Hi.
I decided the last name didn’t have enough punch. So let’s try this. The Broadway tune reference is specifically for Mark Barbash. Happy Birthday! (I don’t actually know when his birthday is…)
With that nonsense out of my head, let’s see how the future has been bubbling to the surface in communities that look a lot like yours and mine.
Future Ready Urban Renewal
When a local organization leadership takes a power stance on a radical change in two national publications, I suspect we should see that as a potential watershed moment. Christopher Tyson, CEO of Build Baton Rouge, took just such a stand this summer when he declared in Bloomburg, and later on NPR’s Marketplace, that redevelopment authorities have “a responsibility to build better cities that follow the needs and wants of the residents who live there, rather than of private developers.” Get a load of this:
We know the history of redevelopment authorities and other kinds of large-scale, government-led urban renewal plans and cities has been a disastrous one. Indeed, the problems that I wake up every day and try to design strategies out of are the ones that previous iterations of urban policy created. What that means is that we must have an equity focus, we must have an equity lens. We have to realize we need a robust and well equipped public sector to partner with private investment, to partner with communities and to partner with others to make sure that everyone is included in the future city.
“the problems…are the ones that previous iterations or urban policy created.”
All of a sudden, I don’t feel quite so much the violin in the void anymore. I’m super curious to see how this assertion is received in the economic development field.
Dream homes, evacuated.
This story, however, drives home that public-private failures aren’t a thing of the past. In Washington, DC, a 4-year old new-build condominium geared toward low income and first time homeowners has developed such severe structural problems that it has been evacuated, with disabled and other hard-to-house homeowners forced to find new housing on a couple weeks’ notice. And it appears that there is blame to go around on both the public and private sector side.
The River East at Grandview Condominiums were built by Stanton View Development as part of a D.C. initiative to encourage first-time homeownership in the District.
The D.C. government underwrote a $6 million loan to Stanton View Development
to construct the building, with the funding coming from the city’s Housing Production Trust Fund — the District’s primary reserve used to fund affordable housing projects for low- to moderate-income households….
The Talbert Street building, a 46-unit structure of two-story homes in the heart of Anacostia, was sold to residents as a brand-new condominium building, but within months of moving in, the first problems began to arise: cracks and uneven surfaces that the first-time home buyers were told were just cosmetic issues. Contractors filed through the building, patching the breaks.
As months ticked by and cracks continued to cleave through concrete walls and floors, the residents began to compare notes, homeowners said. By the spring of 2018, homeowners were copying D.C. government agencies on emails to the developer asking that they take a closer look at ongoing structural issues.
“I was there less than six months when I and a group of [residents] knew there was something wrong with this building already,” said Ty’on Jones, a homeowner and secretary of the condominium association.
This, of course, begs the question of how the constructive, community-focused collaboration identified in the first article can be designed to head off these kinds of unintended consequences. Did the developer feel justified in taking short cuts? Was something wrong with the site that led to its availability for this use (in a super-high demand housing market)? Why didn’t the complaints of the new homeowners spur earlier action?
Unintended consequences increase in likelihood as the process for getting the thing done becomes more complex, and public-private partnerships rely on a level of trust and confidence — and shared purpose — that even a detailed contract might not be able to guarantee. Which may point to the need for new types of collaborative parties to address these kinds of community necessities — not just governments and conventional private sector developers, but a new kind of entity that shares the benefits and the risks — and the mission.
Working Motherhood><working ethic.
Working mothers of all ages know how brutally difficult this life can be — and for mothers whose families depend on their income, that struggle only becomes more intense. This article focuses on the impact of the COVID pandemic on largely white collar mothers, but that should tell us volumes — if it’s this impossible for the most priviledged, imagine how destructive this confluence of issues is for everyone else.
Perhaps more importantly,
That all creates an unfolding crisis, not only for women and their families, but for society and the economy as a whole. And the root cause of this crisis long preceded the pandemic: The expectations for the American worker and the American parent are inherently contradictory — and something’s got to give. What happens next may significantly shape what the future of work is like for millions of Americans….
“I felt like I had to be in a million different places at once: preschool on Zoom, my own Zoom meetings, and taking care of household duties,” Michelle Pietsch, a vice president of revenue at a software company and a mother of two toddlers in Boston, said. “There was no escape.”
On a selfish, personal level, this article was really discouraging. I lived the working mom life, with an intense job, constant struggle to make day care work, overwhelmed by the household responsibilities, the whole deal, for years. And I had actual functional non-shut-down day care, and enough money, and a supportive husband, and all the rest. And I still don’t know how I got through those years. I could be a grandmother in a few years, and I had hoped upon hope that the impossibilities I felt like I was facing would be better by the time my sons were parents.
At the same time, however, there’s a cause for a little encouragement here. When I was going through all of that, I felt like I was completely alone. Out of all the women my age with kids that I knew, maybe one or two of them had a full time career-type job. And this wasn’t the 1960s, this was around 2005. 2005 Della would have been stunned to see these struggles laid out in an article, let alone getting attention from lawmakers and policy makers. It’s not going fast enough, but there’s at least some motion in the right direction.
And of course, making sure that motherhood doesn’t sideline people from contributing their insights and experience to our collective innovation toolkit means that we have a better chance of finding actually effective solutions to our challenges.
From the Wise Economy Network
One of the benefits of subscribing to this newsletter is that you get first dibs on any of my new stuff!! I just finished a Short Shot that outlines the five most important trends that I see impacting our communities as we move into the Fusion Era, and the five things we need to do to help our communities manage that transition.
I’m really proud of this one, and I love how it looks and how easy it is to read.
You can get your digital copy right here! (But be warned, it’s a 27 MB download. Pretty pictures take a lot of memory.) If you want a print-quality version, let me know and I will provide.
Another one of the benefits of subscribing to this newsletter is the Ask Me Anything, an online session where I answer your questions about… dang near anything. I’ll hold my next Ask Me Anything next Thursday 10 AM EDT. It will be live streamed on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you think of questions ahead of time, you can message me here or email to me at della.rucker@wiseeconomy.com. Otherwise, you can send me questions through the comment function on any of those platforms, and I should see them in real time! Feel free to share with your colleagues. And don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube or follow me on the other two platforms to get notified when I go live or upload new videos.
Speaking of uploads, I did an AccelerateUS Salon last week on everyone’s favorite topic… Fear, and how to deal with fear when it threatens your ability to improve your community. Anne Krieg and Lara Fritts blew my freaking socks off with their insights… and took the discussion in directions I never anticipated. You can catch the livestream recording right here. And you should!
Next week I will be travelling to Delaware to see my favorite band in action. Yay live music!
Thanks again for your support.
Go get ‘em!
Della