Let me know what you think, and I’ll share with Bill.  Thanks!

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Local government officials and staff tend to think about community engagement as a purely transactional exercise, and that’s not surprising.  Think of our typical experience: our residents, businesses or stakeholders come to us and want something, such as a service or asolution to a problem.  Once that need has been met, the transaction is over and the other person vanishes from our offices.  To be fair, the reverse is also true.   When local governments need public input for a project or an activity, we publish notices or get the local paper to write an article and (hopefully) residents come and provide input… and then leave.  In both cases, citizen engagement is reduced to a series of transactions.

While working in terms of transactions may be efficient and effective, they are, in a sense, damaging to the business of local government..  Every day, our residents make judgments and assessments of our community and those thoughts lead to a well formed (although, yes, not necessarily well informed) perception of the community in which they live.

It’s hard to influence those perceptions when our rules are reduced to a series of transactions.

Here in the City of Piqua, we struggled with that very issue:  How can we change the dynamic of local government being seen not as a transactional relationship but something more transformational?  We made a concerted effort to increase citizen engagement strategies, to create situations where residents felt more ownership in their community and had a better understanding of what our city staff does, with the expectation of engendering trust and confidence within the city government.

We’ve come to understand community engagement as a circular process,  –as four interrelated steps  that build an ongoing relationship on the foundation of  mutual understanding, not transactions.

In the first step, we need to find residents who are Concerned about their community.  Many times, residents in this stage are those who are coming to the public hearing or a council meeting to voice their perceptions on a particular issue, sometimes in a negative fashion.  Often these residents are afraid of the future consequences of a proposed action, and that fear calls them to action.  At this point, we think local governments should not treat the interaction as  a transactional event, but rather the beginning of a relationship.

In Piqua, we encourage this relationship by Communicating to these residents that our local government is concerned about the well being of the community and has their concerns at heart.  This stage can be difficult because, at its root, it is not transactional, but relational.  A local government manager or an elected official can’t simply state from the dais that they have the community’s best interest at heart – like any relationship-building, actions often matter much more than words.  We Communicate these residents by involving them — by demonstrating to them the decision making processes and the internal struggles that local government goes through.  Taking time outside of the meeting and showing residents the information that the government knows can go a long way in convincing residents that the local government is making the best decision for the community.

The third stage is to Connect residents to each other.  It is at this stage where the true power of community can really be unleashed.  Many times, our residents may feel disconnected and isolated as they want to tackle community problems that the local government is not well equipped to handle.  The local government can play a major role as connecting residents to each other to other neighbors to develop opportunities to forge substantive change.

The final step in the process is Commitment.  Once residents are linked together, things happen.  If a resident sees a litter problem at the park, the local government can link them with other likeminded and committed individuals to start a litter collection program.  For many residents, giving back is easier with strong support from their neighbors and the local government.

Community engagement is more than just a series of sterile transactions; it’s built through continuous and conscious efforts to forge positive relationships.  This four step process helps explain how the relationship develops to build trust and commitment among residents and the local government.

Hopefully I’m not this furry.

About every other week I discover that I have totally confused someone with my business.  Yesterday it was a longtime colleague (granted, he’s not known for his powers of observation).  He couldn’t figure out why I have a business with the word “economy” in its name, although his community has hired me to do public engagement.  He thought I should lose the economy part from my company name.  Like I said, he wasn’t the first one.

I know.  It’s all weird.  But it’s not.  Really.

When I starred this business a couple of years ago, I settled on the Wise Economy name because I tend to see everything I do through the filter of whether or not it fosters long term economic health. The original business plan included a cumbersome five service lines, one of which was traditional public engagement. It’s turned out that most of the consulting work I’ve been doing has had more to do with in person and online public engagement.

I’ve learned in the process that there’s almost no overlap between the public engagement people and the economic development types.  And that those are commonly seen as completely unrelated professions.  Even after spending a lot of years In local government consulting, that surprised me.

Here’s the thing: in my head, at least, economic revitalization and public engagement aren’t two unrelated things.  They are critically intertwined, and we screw both of them up when we try to do one and don’t deal with the other.

We depend on our economies.  We live in a world where economic decision making either sets a community up for success or drives it deeper into a hole.  And we live in a world where the economy that we all depend on doesn’t look much like it did 10 years ago.  If we want healthy, desirable communities that will stay that way for a long time, we have to deal with that set of conditions.

