open up my phone and um there was an article from another uh uh group that said the midwest is dead and i was and i literally changed my entire presentation for play summit um but that was the that was this huge and it still is to an extent there's this idea that this is the way urbanism should be without understanding the real issues that are happening in this part of the country where a quarter of our population lives well and and to to sort of feed off that there's a there's a question in the q a that i wanted to uh focus back to y'all um that you know i grew up in a small uh historic town outside of chicago my mom and dad grew up in small legacy cities in indiana muncie and marion um and uh and you know you all are each coming right now from larger legacy cities but there are a lot of small industrial towns former industrial towns and and what were larger cities that they themselves have shrunk down and and you know marion indiana is the perfect example of that of of these smaller towns that have the same problems that y'all are describing at a large scale but they they have a significantly smaller population they have a significantly smaller set of resources to try and respond to and and the question was you know are there particular practices particular low-hanging fruit that you would focus on for those smaller towns that you know maybe are under 50 000 maybe under 25 000 that still you know there's still place there to to you know reference katie's comments there's still a sense of place there there's still a community there that that has some of this you know these these resources how do they work to better stabilize and better lift up what they have there in their smaller town i i think that the solutions having worked in in these smaller cities serving them as on the public side and also serving them as a consultant i will say um you do have fewer tools to work with but the basic tools are the same focusing on quality of life um at this point i would say i mean the main street programs do a wonderful job if you're relying on tourism as an attraction piece but you also once once these communities have access to broadband quality of life becomes a really key attractor that you know if you can work from anywhere we all have found that we're all working from home obviously no one's sitting at their office if you look in this room we used to use that as a strategy in appalachia which was you know living in the shenandoah valley is a gorgeous place you can hike everywhere you can do so many things um the only thing we didn't have was like great internet speed and if we could solve that one problem then people could come and enjoy the quality of life and not need um you know access to washington dc or new york city and that i think we're seeing a lot of that play out through covid um but yeah broadband infrastructure indiana has done a really great job of investing in broadband but there are other states that really need to step up and fill that gap because rural rural internet is becoming not only it's it's the digital divide is is probably one of the biggest challenges we'll be facing in the next five years and as a former main street director myself i would i would jump in and quickly say that the two of the biggest things i think you can do as a community a small community is focus on one core asset in your in your downtown we all have that one building that one spot that that holds value for the community start with that um and the other thing is really look at how are you connecting your open spaces your your parks your access to rivers or streams or pools or something like that and that's just a great way to get people outdoors connected it all comes down to getting people back on the sidewalk again and um sparking those conversations and relationships well that allows people to uh not just connected to the city but connected to each other as well and you know one of the again going back to katie's point about uh you know covid and how people's work lives have changed or st louis and it's its beauty its wonderful parks the ability to still have a human connection uh helps appeal helps a person feel grounded in their city uh and so again if you're if it's a small city with not a lot of uh additional assets the greatest asset you do have are the existing the people that are that happen to be there uh and what are the ways you could help them feel more connected to each other you know i would just echo everything everybody else said and just maybe add um a little bit of a big picture perspective i mean i think about a city like east liverpool you know that dan mentioned and i just googled it what you guys were talking it went from 24 000 uh uh less than 11 000 people but it's also where ohio west virginia and pennsylvania come together and it sits right on the ohio river and i think the hard thing in the smaller legacy cities is it's too easy to succumb to either kind of you know like the to use an indiana reference the music man uh type philosophy of like the snake oil salesman comes and says just do all these things and everything will be great or uh fatalism which in my experience of living in the rust belt is a much bigger danger that a lot of people truly have given up hope and they hate where they live and they hate uh everything that's happened and with a lot of justification i mean things you go to live east liverpool and walk around and it is it is a tough town but um i there are assets and places like that and i was telling somebody the other day the first long-range plan i ever worked on was in 1997 and ironically it was a 2020 regional transportation plan and i can assure you we didn't forecast any of this it's been happening this year so i think it is important to keep in mind you know we don't know what the future holds if you project out far enough and just assume the