An Open Editorial to Your Town

In his book, "The Rise of the Creative Class - and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life," Richard Florida concludes that ..."creativity has emerged as the single most important source of economic growth, [and] the best route to continued prosperity is by investing in our stock of creativity in all its forms, across the board." He lists the arts, music, culture, design and related fields as a means of attracting and keeping the talented, creative members of society that are the catalyst for today’s economy. Just as importantly, he lists the character of the physical community; its sidewalks, parks, natural resources, infrastructure, bridges, train stations, courthouses, shops and other buildings. All those tangible things that make a place authentic also attract the kind of people that attract and build wealth.

I think Mr. Florida has the same obsession with old towns and their main streets that I have. For me, it is the buildings that represent a moment of tremendous craft and pride. But it was also a moment when America received abundant, cheap, and skilled laborers who found an opportunity here in all the places that were reveling in the industrial expansion of our cities and towns. I have always been attracted to the physical characteristics that made the 'place' interesting. The towns that had the most interesting landscape, or the most ornate architecture would captivate me. We don't seem to do it that way anymore.

I have left my hometown three different times in my lifetime. Each one was for good. But, I kept looking back, and eventually I found my way there again, and again. Each time, I was reminded why I left. First it was the street trees. Mostly maples and london planetrees, they were cut in order to preserve the sidewalks. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the sidewalks had already been heaved - maples are notorious for this. Now, my hometown has broken sidewalks, and no trees. Walking is tanning.

The second time I was reminded by the fact that none of my friends were still around. They moved all over the country for different jobs and different lives. Living in a rural area is not for everyone, and high paying jobs are scarce. Their priorities were elsewhere as mine have been. I have wondered once or twice what it would be like if we all moved back home, with our skill sets rightfully compensated, in a weird kind of after prom life and soap opera community. Well, I guess I've already imagined how that would turn out.

The fact is, there is nothing left there for me and my generation. The population is aging and people are moving away. That has been the trend in rural Pennsylvania for decades. It is only getting more profound, and Mr. Florida is right - other places are really good at mixing the ingredients that attract my generation. I have lived in some of those places and they are really fun. Baltimore is still my favorite, and Camden Yards is but one attraction to a city that I look at as a second home, one that is really authentic.

Most towns in Pennsylvania are losing their authenticity. Maybe that is one of the reasons why my generation has looked elsewhere. It isn't always about the job. Most people have strong enough family bonds to stay in some kind of proximity to their home town. But if the authenticity of a place is replaced with something less than unique, it might not be interesting enough to stay. It follows that the wealth builders will leave to find an authentic place that provides the amenities that they seek, beyond a high paying job. Sometimes the amenities are as simple as a coffee store, a bagel shop, or a bookstore, where people gather, can meet and linger and attract other people. Other times, it is history. Historic architecture and historic street patterns add to the charm and interest that many people seek.

Just as I always have, many people search for just the right character in a house or neighborhood or city block. If they bring an idea or business with them, they can dramatically add to the local economy by providing jobs for others. But the "place" needs to be right. When the place is compromised, the innate charm of a community diminishes, and so the community may not attract the talented person with ideas and jobs to give.

Every old building that is torn down and replaced by a generic office space or parking lot is another strike against a town’s economic future. One building at a time, a city can chip away at its charming foundation to become a city that is not special, and therefore not attractive to the kind of investment that will support and create new and interesting architecture. Any town can let a big-box retailer come in, rip apart a hillside, build a berm for temporary swamps, pave over acres of field and forest, and then send all of your local money to a main distribution area somewhere in the southern U.S. But it takes a special place to resist such easy tax money, to build on its past, renovate downtown buildings, and provide specialty retailers with a rich and diverse place to sell their wares.

These towns attract interesting and clever people. These people react by reinvesting in their community and the community grows and prospers. Too many times, the leaders of a community take the easy way out. Instead of combing the region’s business leaders for investment in their own community, a town opts to push a building over, erasing one legacy of triumph and authenticity for a new legacy of mediocrity.