And yet, when we do economic development, we tend to treat that as an insider game.  We claim confidentiality or that “it’s too complicated,” and we confine our planning and strategy to a star chamber of ED types, elected officials and a few Blue Ribbon Committee business leaders.

Then, when we propose The Big Project, the community fights it, raising ill-informed (or maybe just uncomfortable) questions about real economic impacts, or community side-effects.  They don’t make it easy, and sometimes their scrutiny kills our pet project.

Rubes. Don’t they know anything?

Similarly, when communities do “public engagement,” we tend to ask people questions in a way that’s divorced from economics, as though dealing with the dollars and cents that determine whether a choice can become reality or not would somehow sully the truthfulness of the public input.  Long range planning is the worst for this– “what do you want to see here?”  Not surprisingly, we get dreams, we get idealistic visions.  We get Santa Claus lists.

Then, when the plan comes out, those residents turn out torqued that the economically impossible answer they gave didn’t make it into the plan.  Our if we go with the Kum Ba Yah theory of plan-writing, we put the fantasy in with full realization that there’s nothing in there to help make it happen. In either case, the damage is done:

“They didn’t listen to us.” “They didn’t really want our feedback.” “Planning and public meetings are a waste of time.”

We need to do a lot of things better in public engagement, but perhaps the most important is using the process to help people apply the creativity we know they can provide within realistic economic boundaries.  And we need to do a whole lot better at economic development planning, but our most critical need may be to help people clearly understand and evaluate their community’s economic options and the potential consequences of those choices.

Most important, whichever we’re doing, we have to admit that we don’t have all the answers, and that we need to crowdsource as much wisdom as we can get.   That doesn’t mean the public has some magic set of answers, but it does mean that we need the community’s perspective and experience, just like they need our expertise.

We need both wise community engagement and wise economic decision making.  They’re part of the same mission. And we have to get them working together.

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As some of you know, I just became managing editor of an online magazine that I’ve admired for a long time, called Engaging Cities.  Engaging Cities has focused for years on the fast-evolving interface between internet technologies and public engagement or community participation.  It’s a thrilling opportunity for me to get back to my journalism roots, do more writing and play a role in the evolution of a field that I find fascinating–and critical to achieving the kind of working together that I described a minute ago.

The Wise Economy Workshop isn’t going anywhere…I’ll still be writing and sharing great thinkers with you here and on the podcast, and I’ll continue to do speaking and writing and consulting from this platform. So stay tuned!

At the beginning of their fellowship, these mid-career professionals talked with CoLab staff about their ground-breaking work in communities across the country and their observations about the challenges of doing economic development in a manner that sustains a community’s environmental health and grows economic opportunity for residents.  The interviews weren’t recorded with the intention of sharing, but the Fellows’ observations were so rich that I jumped at the opportunity to help share them.

This podcast focuses on the use of data and analytics by several of the Fellows.  We hear about the challenges of measuring avoided loss  in New York, sorting out the information you need from the information you don’t need in Portland,  impacts of _not_ being able to measure impacts in multi-country initiatives, and the importance of reality testing in Massachsetts.

Upcoming podcasts in this series will focus on breaking down professional silos, what the Fellows are doing in their communities to build sustainable economic development, and what it all means for the future of the economic development, planning, environmental, social justice and other professions.  These are a little more complicated to produce than my usual podcasts, so stay tuned.  We’ll get the next one up as soon as we can.

GEDI Podcast #2: Data

We’ll interview people who are

• improving our understanding of how to do public engagement more effectively;
• developing online and in-person tools to improve our residents’ ability to engage constructively; and (occasionally)
• people who have a bright ideas in the hopper that are close, but not quite ready, to hit the street (everyone needs some you-heard-it-here-first, right?)

You can watch and listen on a computer, smart phone, tablet  or other device — anything that can show you a YouTube video.

Our first interview, which you can watch below, is with Chris Haller, CEO of Urban Interactive Studio and developer of several online engagement platforms, including Engaging Plans, which is demonstrated here at about minute 10. Chris and Della talk about the new world of planning project web site development (hint: it’s much easier and more powerful than it used to be!), as well as the challenges of engaging our residents in the mobile era … and the importance of bringing online and mobile engagement face to face with real world spaces.

If you know of people we should talk to or issues you’d like to see addressed, let me know.  Enjoy!

