I have had the privilege for the past couple of years of writing a regular column for Planning Commissioner’s Journal, a publication geared toward citizen planners and the professionals who ...
In the “Good Ideas Directly Lifted from Someone Else” Department:” Just came across these principles from the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service. The agency makes very clear that this is ...
The following blog post from www.businessinsider.com hit my inbox a couple of weeks ago during an intensely busy period. We talk a lot in the Wise Economy world about the necessity ...
As longtime readers of this blog may recall, I have an awesome friend named Bill Lutz who is the Development Program Manager for the city of Piqua, Ohio — a ...
When I give a presentation, my slides anymore usually have more words than pictures. That’s what the presentation experts say you should do, but it means that when you download ...
I am getting ready to speak at the American Planning Conference in Los Angeles about two of my favorite topics: downtown and retail district revitalization, and online tools for public ...
For those of you attending the Ohio City-County Manager’s association presentation today, here is a link to the presentation, in case you want to follow along. Gold star for you! ...
I’ve referenced a guy named Umair Hacque on here before, and if you haven’t taken the hint and started reading his stuff yet, you should. If anyone is thinking and ...
I wanted to draw your attention to a great blog post from Otis White… As I have grappled over the years with the question of how to help communities become ...
For those of you who attended my session on public participation at the workshop, I promised to post the links to the various online public participation and planning tools that ...
I put a post on my Google+ profile this morning calling attention to an article Richard Florida did for the Atlantic. Florida does a nice job here of summarizing ...
Q: What is this flower? A: An apple blossom. It’s also the state flower of Michigan. Q: What’s this second flower? A: A Hibiscus. It’s also the state flower ...
Ah, July… I’d like to say that I haven’t blogged lately because I have been working so darn hard, but there’s too many pictures of me at a U2 concert ...
First, we need to change how we think about communities, businesses, organizations and governments. We need to understand that economic vitality depends on the health of a community, and that ...
Wise people and Wise communities make conscious choices, rather than letting circumstances make the choices for them. As people, we all allow some decisions to get made by default — ...
A wise person doesn’t only think ahead, he or she also anticipates and prepares to deal proactively with the unintended consequences of a decision. That sounds like an oxymoron – ...
A few months ago, I received a wonderful invitation from the publisher of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal to start writing a regular column. The first one appears in the Spring ...
One of the items that I have been struggling to define over the last few months is what I mean by a Wise Economy, and how that approach fundamentally differs ...
I am getting excited about the prospect of meeting you all at the Michigan Small Town and Rural Development Conference at Crystal Mountain in Thompsonville April 18-20! As I said ...
Stop it. Just stop it. Are you trying to sound like children squabbling on the playground? I know you’re going to say the other side started it, it’s not my ...
We all know that most of our local economies are in some form or another of mess. Draw the border around your town, your county, your region, your state, doesn’t ...
This post breaks all the Blogging 101 rules by actually having two purposes (ooh….don’t tell on me…). The first purpose is to encourage you to read this blog entry by ...
It’s that time of year when even the most laissez-faire of us get hit with the Set Goals bug. We all resolve (myself included) to lose more weight, eat better, ...
The article on retail incubators at the bottom of this blog entry is not new, but it’s in the file of “interesting stuff to write a blog about when it feels ...
I am delighted to announce that I am starting a new firm, which will be known as the Wise Economy Workshop. WEW will help local governments plan for bright economic ...
This post is NOT mine…. I get no credit except maybe a little editing. My friend Bill Lutz, the Community Development Director for Piqua, Ohio, has a tendency to raise ...
My post last week about whether comprehensive plans are worth doing and what goes on with them generated a lot of very thoughtful feedback, both in the blog comments and ...
Comprehensive planning gets a bad rap- one that it has partially, although not completely, deserved. In the past few years I seem to encounter more and more clients who are either trying to avoid ...
Vacations are a wonderful thing… it’s a rare occasion for me to finish a book anymore (reports, yes, books… a different situation), but thanks to a long flight I was ...
After my last post, I have been thinking a lot about how being a parent relates to planning and economic development and vice versa. For either amusement or edification (you ...
Last Saturday my kids set up a lemomade stand on the street in front of my house. I wanted to encourage them to do it for all the usual good ...
Last week, the Sacramento Bee took the city council to task for turning down a “more ambitious proposal with greater potential to transform downtown” in favor of a more modest proposal ...
I am writing this from a conference, listening to the keynote speaker, and feeling pretty discouraged. The speaker’s premise is one that I defintely support: Locally-grown businesses are critical to local ...
There was another sign yesterday that our local economies are undergoing a significant shift: Colliers reports that the market for development of new retail facilities has come almost to a standstill, ...
“Clustering” is one of those magic wizard ideas in economic development. Everyone knows that business clusters are good things, that somehow they make economies work better, but when someone asks ...
I’ve said here many times that a wise economy requires building on your assets, finding and capitalizing on the things that make your community unique, and using the precious resources ...
As the National Main Street Conference continues, I’ve been talking a lot with Eric Model of Journeys Into on SIRIUS-XM about some exciting, inexpensive opportunities to promote the things that ...
This article highlights two counties in Florida that have found a way to continue their traditional public input systems, using chat and video streaming, in a way that not only ...
Another sign of the general oversupply of retail space in the US — and the opportunities this might provide. This article highlights a couple of retail real estate developers who ...
First, thanks again to everyone who participated in the session on sustainable economic development at the APA National Conference in New Orleans. I am still shocked so many of you ...
A blog post from the Harvard Business Review (always worth seeing what the smarties are up to) makes a point about managing a job hunt, but it’s also relevant to ...