The local business that does reinvest in a community should be commended and made as an example for smart growth and preserving a town’s economic future. The responsibility of a community lies within every member of the community. But, the leaders must lead, sometimes by painful example, other times by quiet philanthropy. Your town is special - for now. Keeping it special is up to each of you.


Retaining talented young people should be the most important goal of your town. Think of how many intelligent, talented young people you helped to raise that no longer live in your town. They are giving freely, their talents, to someone else’s home town. They went to school, found a job in a creative center, and are now enjoying the benefits that a different "place" is giving them. The place they live is interesting and lively and provides them with many options to entertain and employ. That place has found the key ingredients to attract and keep new residents. The specific ingredients can be found and implemented anywhere, in any town, whether or not jobs currently exist. When investment is made in placing the ingredients, creative people and then jobs will follow.

Almost every town has physical, historic, and natural assets to provide initial interest. When these are identified and enhanced, they will attract attention. At one time or another almost everyone looks back to their hometown for new opportunities and a chance to succeed. If the right ingredients are there, they might be willing to "come home" and bring their, now worldly skills and experience with them. But if they come home to find that extremely rich and elegant four story brick building on the corner that they loved as a kid, in a heaping pile of bricks pushed into the middle of a desolate city block replaced by a plywood sign hanging on two posts with a colorful piece of vinyl stretched over it advertising the bank, the builder and the new Rite Aid, they might think twice. After all, they already have a Rite Aid, and it looks just like the one they’re building in that spot where they used to buy their Keds and get a fountain soda.

These talented young people have the ability to enrich your town in ways that no one can imagine. It is as important to bring talent back as it is to retain talent in the first place. When people go away, they see the manifestations of other creative genius. They may be inspired to greater genius, or they may just provide the vehicle to transport a good idea back home. Regardless, they, and your town, are better off if they return home and stay. They provide new ideas and change that is required for a town to grow and prosper.

Those service jobs that the big-boxes provide don’t add to the creative faculties of your citizens or the economic future of your town. They might as well be a signal for your imminent decline and the death of your downtown. Nourish your old town, provide the ingredients to attract and retain your young people, plead with your business leaders to invest in young talent and old buildings, and watch your town have an awakening.

Confessions of an Addict

We all have secrets, little things we keep private, moments in our lives that we hope the world will never see. Somehow though, these things eventually find their way into public view, where the exposure is amplified and put on trial. Often, that new knowledge becomes a media frenzy. Other times, it is less public, but more hurtful, and comes in the form of a patronizing and judgmental glances from whispering circles of the innocent.

Sometimes, the secret boils inside us with a vengeance that cries to be heard, like a Poe conscience, under the floor, knocking on the grain of our guilty souls. Well, my soul is knocking, and I wish to confess.

Several years ago, I became an addict. For years I walked the straight and narrow. I was the one casting the penetrating glances on the afflicted. Maybe that was why I fell. I was feeling really good about myself and thinking, somehow, that I was better than all the rest. Now, I know I am just a brother in life, trying to figure out this complicated and wonderful place called earth. I am more able to see others when they are in their moment of weakness, and lend a hand, because I’ve been there.

Every now and then, I feel the tingle of my own weakness. Lately, it has been stronger. For that reason, I am exposing my addiction, to increase my accountability and let the public know my weakness. I wrote the following letter to a friend after my only rehabilitation. Every day, I fight the demons that lead me down the road to that horrible addiction. Every day, I fight to stay clean. This letter was the first of many, and tells the story the best.