“This is not the planning profession John Nolen built. A century later, our great recession has sparked a full re-evaluation of what a city’s urban planning department should be ‘doing’ for its citizens. As witnessed in Los Angeles and San Diego, the planning profession is being measured by its eternal conundrum between Forward Planning Departments that plan for future development projects and Current Planning Services that process today’s development applications….

Having been regulated to stakeholder status in a city’s Economic Development prioritization, planners must reclaim their place at the city’s Capital Improvement Planning table.”

-”The Future of Municipal Planning: Is John Nolen rolling over in his grave?” http://t.co/lCrdPWdQQq

It’s always a little disorienting to agree and disagree with an author at the same time.  This article by by Howard Blackson on Placemakers gets at many points that I’ve advocated in the past– planners needing to be proactive, responsibility for fiscal decision-making, important role of planners in guiding economic development decisions.

But…the objective is “a place at the Capital Improvement Plan table?”   No doubt, that would be helpful. But it’s not enough.

Planners do more than lay out physical improvements.  We do more than illustrate desired future developments.  And we have to.  Our communities need more, a whole lot more. The responsibility, the importance of planning, goes far beyond capital improvement plans. Today more than ever before.

–

I know this is a long, long debate in planning…Moses vs Jacobs, van de Rohe vs Davidhoff, etc etc.  We sometimes joke about it as why the profession gets no respect…no one knows what the hell a planner does, and sometimes that includes the planners themselves.

But there’s a very practical reason why we all have to reach beyond our core skill sets: doing the job that needs to be done takes a lot more tools than pens and zoning codes and AutoCADD.

If all you do is physical design, and you meant it when you said way back when that your purpose was to make places better, you’re hamstrung by the box you have allowed yourselves to be stuck in.  Even if you are in a proactive and forward-thinking community and you can do great design work, how much of your ability to enable change and improvement is constrained?  How much difference can your design work make if people can’t find jobs?  Will they be happier just because you make it look good?

If you’re only tool is a hammer, how often do you actually fix the problems that need fixing, and how often do you just bust the box instead?

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I was in Chicago for the American Planning Association conference last week.  Chicago has this incredible history of urban design and physical planning.  By the end of the week I suspect even design junkies might have had their fill of the Burnham Plan and the World Fair and Mies van de Rohe and the rest.

But Chicago is not the buildings or the parks.

I love Chicago’s architecture, but I would not move there to look at buildings, as much as I appreciate the buildings.  My husband and I, 20 years after leaving, still talk about retiring to Chicago…because of the human activity.  The things to do, the character of the place.

One of the real reasons why people go to Grant Park. www.lollapalooza.com.

Buildings and spaces set the stage for the things that make a city great or miserable, but they are just that: the stage upon which us as the actors make the play.   People often attach intensely to places that don’t have Millennium Parks and Sheds Aquariums, as delightful as those are.  Sometimes, they attach fiercely to a place despite their absence, or in the face of the lack of such loveliness.

It’s one thing to be an Artiste and dedicate your life’s work to pure aesthetics.  It’s another thing to take on the responsibility for using design skills to make our stages for human activity work better.  That’s a critical and necessary differentiation.

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I know…it’s not your job to fix everything. You can’t do it all. You don’t know it all. You don’t have all the answers.

Understood.  But… you, you might be our best hope.

I have spent most of my adult life in the intersections between professions– physical planners, landscape architects, traffic engineers, civil engineers, economic developers, community developers, Main Street managers, city admins, neighborhood rabble rousers, so on and so on.  My address book needs a sorting system that doesn’t come with the software.

This next part is for you who have some kind of degree or job with the word “planning” in it….and only you.  Everyone else go get a sandwich or something.

Ok.  Are they gone?

Here’s the deal: you guys, the Planners, whatever flavor, you understand the interconnections.  You get that, frankly, better than anyone else.   You guys have either learned or intuitively see how the human elements and the design elements and the infrastructure and the programs and the hundred other things fit together.  It’s not a perfect understanding, by any means, and you each come at it from a little different direction, but you’re closer to it than any of the other professions that deal with communities.

You’re at least talking about it…for all its warts and limitations, a conference like APA enforces that.  I can tell you that the economic development profession, for one, is deep in the throes of understanding the limits of its historic siloed approaches right now….and I think it’s going to be a long time before that profession, as a whole, comes out the other side.