future will be like the past you're eventually going to be wrong and i think i just echo my panelists that it's working on those small things that all of them mention but but not succumbing to despair and fatalism because you you don't know what the future holds and i just want to follow up real quick before mallory you jump back in but um the uh i've had a few conversations with uh individuals who are the planning director zoning director building director or building a code person they also serve on council on their high school football coach because they have to make money to live and they're working in these small communities and so when we have these ideas of we should add bike lanes their first thought is when when do i have time to even think about a bike lane so um having that network and having that ability to talk to other people who are in like-minded situations i think is super super beneficial well and that that tees up another question that we had from the the audience and it it made me think travis of what you said in the beginning about you know the importance of of both attracting but also lifting up existing talent and um the question was about social organizations and the divide the age divide so many of these cities have you know a much older population that you know jason like you're saying they may have they may not believe in their city anymore they may have seen it decline and are having a hard time you know really feeling encouraged to to spark new and change and and all of those sort of scary things that that maybe haven't panned out in the past and at the same time there's a need in this organ in the social organizations and that in the just investment in the city in general for younger populations to to feel engaged and empowered to do so and i wonder if y'all could speak to that that age divide and in ways you've seen that successfully overcome uh so this is probably really callous of me whenever i interact with people i always group them into one to three categories they're either an advocate they're apathetic or they're an adversary like that's just like everybody falls into one of those three categories right and i think people in cities are are like that as well they're either an advocate for the city they're apathetic toward their city or they're they're you know vocally or physically working against any progress in their city and every city regardless of size has people in each of those categories i am so lazy in that i try to identify the advocates as quickly as possible even if it's a small number of them and continue to empower them give them small things that they can do now what happens unfortunately with a lot of young people who happen to be maybe advocates for their city is they are relegated to serving on junior boards of and friends of and please be the social media manager for our organization uh because you cannot financially contribute you don't make money yet uh you're not you're so young you couldn't be smart enough to have a leadership position and you know that's just all bs like i think we need we we have to recognize that everybody has a sphere of influence and that sphere of influence is what what their leadership capacity is made up of and if you can find young people who haven't necessarily been beaten down by the system or quote unquote reality uh let's let's continue to fuel that fire um but you know i remember coming out of college uh i think jason based on your statements i think you and i are probably about the same age like coming out of college as a gen xer uh people expected us to be apathetic or to or to be overly ambitious and and and want to get in over our skis and what i quickly realized is it's not a we attribute a lot of things to generational generational cohort uniqueness as opposed to phase of life and just adult development like a baby boomer was you know if you think of baby boomer like they were hippies like they were they were they thought the world was great they were all moving to san francisco to experience free love and then like reality of life might change their their temperament toward life so how do we how do we foster and and fuel that that idealism that does exist and not extinguish it by relegating young people to the young people things like managing social media i would say in my experience um i have been infiltrating older social groups um and i like to refer to them as my surrogate grandmothers but i i think that's one of the things that we have to do uh to get out of our comfort zones i i have challenged myself that if you know if i am only hanging out with people my own age then i am not doing my service and so i am a member of the dar and i hope other people will join too because there's lots to learn from the generations that came before you but there's lots that they're interested in learning from you as well and i think it's really important um and the other side of that coin is part of the challenge of legacy cities is you have a huge opportunity to make a difference but you also have to make a difference if you're kind of like me you feel compelled that you need to do something and that you also must do something and that you can and there's all these these pieces fighting around so so find the balance and recognize that there are people out there willing to help you just need to start making the ask um and sometimes it's it's your passion that will inspire others to get involved and i will say that my surrogate grandmas have done a wonderful job of helping me get connected in these new cities i've moved 12 times in my life and it's it's these social groups that are kind of long-standing old social groups like my sorority or the dar that have been my connection to new places everywhere i go so get involved and i don't really have anything to add other than to uh tell travis that i appreciate him