March 6, 2001


Dear Micah:

I know this might come as a surprise to you, but I’ve already been a member of CAW (Citizens Against Walmart). However, the inherent dangers of being "too close to the enemy" have finally caught up with me. Let me tell you how it happened. One fateful Sunday morning, while protesting outside a Wal-Mart in Kalamazoo, I felt the need to get a cup of coffee. The night before, me and a fellow CAW member, while caught up in the passion of our cause, found ourselves entangled as lovers; we fell madly in bed with each other. Before we knew it, we found ourselves looking at 6:00 AM, already late for our consumer clash scheduled for the morning. Although it was a night I won’t soon forget, it left us both weakened and exhausted; I was unable to think clearly - I wondered if I could put a fight up for the day. But, I pulled myself together and somehow made myself believe that I could still be an effective member of the protest team. I asked two team members to prop me up in between a stack of plastic kiddie pools and a lot of Igloo coolers. The coolers, I noticed, were at the unbelievably low price of $19.99 and each one included a beverage jug and a four-place setting. I knew we were in for a long day. The enemy was already pulling all the stops. I remember thinking to myself just before I began to doze, "Don’t they understand, ‘buy it quality, buy it once’. This plastic throw-away world called Wal-Mart doesn’t really save you money!! The Edison light bulb still works!" Fighting off the sleep, clearly not in a useful frame of mind, I thought of my alternatives. Give up? Certainly not - this was a fight for which I would die. Stimulants? Maybe. But before long, I began to doze. Every now and then, I would wake up, reminded of my night of passion from extremely cramped toes. But still, I fought to stay awake. It was then that it happened. In my crippled state of mind, I thought to myself, "What would it hurt if I just went inside and bought a cup of coffee at McDonald’s?" Even though we learned at CAW prep school that the conglomeration of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s was one of the consumer industries most effective strategies ever put into effect, I thought that I was strong enough to handle just getting a cup of coffee. But, what I never learned in prep school was how they placed the McDonald’s at the far end of a long row of falling prices. Little did I know, the onslaught had begun. From the moment I walked into the building, I was bombarded from every direction, Salad Shooters for $10.54, Jumbo Ladies Panties - 4 to a pack for $8.77, a folding cardboard model of Heidi Klum (when did she join this corporate monster?) For $34.89. It had motorized accessories. I started thinking our little brigade couldn’t beat this evil super power. This enemy was relentless. Still, they fired all their weapons. A giant pink panda bear filled with confectionary hearts and HoHo's, only $23.76, my mind began to waver, a set of 28 different philips-head screwdrivers, only $5.33. It never even occurred to me that no one needs that many philips-head screwdrivers. And then it came. The fatal blow. I was dizzy from the falling prices when I saw, out of the corner of my baby-blue-light-special-eyes, a collector’s set from the movie Titanic, with never-before-seen pictures of Leo getting dressed in his Titanic one-piece swimming suit; and interviews with Kate, "Did she have a secret crush on her sexy, boyish co-star?" I had to know. It included six audio cassettes ("What was on those tapes"), the making of video, and a pop-up scrapbook. Micah, it only cost $49.56. I never knew. I had to have it. I forgot about the coffee. I felt like I was alive for the first time in my life. I saw the whole world with new eyes from the inside of this big box. Like the undercover drug enforcement agent who becomes addicted to the drug he meant to take off the street, I was addicted to falling prices. From that day on, I spent all my money at Wal-Mart. When my money was gone, I hit my mother over the head with a 12-pack of Bounty (only $6.25) and I stole money from her vacation fund. It wasn’t until I found myself collecting week-old falling prices signs in the dumpsters behind Wal-Mart that I finally hit rock bottom (not to be confused with rock bottom prices). It was then, with the help of several compassionate friends, that I finally sought help. I learned that I wasn’t alone. There are thousands of people around the world who are addicted to falling prices. It doesn’t matter that most of them are retired and live in Florida, we all have the same addiction. I admitted myself into the Hillary Rodham Center for Falling Prices Addiction in Little Rock, Arkansas, and began a 10 step program to recovery with my fellow octogenarians. That is one reason I’m writing to you. I have reached my final step to recovery. Micah, My name is Greg Olsen. I am addicted to Falling Prices. I am so sorry that I did not emphasize enough, the dangers of shopping at Wal-Mart, their stealth attack of falling prices, and their big box retail outlets. I apologize to you and I will apologize to everyone I’ve ever known for the failure that I've been. Please Micah, never shop at Wal-Mart. If you recognize this story as your own, or one similar to it, please seek help. Wal-Mart sneaks up on the strongest of us. And remember, they contribute to the decline of small town America. I love you man. No man is strong enough. The truth is out there.
Your friend in recovery:
Greg


I am obsessed with rejuvenating small towns. I need help.