I think a secret to the planner’s insight is this crazy messiness we’ve inherited… the fact that”planners” do a hundred different kinds of jobs, to the point where sometimes we have no idea what that word actually means anyways.

That always bugged the crap out of me.

But…I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s an advantage.  Or maybe a burden, but the kind of burden you have to carry to be able to do something great and meaningful and needed.  Kinda like a superpower.

“Able to see interconnections and interrelationships through walls and silos!!  It’s a design geek…no, wait, it’s a zoning director… It’s Planner Person!”

eh….maybe not. www.branded4good.com

Ok, I won’t get the t shirts made yet…

But the communities we work in need you to use your superpower–to reach across the disciplines and find the interconnections. We need to do that better.  We need to develop the tools a and analytical frameworks to do that, and right now we’re still weak on that.

But we’re probably the best chance our communities have for getting to it.

So if your main gig is design, incorporate into your design work the best understanding you can possibly muster as to how people actually use places and how they can support people better.  If you deal in land codes, strive to anticipate those unintended consequences– how one site’s development might have rolling impacts.  If you make land use plans like I used to, don’t just color maps–work through all of the interrelated elements that will either empower or hinder those recommendations.  And if you do any of those other 97 things… wade into the edges, take on the messiness, do your damnest to use the full range of your knowledge to make places work.  You won’t do it perfectly.  But try.  And keep trying.

Why? Because most of the others probably won’t get there any time soon.  And our communities won’t wait.  You, you might be our best hope.

https://soundcloud.com/wiseeconomy/dublin-ohio-bridge-street

This conversation with  Terry Foegler and Colleen Gilger focuses on the story of the changes that Terry and others saw on the regional and national horizon, and how they persuaded Dublin’s elected and appointed leadership to dedicate significant time and resources to a planning process that would lay the groundwork for a profound reconfiguring — and densifying — of the historic center of the community.  Beginning with an initial visioning process and continuing through the recent adoption of a form-based code, Dublin is trying to strike an unique and potentially trail-blazing balance between traditional suburbia and urban vitality.

As APA 2013 gets underway in Chicago, this is an interesting case study on convincing a community that doesn’t face many problems today to anticipate and get ahead of many of the trends that planners have been talking about, but communities haven’t always had the willpower to address, for a decade.

I could post a bunch of pictures, but since this is an ongoing project, and Dublin is pretty good at generating new information, here’s the latest on the Bridge Street initiative — videos and all

Enjoy!

On Saturday, April 13 at 4:00 PM, I’ll be talking about the future of web-based fiscal impact modelling with Doug Walker of Placeways, LLC and Chris Haller of Urban Interactive Studios.  We’ll be digging into two different web-based fiscal impact models, telling the truth about what worked — and what didn’t work — and thinking about what communities can do to capitalize on the explosion of analysis and communication power that these tools can bring to decision-making today.  Sound eggheaded?  Well, I hear that Chris has a guerilla app that’s launching this weekend, so you never know what will happen… especially if someone brings some bananas… what?

What’s a fiscal impact model?  You can read my explanation here, and a little information about one of the models here.  Per usual, I’ll post a podcast and annotated slides in the next week or two — after I find out what the heck these guys have to say.

On Monday, April 15, at 9:00 AM, I’ll be talking about building Small Business Ecosystems with Carolyn Dellutri of Downtown Evanston, Inc. and Taylor Stuckert of Energize Clinton County.  Taylor himself will be worth the price of admission, especially if some of his recent hard-earned luck can rub off on anyone else.  Not only is Energize Clinton County winning an APA National Planning Achievement Award for Innovation in Economic Development and Planning, and he was featured in Fast Company Magazine’s recent article on “ 7 People Under 30 Who Are Changing Our World,”   BUT…. he just successfully defended his thesis for his Master of Community Planning.  Like last week.  How freaking cool is that?

Does that Energize Clinton County thing sound familiar?  Well, it should…especially if you read or listen here very often.  Here’s a link to an awesome podcast that I did with Taylor and Chris Schock, his partner in crime at the county…awesome because of them and their story.  I mostly just held the recorder.  And Evanston?  In addition to having a completely kick butt downtown that Carolyn shepherds, it’s the home of my alma mater, where I’m proud to say they do it the right way.  If only the wedding ecosystem that Carolyn will describe existed back in the dark ages when we got out of school….  I’ll get audio and annotated slides posted for that one as well.