for acknowledging the existence of generation x and uh we're here and we're proud and we exist and i'm i'm kind of on the cusp there of x and millennials so um but no i would say the big thing for me is pilot pilot pilot and the reason i say that is um last year we had the regional neighborhood network conference in fort wayne and um we painted a neighborhood mural on the back of a church building and it was amazing uh just getting a muralist and a couple buckets of paint and have some free food out there and block off squares and we had uh you know a 98 year old with her great great granddaughter who was three years old out at that same site and so um you can do really small things and make a huge impact in your community that's that's one of the things i like about smaller legacy cities is they're while they may not have the same resources they also don't have sometimes have don't have the same level of red tape uh and so they are ripe for tactical urbanism of uh you know turning parking spaces into parks for a weekend or painting a mural assuming you have the owners the correct the true owner's permission uh you know doing these things that are very where you see a very quick turnaround and it's uh you know maybe it's the tom sawyer idea of getting everybody to whitewash the fence but it's getting the community to participate in something i'm just going to jump in before we have to go um mallory said i could answer the questions in the q a box one was related to gentrification i will say if you haven't read the divided city by alan malik he he makes a really good case about gentrification we have an abundance of land and i know that gentrification is a concern but the areas if you look at in total where gentrification is happening in legacy cities and then you know where decline continues we still have plenty of land and opportunity available to take advantage of so i would say gentrification is a very very localized issue and it should be addressed with localized prop like local local prop like problem solving however as a whole gentrification outside of pittsburgh i'm not seeing it in legacy cities as a huge challenge um i i wanted to give you all one last question because i think you know the there are the folks that commonly work in legacy cities and then there are the folks that that maybe don't have as much experience um and i suspect that as we look based on things like climate based on things like population shifts that that legacy cities are going to continue to be a a space that maybe audience members cnu audience members may be taking a closer look at in the years to come and so i wanted to offer up for each of you if there was one takeaway that you would love to impart on the outsider that's coming into your city to try and do design work or try to make a difference what would that be you don't all have to answer at once leave us with a stumping question that's a that's a good one i would say for me um the biggest thing is that we are not like all other cities and so you need to understand that you can't replicate what you've done in other places here and you have to think local you have to get local people involved and it has to be um from the roots up and i think maybe to add to what dan said um i think there's a unique i mean i'm gonna probably speak for my own city more than any other but i think it's fairly common in legacy cities there there's kind of a unique combination i think of a willingness to innovate because of all of the decline and all of the um things that have happened in these cities that have kind of caused people to throw the playbook out um but there is also a very large climate of like what i would call small sea conservatism uh of people uh being very leery about bike lanes or uh uh removing parking minimums for example that i mentioned before and so i think if you're coming in it's it's kind of working with people to use travis's formulation who are the advocates that can help you kind of navigate that landscape of um finding maybe the low-hanging fruit that you can find innovation on and then also identify the minefields or the things that are uh you're going to have to kind of uh lead the population to water a little bit more on and and i think it's kind of having that finesse to to work on both of those levels at the same time yeah i guess my my my quick addition here is every place has a story learn the story and then figure out how to tell it through design um you you have to listen to the people in the place yeah and i would say especially if you're an outsider trying to come in don't don't think don't worry about trying to change people's minds uh think about whatever capacity you have how you can apply that and help other people achieve their capacity uh you know a lot of cup filling going back and forth use your capacity to help other people and to dan's point earlier this is where i think a network of practitioners can really be a resource for each other a lot of the challenges that we face uh we're not the first ones facing them and other people have solved similar problems um i think it's the willingness to share share best practices and to my my opening remarks uh be transparent about our shortcomings that's really great y'all thank you so much i want to thank katie dan jason travis for for really wonderful comments educating us about legacy cities the challenges and the opportunities as well um and i want to thank the audience for being a part of this webinar today as always a recording of the session will be available on cnu.org within the next 24 hours so check back if you'd like to listen again and i want to remind everyone again about january 12th we'll be coming back in the new year for the next on the park bench with jim williamson and ellen dunham jones interviewed by david dixon thank you all so much and have a wonderful day cheers