Episode Summary

  1. Cities should take lessons from the private sector and find ways to make working for them career accelerants.
  2. Big Box stores destroy the bottom line of city budgets. Walmart did it the 90s. Amazon and Costco will do it to you today.
  3. Don't make the Swiss Army knife of public spaces. When you try to make everyone happy, you'll make no one happy.

​What happens when your city can't find anyone to work for them? (4 min read)
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Best practices for public space investment (6 min read)
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The people who tried to fight big box stores in the 90s were right (3 min read - twitter thread)

Outside The Episode

Source: pps.org

The Flint Farmers Market is a great case study in how you can focus on citizens more likely to be excluded to make a successful public space.

Transcript

Hey everybody it's Kyle. Where, on this podcast, I share, discuss, ponder, and try to connect some dots through the best content I've discovered each week related to urban planning, architecture, and cities.

Ultimately, trying to learn, what are the patterns of development?

I want to build with you case studies, discover examples, refine ideas, that hopefully inspire you as you go along your journey as a developer, real estate agent, city staff, builder, or citizen. If you don't have time to read, I'm trying to break down the patterns here and help you stay ahead of the curve.

First up, an article from Bloomberg's City lab. Titled "Desperate U.S. Cities Pitch Wall Street-Style Sign-on Bonuses"

The article by Katia Dmitrieva, Amanda Albright, and Reade Pickert details the challenges that the tight COVID labor market are having on cities.

According to the article, "In Albuquerque, New Mexico, landing a job with the police force or fire department may get you a sign-on bonus of $15,000.

And despite such incentives Despite such incentives, about 1 in 10 local government jobs remains unfilled. Wait times on the city’s non-emergency police line are upwards of 45 minutes and several bus routes are cut each week.

Thousands of cities, towns and states across the U.S. are facing the most acute labor shortage in recent memory. Regional governments have an even tougher time than businesses because they can’t compete with private-sector wages, can rarely offer remote work and they’ve faced a larger wave of early retirements during the pandemic."

This is Kyle again.

It's no secret that municipal work isn't the most glamorous or high paying. So what happens when are cities aren't the best place to work and nobody wants to work there. Well, you start to have problems. Long wait times for non-emergencies. Public transportation gets cut.

I talked about this in a bonus episode of the podcast back in May. The best companies out there, the "trillion dollar thinkers" all work to make their businesses career accelerants and put value on their human capital.

Typically working for your local municipality will be hard, low-paying, thankless work. There’s a reason the best and brightest go to Goldman and not to work for the local economic planning office.

Salary and benefits, sure. But it’s because working in a local government doesn’t springboard you into much else other than more public service.

The question is, “How can we make working for our cities a career accelerant?” I don't have an answer to it, short term thinking like offering bonuses might get people in the door but it won't get them to stay and it probably isn't a long term solution.

Speaking of long term solutions - BIG BOX stores. When I was growing up.I didn't understand why some of the "hippie moms" didn't want a Walmart in town.

Well.

Hindsight is 20/20. So good job Mark and Steven's mom. Looks like you were right. A twitter thread from Stacy Mitchell "@stacyfmitchell" outlines what's happened.

I'm going to pull out 3 and 4 from the thread:

"The tax bonanza was always a mirage, but you had to actually do the full math to see this. Most city officials refused -- they wouldn’t look past the top-line of what the Walmart store would generate in property tax revenue."

But the bottom-line was another story. There are 2 big costs:  Big-box stores are expensive in terms of the public services they require, mainly police and road costs.  And second, big-box stores cause the value of downtown and other commercial buildings to drop.

This is Kyle again. So many times city leaders get caught up in top line thinking. And voters get caught up in perceived value. But we all lose sight of that bottom line and the margin on the services provided by the city...why do you think so many cities have budget problems...

I just said budget. Another thing we like to invest in publicly is the spaces in our cities. An article from Nate Storring at Brookings considers best practices for when you might be considering investment into public spaces:

I want to highlight 2 of them

  1. PUBLIC SPACES FOR ‘EVERYONE’ DON’T WORK FOR EVERYONE.

This is basic human nature. The Swiss Army knife does a bunch of things ok. You ever tried to open a can of soup with one of those things? ITS REALLY HARD. It doesn't work. And you wish you had a can opener.

Don't make the Swiss Army knife of public spaces.

  1. THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC SPACE RESEARCH IS QUALITATIVE

And I'll quote Nate Storring for this one, "Public spaces are complex places. They bring together a staggering array of people, activities, and systems and produce diffuse and unpredictable benefits and costs....Traditional economic measures tend to focus on outcomes such as property values, vacancy rates, and revenue generation, mostly because these are the easiest outcomes to measure. But they may not be the most significant outcomes"

It's the old anecdote if property values didn't go up, did you even develop the economy?

You can have nice things, and yes property values might go up. But quality of life, and public spaces can be essential parts of the community without doing that.

Which brings us to this weeks patterns:

  • Cities should take lessons from the private sector and find ways to make working for them career accelerants.
  • Big Box stores destroy the bottom line of city budgets. Walmart did it the 90s. Amazon and Costco will do it to you today.
  • Don't make the Swiss Army knife of public spaces. When you try to make everyone happy, you'll make no one happy.

Of course as I say this, I wonder how the "Swiss Army knife of public spaces" is different then building mix use spaces.

More on that next week! I'll talk to y'all soon.