So, I’m gearing up for a busy, exhausting, exciting and energizing week of hanging out with the best and the brightest — these guys, and you.   If you’re going to be at  APA, send me a note at della.rucker@wiseeconomy.com or on Twitter at @dellarucker.  I’m hoping to catch up with a lot of you and hear your stories about how you’re making great things happen where you live and work.  And I might have a notebook or a recorder in my pocket.

I’m even toying with an impromptu tour of NU’s campus or a night at the Kingston Mines.  You never know….

Though the meeting was ostensibly held to discuss a proposed $21,000 project to replace the high school’s grass football field with synthetic turf, City Councilman Thomas Reed inadvertently opened the floodgates to a deluge of ill-informed, off-topic diatribes on inconsequential bullshit when he allowed those in attendance to demonstrate their God-given gift of language.

–”Town Hall Meeting Gives Townspeople Chance To Say Stupid Things In Public.”  The Onion (everyone knows that this is a satire/fake news web site, right?  

Right??  

Just checking.)

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This fall, my son starts a new high school.  After a lot of deliberation, my husband and I decided to acquiesce to the kid’s wish to attend an academically rigorous Catholic high school.  For a former public school teacher and career public education kid, this was a hard decision.  Our kids have gone to public school since kindergarten.  But in the end, we concluded that this was the right choice for this bright, serious, disciplined kid.  We decided that he needed an environment that would build on those assets.  And he wanted the challenge.  Hard to argue with that.

The kid was accepted in January.  By the time he starts school in August, he will have had one Saturday morning with the music program, a one on one with an assistant principal, two weeks of band camp and a two day freshman orientation.

He had the meeting with the assistant principal last Saturday.  It was not what I expected.  There’s my 14 year old, sitting across a conference table from a massive, intimidating-looking man–300 pounds of tie-you-in-a-pretzel-if-you-mess-up.  Generally a good trait in an assistant principal, thinks the former substitute teacher turned mom.

Find yourself a 14 year old boy and try those questions on him.  Or try them on yourself.

James stumbles through them, and Mr. Intimidating takes notes.

Then the assistant principal asks James to open the binder.  Sitting to the side, I steel myself for a marginally painful review of rules and requirements and consequences.  Instead, Mr. Intimidating spends the next 20 minutes conversing with James about the core principals of the school’s educational philosophy.

Critical thinking.  Self-awareness. Compassion towards others.  Integrity.

Deep stuff. Foundational stuff. Not a single rule or regulation.

As I listened, it dawned on me that this wasn’t a one-off thing.  It was just more obvious because of the setting.  When my son did the music department event a couple of weeks ago, the entire group of kids ended by singing the alma mater.  The incoming freshmen put arms around each others’ shoulders, exactly the way the upperclassmen do, while they tried to read the words off a piece of paper.

Find yourself a 14 year old boy and try to get them to put their arm around the shoulder of another boy.  Good luck.

And yet I watched my kid do exactly that.

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Think for a moment about how we complain about the public’s involvement in our planning and economic development and local government–in person and online.  I opened this piece with a purposely over-the-top piece of satire, but…come on.   Hits a little close to home, don’t it?

We gripe that they don’t behave themselves, that they say nasty or off topic things, that they pound soapboxes…or worse yet, that they just don’t show up.

No wonder our meetings are so miserable.  It’s all their fault.

Now think for a minute about how much effort we’ve put into establishing our community’s culture of public engagement.  What have we — and our predecessors– done to convey, to demonstrate, what effective public engagement looks like?  What have we done to set the tone, to establish the environment we want?

Do we even know what the public engagement we want looks like? Or would we sound like a 14 year old trying to answer a question about how his best friend would describe him?

What public engagement culture do we have?
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If all St. Xavier High School did was a 20 minute discussion of principles, I would never expect it to take.  A 14 year old would forget that stuff before he got out the door.  But when every aspect of the culture reinforces those principles– alma mater sung with arms around each other, freshman applauded by upperclassmen when they enter the assembly on their first day of school, senior mentors in freshman homerooms, band camp that welcomes new students instead of hazing them–then those principles come to mean something.  That’s how a culture–especially a culture that is radically different from what newcomers might expect– sticks.

The most successful companies all know that. Edward Deming, the father of modern manufacturing, gets quoted in business schools every day:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast and process for lunch.