$200 Billion and a Wet Pillow

Earlier this year I was interviewed for an article that was published in the Journal of Healthcare Contracting (March/April 2007). The writers asked the question, “What is supporting the explosion of healthcare construction?” The simple answer is that most facilities are outdated. They have outlived their useful lives and they need to be replaced. According to the article, $200 billion will be spent in the next 15 years on healthcare construction.

$200 billion. Yikes. I get bored counting to 20.

The crazy thing is that it will happen. Buildings will be built, money will be spent, developers will get rich, and health care and elder housing will still suck. But that’s another blog.

Actually, health care and elder housing is getting better (ie. The Green House model of assisted living and Planetree hospitals – see Nick Jacobs at WindberCare), but we only have 30 years to really get it right and provide great service and care to the coming wave of elderly boomers. We need to get it right, now. The Green House is a good step forward, but to its detriment, it is still a campus (suburban) model. In the article above, I was interviewed to talk about Evidence-Based Design which is looking to architecture to create living and healing environments that are pleasing and stress-reducing, which has been found to promote healing and general well-being. If you read my first blog, then you know that I think the answer is right in our core communities. A Green House that as a rule, is placed in town at the center of our existing neighborhoods would be a mammoth step forward. Add a little mixed-use to that and then you really have something. Our health care model, PatinaCare, relies on our towns to enhance that healing environment. I think that permitting the elderly to remain members of their home town is a good way to promote well-being and health.

But still, that money. My mouth is getting wet.

As the saying goes, the baby boomers are the ‘pig in the python.’ That is, when you are looking at a population graph, there is a bulge where the boomers are located in time. This implies a beginning, and an end. We have just reached the time when the python is starting to bulge – the boomers are retiring, starting now. In 30 years, the elderly population will reach its crest. After that, the bulge begins to disappear. The elderly population ‘problem’ will start diminishing.

So, how do we spend $200 billion? Well, one option is to build brand new facilities in the same manner that we are now. That is, we build single-use facilities in a campus-like environment on an old farm field. This is Door Number One. We'll spend all that money to address a problem that will be over, beginning in 30 years. Similarly, we'll build independent cottages, the new best option for still active elders. According to the National Association of Home Builders, 40% of new housing is being built by baby boomers as either second homes or investment properties. The housing market is banking on the boomers, especially since some markets have begun to simmer. We are building a lot of extra houses.

What will happen when the baby boomer generation passes? I have not found the data for this yet, but my instinct suggests that each of us who follow the boomer crowd will own two, three or four homes because of overbuilding for the baby boomer population. That means that we will be abandoning many more homes, and property value may plummet across the board. Our towns will suffer. New developments will suffer, later. And we will have used a lot of new resources.

There is another door.

I have the key to Door Number Two. This door hides something a little more creative, and it gives all that money double or triple duty. If, oh imagine if, we made it a priority to place all new health care facilities and elder housing directly in our core communities. We could utilize the old buildings, the lost craftsmanship, the rich and decorative architecture that represents each town’s success and heritage. We could boost the prosperity of businesses in town. We could enliven small neighborhoods and city streets. We could make more efficient the services of home care providers and volunteer groups. We could keep our elders right in town and let them age gracefully among family, friends, and children. Today, few if any facilities permit all of this to happen.

Now I'm dreaming, and since I'm asleep and my mouth is still wet, drooling. Yes, dreaming and drooling.

According to a study completed by the Brookings Institute for the state of Pennsylvania, it was determined that developers spend a disproportionate amount of money on new suburban-type development while ignoring existing towns. This is an important point when the population of the state is taken into consideration. Many existing towns in PA have seen an economic and a population decline. When that occurs and new development takes place on the outskirts of town, the core communities suffer even further. Business and housing is being built while existing business and housing is abandoned.

