Midtown– Why “home run” civic development is tough to sustain
Rochester Junto is a new-ish blog created by a couple folks from Duffy’s economic transition team. The mission:
What were the public and private sector successes that led to our becoming America’s first boomtown? Where have we gone wrong since? Like you, I have plenty of opinions about our politicians, laws, taxes and local business policies. My hope is that we can come together to use this blog as a forum to learn, share, debate and innovate.
Sounds good to me. They have a number of good posts, including one that shows a 1963 clip called “Rochester: City of Quality”. The Junto praises the clip’s “optimism”, although the cheese factor (of any 50’s or 60’s media, really) is compounded by the way it’s a cheerleader for “more roads! more cars! more parking lots! SUBURBIA!!!!” Its main focus, though, is the glory of newly-built Midtown, with sparkling white Jimmy and Buffy enthralled by the international clock thinger-dinger.
The funny part is, the post also features a modern-day update of the clip, that keeps the cheesy voiceover but uses new footage.
Funny stuff. But a sober reminder that just because you spend a bajillion dollars on big-ticket civic development (*cough* Fast Ferry *cough* Ren Square *cough*), doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. How about spreading that around to micro-improve many different parts of the city? “Leaven in the loaf”, and all that.
Nice catch, btp. I’m enjoyng reading that blog.
Micro-improvement sounds like a great idea to me, but I think it’s a much harder sell. Writing lots of little grants is more time-intensive and not as sexy as writing a few big grants. IMO, if you really wanted to improve Rochester, you’d throw as much money as possible into childcare and schools from prenatal care all the way to college tuition. Give the kids of the underclass good reasons (and good ways) to stay in school, and create an education system that all the middle class people from the ‘burbs want to be a part of.
Agreed. An addition to your excellent suggestion would be to promote eco-energy as a regional industry. Everyone talks about it, a few areas are actually doing it. Now is the time to do it before other areas/states get the jump on us.
Everyone’s talking about youth flight from the area once they graduate. A nascent eco-energy industry would be a great way to get folks to stay, and have serious lateral benefits– more energy independence, more cash to spend in the local economy rather than energy bills. Offer great incentives to folks to go solar, for example, and you jump-start that kind of thing.
That’s true as long as you assume that the micro-grants go through the same arduous grant-writing proposal as the big grants. I’d couple any micro-grant proposal with a streamlined process that’s more like a bank loan than a traditional government grant. The guy who won the Nobel Peace Prize this year did a similar thing with women from Bangladesh.
You’re also right that it’s all about the education and childcare system, but a small micro-grant program could still exist in tandem with school reform, which is a much bigger project.
I know there’s some micro-credit lurking around in Rochester, but it’s damn hard to find info about it, at least on the web.
With the US on schedule to become more and more 3rd world-like over the next 10 years, maybe the Bangladeshi thing would serve as a good pilot project for us.
[...] this really was part of good progressive values discussion. We were discussing sustainable development and Big ticket items for [...]