Planning Commissioner’s Journal usually finds something interesting and relevant to say, and this 2006 article by Hannah Twadell that was recently reposted remains relevant: Corridors link communities. And sometimes the ...
Joe Borgstrom of Michigan Main Street Center is one of the people that I increasingly look to for insight into what makes communities economically successful. In this blog post, Joe ...
I have become increasingly convinced that microenterprise is one of the most effective low-cost ways to build the business base, especially in disadvantaged communities. Microenterprises can make a little money ...
Here’s an idea that’s beautiful in its simplicity. Won’t work everywhere, and not a magic bullet, but it’s one of the hundreds of small good ideas that make a healthy ...
I took a couple of weeks off from the blog (and from work) to enjoy the family, spend a lot of time in the car and catch up on reading. ...
Sometimes the universe just seems to be on the same page for once. This post from the Michigan Main Street Center has been circulating the Twittersphere the last couple of ...
After my last post about the OKI Fiscal Impact Model, I received several great comments. One of them reflected on past experience with a per capita fiscal impact model in ...
We all live in boxes. We all operate on the unspoken assumption that the options available to us are constrained, are limited by something or someone. And those constraints limit ...
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2009/11/clevelands_euclid_corridor_pro.html Truth in advertising: even after 20+ years out of the region, I am still a huge Cleveland fan (the city, I mean — I gave up on the Browns ...
My biggest difficulty in Christmas shopping (other than trying to remember which Bakugon the 7-year old said was the really wonderful one, and which one was lame), is trying to ...
Agenda 360, the Cincinnati-area initiative to catalyze regional growth, has announced a goal of creating 200,000 net new jobs in the next 10 years. A description, and a link to ...
OK, a short one for Thanksgiving eve. This graphic from N-Judah Love Song says it all — and this applies both to us individually and to our communities. Sometimes you ...
http://www.biztimes.com/news/2009/11/13/a-new-corporate-umbrella An interesting article out of Milwaukee. Not every community can have a sort of Daddy Warbucks like these three gentlemen, but what I think they have really done goes ...
I spent way too much time writing this response on ULI’s LinkedIn group to my post on seeking opportunties to not put it here, too! Charles Brenton of Brenton Associates wrote: “Seeing ...
Last week, in my Wise Economy Manifesto first draft, I wrote that a Wise Economy Looks constantly for new opportunities — and particularly seeks the unexpected ones. This idea probably comes from ...
Just found out that I’ll be speaking on sustainable economic development at the American Planning Association National Conference in New Orleans in April! Yahoo!!
Just a brief thought: I really hate having my plans disrupted — I have a sick kid right now, and the last 24 hours have been a mad chase to ...
As I discussed in this post, I have spent most of my adult life thinking about how to deal with the impacts that economic change has on the health and ...
This editorial from South Carolina’s News & Observer advocates an idea that isn’t new but is still radical: that financial incentives to recruit businesses aren’t worth it. The author, Dr. ...
My last blog post focused on one of several points made in an article at www.newgeography.com that discussed issues around Detroit’s post-industrial environment. In addition to an interesting insight into ...
This article from newgeography.com is more dense with information and ideas than I can cover in a blog post (especially a Friday night blog post!), but — and I say ...
Last year I chaired a work group focused on urban entrepreneurship for Agenda 360, a Cincinnati-region strategic planning effort. One of the issues we struggled with was, what urban communties ...
Regional government is a touchy subject at best in most places — and one likely to get you chased out of town with sharp implements in others. In Kentucky, however, ...
This link takes you to an abstract that summarizes (in nothing resembling clear language) a study that indicated a high correlation between a higher level of amenities and choice of ...
As I outlined in the last post on this topic, OKI’s Fiscal Impact Model was designed to provide every community in the OKI region with an off-the-rack option for fiscal ...
I spent a huge amount of time over the past year working with the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments and the University of Cincinnati School of Planning and Center for Economics ...
ICSC Latin America finds that commercial developments do better when they are “authentic.” But what does that mean?
Wow…. This article claims that more than 50% of businesses are home-based. Imagine how that changes the game for planning and economic development: How do you retain your businesses and ...
One of the biggest challenges in local government economics, and I would say one of the most important ones, is understanding the fiscal impacts of the kinds of things that get built ...
From the Downtown Idea Reporter — sorry, I don’t have the full story, but the following bit is intriguing. Who knew that the USDA would help fund a downtown parking ...
This is an interesting idea from a nonprofit planning process in Maine. I think the call-in telephone number and the boards in public places are a great idea – excellent ...
Another presentation today… this one in Indiana for APA (it’s been a very long fall!). Topic du jour was fiscal impact analysis as a tool for sustaining local communities. I ...
Here’s the link to the presentation that I did for the National Trust for Historic Preservation last week on innovative and effective public participation methods (read: no grandstanding, minimum boredom, ...
For my Ohio friends — a good training opportunity on one of the very valuable resources available to owners of historic buildings. One of the single best tools for conserving ...
This article from the Center for Rural America demonstrates a key challenge in small city redevelopment — and in any place, urban or rural, that is having trouble attracting redevelopment: ...
I get NO credit for this list… this was created by contributors to the Indiana APA listserv last Friday.. too good not to publicize! : Top 9 reasons I am ...
I am not a very dedicated “greenie” (as evidenced by amount of petroleum tied up in Legos in my house), but I think the Midwest governors might be on to ...
I started my professional life as a cultural resources consultant in northern Wisconsin (ok, that wasn’t quite the start, but it’s a long story…). During that time I had the ...
How can a place like this be fixed? That is the question that has driven my career. I grew up in a Cleveland suburb watching the rippling impacts of closing ...