In PA, where the population is aging at a rate higher than every state but Florida, the same thing is happening with health care and housing for the elderly population. Small towns are being emptied as the members of those towns age. Because the young are leaving most regions in search of high paying jobs, there is no population replacement. However, new elder care facilities are typically placed on new developments out of town. These facilities try to duplicate the amenities found in traditional towns. It is an expensive replication that has never succeeded to function the way our existing towns function. And, it takes the elderly out of their community and their comfort zone.

Imagine, $200 billion reinvested in our core communities. If we were to place new healthcare facilities in our small towns, and surround these facilities with a new housing option that ultimately supports the new facility (in the same way that graduated care currently works), we could revitalize our existing towns in a way that reduces our sprawling tendencies. Vacant lots and empty buildings could be filled and energized. Our once active communities could buzz again, this time with a new resource, and a new economic engine – health care and elderly housing. We could save some of our farm fields, just as central food supplies become more suspect and fuel prices are rising. The $200 billion would go even further because we could utilize amenities already found in town. $200 billion acting like $300 billion! Someone get me a towel!

Our growing elderly population is not a problem. Our dying towns are not a problem. They are potential resources, each relying and using the other for the benefit of all of us and our diminishing resources. So, we have a choice. We can continue to build in the same manner. Or, we can reinvest in our core communities, and create a more holistic way of life for our elders.

We have $200 billion to spend. How will we spend it?

Looking Back to Move Forward: Our Towns

There is a solution to many of our modern problems. Reinventing small towns for our growing elderly population is a solution that deals with many social, welfare, economic, health, housing, political and design issues that inter-relate with each other on practical and logical levels. Finding ways to form partnerships with not-so disparate groups, as well as finding common themes within the most important issues of our day is essential to the development of a successful reinvention that has few, if any precedents.

The problems that may be solved by in-filling elderly housing in existing small towns are gaining significance with the displacement of thousands of people due to recent natural catastrophes, and the looming oil crisis that will force us to rethink the way we displace ourselves from centers of commerce. We have in our small towns, a reserve of resources enmeshed in the fabric of the town itself. The embodied energy contained in the infrastructure, housing and building stock, parks and public amenities is valuable and extremely expensive and inefficient to build from scratch. This could be a large-scale example of adaptive re-use, a model of conservation, an efficient use of man-made resources, and an economic renaissance of small towns in decline whose inertia has shifted out of town. It would also be an example of design for resilience in community and a natural, unforced dispersion of the wealth of the elderly, ideas expressed by environmentalist David Orr.

On a non-physical level, the embodied energy of community assets such as social connections, political, civic and religious institutions, volunteer groups and welfare agencies exist and can be augmented. Multigenerational communities that sustain children, families and the elderly can be found in our existing core communities that have seen population decline, and are just waiting to be in-filled with new homes and people. This plan can restore and revitalize communities that have once seen vibrancy and life that we still recall as the quintessential small town.

In a way, the genius loci of our existing towns is the community that we are missing in new developments today. We can awake a sleeping giant in each of our existing towns by changing development policy to place elder care services and housing, and include urban growth boundaries around each town, hamlet, borough or city, and focus redevelopment close to historically important centers of commerce which includes every small town in decline in America today, that have proven, historically, to be locally self-sufficient. This can, and will, occur again. It has to. Our current practices are not sustainable, and are inefficient.

We should look at each town as an opportunity to review regional planning policy and even national planning policy to stop current practices of elderly housing and care, and refocus on our existing assets; that is our towns, civic institutions, natural buffer borders and productive green space. As our population grows, density increases, and energy supplies get redirected to China and India, it will be imperative to look at our patterns of living as it was before cheap energy, and begin to live in a smaller, but more connected, radii, focusing on local food chain supply. As David Orr suggests, the Amish make their lives less complicated by limiting their ability to travel to eight miles in a day, or the distance a horse can travel. Our historic towns once accomplished the same function, relying on the surrounding eight miles of resources, that provided sustenance for the local population.