Show me a Fortune 100 business, and I will show you how that company has built its culture through and into everything it does.

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Last year I wrote a blow-by-blow account of how I managed a potentially contentious public meeting.  That post has now been read by 3,500 people.  Obviously that essay addressed something that a lot of people needed or wanted.

But keeping a meeting from blowing up….that’s simply classroom management.  That’s the very basics.  It’s not creating a constructive environment.  it’s not enabling a constructive culture.  It’s not in itself moving us forward at all.

We have to change the culture of community participation, and we have to do it top to bottom.  Organizations that take on culture change know that they have to do it intentionally…they have to build it into every interaction, every communication.  They need to consciously reinforce the principles of the culture they want–not just by saying what the principles are, but living them through every interaction.

What are your community’s public interactions telling people about how you want to relate?  What does the room setup say?  The rules…or lack of rules? The options and opportunities for involvement?

Is meaningful public engagement built into your processes, beginning to end?  How do you involve people upstream– in setting policy and deciding priorities? Do people have real opportunities to be part of the solution, or do your just invite them in when there is a fait accompli to argue against?

Do you give them the ability to do something other than say no, no, no?  Do you channel them into being part of the solution?

If you don’t, don’t despair. Culture change is a long and difficult process.  That’s why my son’s new school starts on this work long before they get their books, and why they build it all the way through the experience.  The more I think about it, I suspect it’s not luck….it’s got to be intentional.

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Like more most analogies, this one breaks down. A 14 year old, to at least some extent, goes where you tell them to go and does what you tell them to do.  Especially if you are a 300+ pound assistant principal.  But your residents will participate only if they perceive that the value of doing so will exceed the c cost of their time and energy.  Which makes a culture of meaningful public engagement all the more important.

So you might as well get started.  Ask yourself: what would meaningful public involvement look like here? What do we need to learn from our residents? What do we want our public meetings to look, to feel like? What character, what principles do we want?  How can we build that into everything we do?

It won’t happen overnight. But goofy 14 year old boys don’t turn into men overnight, either.  So go ahead and get started.

I’m posting this here because that conversation seems like a microcosm of the ongoing debate.

And if you’re going at it as a yes-no-yes-no, on-off switch kind of choice, stop it.  You’re not doing anyone any good.  including yourself.

Instead, we have to start asking:

What are we trying to do?  What are the tools we have available?  What does our data tell us about how they’re working or not working?  How do we get better information on that?

And if it doesn’t seem to be working, how can we adjust our tools or add to the toolbox to give us a chance of doing what we’re supposed to do?

That’s the right conversation.  That’s the conversation that addresses the sober responsibilities that we have to our communities.  Time to grow up a bit.

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Thank you again for leading the charge into this critical element of debate.  We need this debate.  We need it.  And we need much more invested in the debate than we’re-just-fine-don’t-rock-the-boat.

Every business and every profession has to grow and change — we of all people should know that, given the amount of time we spend with people who live in the business world.  And given the intersection where economic development lives — of government pressures and blinding business change — we absolutely have to take a cold-eyed, critical look at what we do, how we do it, how that needs to change and how that can be done better.

Part of the problem that surfaces here and in the previous debates on this group about incentives and the like is that we are looking through an insect’s compound eyes: we as a group represent a thousand differing perspectives, and we are being pushed harder than ever to make a coherent whole out of the picture — by voices outside and inside the profession.  And it’s a lot easier for any of us to just insist that the view through our little lens is the right one.

But we are reaching a point, whether it’s due to techology changes or government pressures or the information that the general public can grab and use and share without our spin control, where we can’t pretend not to hear those voices anymore. The profession has to turn a critical eye on itself, clearly understand its strengths and limitations, and change,

It’s not a binary choice — it’s not “Everything is fine!!!!” or “Everything stinks!!!”

Critique is a part of growing up, and in times of pressure you have to grow up faster than at other times.  We all have some growing up to do – in this and in all the other professions that are on the hairy edge of our understanding of how communities and economies work.  But we can’t rest on some claimed laurels today, more than ever.

So, new questions:

What do we have to do to make the real estate component part of economic development more valuable, more meaningful to communities?  What else do we need to be accounting for if we intend to have a positive impact?  Are our current methods creating unintended negative impacts — impacts that have hidden consequences for communities?