The existence of each town is proof of historic self-sufficiency. At one time, a local resource was in demand, and a town prospered around that resource. But in many cases, that resource, or economic inertia, has changed or disappeared, and many towns have suffered. Today, an aging population could be the next great American resource. This is a talented, successful population that should not be discarded to elderly 'warehouses.'

As each town has lost its economic viability to more centralized commercial activity, we need to find a new use that will provide a new viability. The elderly are a logical source for a new kind of retirement asset. It is illogical to move the elderly from their community to a suburban retirement establishment with no spirit of place. A town with no economic base can be revitalized using the accumulated assets of an elderly population. As a population, the elderly have already earned their incomes, and most can live on what they have earned. But because people are living longer and the cost of health care is rising at 4 and 5 times the rate of inflation, even those with accumulated assets will find it difficult to pay for their own care.

Small towns and creative collaborations with non-profit home care providers can make care more efficient, and therefore, more affordable. Those who cannot live by their own means can be provided with affordable infill housing, subsidized in the same or better ways, as low-income elderly housing projects currently being built. These will be mixed within the redevelopment of our historic towns. No new jobs are needed because the population is already retired. However, with a new population, new service requirements will be demanded that can provide a multitude of service based businesses that are needed to provide and care for a population that will need service for a longer period of time.

In addition, local construction outfits that normally have only a small base of customers, can now count on a building boom. All at once, money will be spent in, and stay within the local community. In this way, the elderly become a new resource for a dying town. They reinvigorate community by giving their skills and assets, and nurture a multigenerational population that can help to ease some of modern society’s greatest ills, such as the lack of intergenerational contact and supervision, and children who rely on inefficient transportation to become socially and physically active.

For-profit and non-profit partnerships must be created that will produce the incentives necessary for this logical redevelopment to occur. Municipalities need to be an initiator in the process by permitting the re-zoning of existing towns to accommodate this rebirth. They can also initiate by assembling land, offering tax incentives, tax increment financing and finding tax rebates. Buy-downs of assembled land will make it easier for large-scale redevelopment to occur and attractive incentives should be provided to local hospitals and health-care providers so that longer term care will be provided once the development of independent housing units has occurred.

It needs to happen now. We have a 30 year window to deal with the baby boomer population explosion. After that, the current system of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Sucurity will be in a better balance. New methods of financing the entire package of health care in reinvented small towns should be created that combines elderly housing with elderly health care, two currently separated issues that are completely connected. A reallocation of Medicare and Medicaid funding should be developed, with an emphasis on using small towns and neighborhoods as new retirement communities.

Regionally, this redevelopment could lead to a reintroduction of mass and rail transit. By increasing the density of existing towns and placing growth boundaries around these towns, we will inevitably create a more European development pattern that is more conducive to centralized bus and rail spurs. Strip malls, essentially just a one-sided town, can become complete towns filled with the elderly. We could create the situation for more efficient travel by placing our elderly in our existing small towns.

We are facing a societal collapse if we don’t refocus on our existing assets, and produce more efficient living conditions that are economically and socially sustainable. Instead, we continue to build from scratch and rebuild where nature tells us not to rebuild. As Spock would say, "This is highly Illogical." Local banks need to reinvest into this new kind of retirement community and state and federal subsidies should secure this local interest by providing tax payer money to rebuilding existing communities first. Any idea that reduces the mining of new resources, reuses existing town fabric, and recycles existing community and building stock should be given precedence, as a matter of local, state and federal policy.

Money should be redirected where it will provide the most logical social initiative, affecting the greatest number of people, solving the largest number of problems with the smallest input of natural and government resources. Killing two birds with one stone is no longer enough. We need to kill entire flocks with the diminishing resources that we have. In a plan that revitalizes a town, solves a housing and social crisis and makes sense environmentally, funding should be provided as a social necessity. Policy needs to reflect such initiative. Placing our new elderly housing and retirement communities in our existing small towns is a logical place to start.