I hope New Orleans('s urban Main Street program) can learn from DC

The air conditioning was on too high during the plenary session yesterday at the opening of the National Main Street conference in New Orleans yesterday. But that's not why I shivered when Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu of Louisiana announced to great applause that the State of Louisiana is launching a new Main Street program for the City of New Orleans.

Earlier in the presentation by director of the National Main Street Center, among the tallies he listed were 39 state programs, 4 urban programs, and 1 county program. Hmm I thought, there used to be 5 urban programs. Turns out, Detroit dropped out. And Milwaukee signed on. (That's interesting and shows the difficulty, how much time is required, to introduce and "burrow" this program in.)

I am a fervent proponent of the Main Street Approach. The integrated methodology based on historic preservation, a focus on the market, and the way it leverages civic capacity and volunteer engagement makes sense in a world that is still refusing, in large part, to reject the big "project planning" focus (of which urban renewal was a part) first criticized by Jane Jacobs in 1958 in her article for Fortune magazine, "Downtown is for people."

I think the Main Street model is infinitely adaptable and appropriate for application in other settings such as neighborhood revitalization beyond the commercial district (such as Pennsylvania's "Elm Street" revitalization program or the National Trust's Preservation Development Initiative), and can be used as a way to manage cultural institutions, ranging from public markets to museums.

I don't think we've been as successful as we'd like in implementing the Main Streets model in the urban milieu of Washington, DC. Of the 12 programs designated in the first two years, two have disbanded, including the one new program that everyone expected to be wildly successful--14th and U. Many of the other programs are experiencing a wide range of difficulties, although two programs are thriving--Barracks Row and Shaw.

One of the galling things about the attitude toward the DC Main Streets programs is that most of the neighborhoods have experienced disinvestment for 40 or more years--recognize that the improving real estate economy in the city "trickled down" to the more marginal commercial districts only in 2003, sometimes requiring tremendous catalytic investments (such as the construction of the Whole Foods Market on the 1400 block of P Street in 2001).

After getting a drib of money, without much money for programs or anything else, and requiring a great deal of organizational, human, and social capacity, Main Street programs have been expected to turn around their commercial districts in about two years--after the failure of scads of many other revitalization progams that the City government had introduced over the past three decades.

Last year I testified about continuing funding for the DC Main Streets program, which the Williams Administration had forgotten to fund (although monies were identified and provided later). At the hearing I provided an analysis of the program, and identified success factors, making the point that we ought to try to replicate those conditions for the other programs.

That testimony is in this blog entry, "Yesterday's testimony on the DC Main Streets program,"and it covers a variety of issues, ranging from the need to coordinate land use regulations in Main Street districts to the fact that most of the funds provided by DC government for retail attraction still go to large projects and national chains.

As far as the success factors go, this is what I wrote:

Everyone talks about the great success of the Barracks Row Main Street program and I agree, it's great. But I think it's important to figure out why this is. In my analysis, I would argue that it is based on eight interconnected factors:

• High-quality community leadership, including residents and stakeholders at all levels; who are
• Committed to working together, despite the existence of pre-existing, possibly competitive organizations; and are
• Committed to implementing and following the Main Street Approach;
• Securing of additional financial support to supplement and extend the impact of monies awarded by the DC Government;
• Enlightened property owners;
• Business proprietors that know what they are doing;
• DDOT investment in and upgrading of the streetscape (a significant infrastructure investment greater than $8 million); and
• the fortuitous implementation of the Capitol Hill BID to provide daily cleaning and maintenance on the newly constructed sidewalks and streets of Barracks Row.

After 14 more months, I don't think I'd modify that statement very much except for the third point, which I would amplify slightly:

• Committed to implementing and following the Main Street Approach, recognizing the primacy of the asset- and authenticity-based approach, centered upon historic preservation.

The success factors for Shaw Main Streets are a little different, but not significantly so. Instead of DDOT investment that area has other investments including the Convention Center and new housing construction, plus a location in the central Northwest quadrant and much greater population density, and better proximity to Central Business District--note that these are the same benefits shared by the now disbanded 14th and U Main Street program.

But these are the kickers:

• High-quality community leadership, including residents and stakeholders at all levels; who are
• Committed to working together, despite the existence of pre-existing, possibly competitive organizations; and are
• Committed to implementing and following the Main Street Approach;

I am willing to bet good money that every other DC Main Street program not doing as well as Shaw or Barracks Row fails on these three factors.

In retrospect, hindsight being a great thing, I wish that when they announced, officially, the Main Street program in November 2001, that they would have gone about the implementation much differently.

The Barracks Row program was pre-existing, created by key stakeholders in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, including George Didden, Chairman of the National Capital Bank.

I think that the first year, the city should only have funded Barracks Row, and it should have served as a demonstration program for the rest of the city.

At the same time, the DC Main Streets program should have done-offered training, training, training and capacity building capacity building capacity building for all the commercial districts interested in achieving designation and participation in the DC Main Streets program.

I think most of the programs, not all, were only out for the money. I don't mean that they were terribly or too avaricious, but most were not committed to the Main Street Approach. A year of capacity building and training would have separated the "wheat from the chaff" in terms of identifying groups truly committed to implementing the Main Street Approach, built on a foundation of community-led involvement.

(For what I see as the failures of the H Street Main Street program to do this, you can always read this blog entry, based on some stuff I wrote in August 2004, About H Street Main Street -- My Opinion," from the March 2005 archive.)

People thought it was the money that mattered. I believe that it is the methodology, the Main Street Approach that matters, although with the conditions--such as forward-thinking community leadership and a commitment to building a true community vision, and a willingness to share power and to grapple with tough issues, such as changing demographics and the need to improve current businesses, and attract new ones.

Community leadership for many of the local programs has failed in DC.

New Orleans has similar issues, but even more wrenching. Regardless of the success of tourism pre-Katrina, many of the neighborhoods are seriously impoverished--distressed. Building the economy of distressed neighborhoods requires a different approach where rebuilding the commercial district is only one piece of a more comprehensive approach. The impact of Katrina made this much much worse. (I haven't gone on a tour of Katrina-related destruction yet, but people who have are shocked, saying it will take 20 or more years for some of these places to recover, plus the environmental issues, etc.)

For those neighborhoods, a broader approach to revitalization is required, more along the lines laid out in Mihalio Temali's Community Economic Development Handbook, which identifies four points that comprise the foundation of successful neighborhood economies, which he calls pivot points:

■ developing the community work force;
■ revitalizing the commercial district/industrial base;
■ growing good neighborhood-based jobs; and
■ developing micro-businesses.

These are the economic levers that communities must change as they strive to improve where they live and work. This vision–creating economic opportunity, reversing negative perceptions, and stimulating purchases and investments–is the vision that undergirds successful community economic development work across the country.

Temali doesn't include housing development, because his book is about "next generation" community economic development. First generation community development (note I didn't use the word economic) focused on housing production. After a couple decades of such efforts, people started noticing that many of the neighborhoods were still distressed, that new or rehabilitated housing wasn't enough to turn around neighborhoods. Hence, his focus on rebuilding neighborhood economies.

Well, I do think that New Orleans needs to include housing improvement, resident attraction programs as well, in such neighborhood-commercial district revitalization programs. They are already doing a goodly amount of this through Neighborhood Housing Services and the great Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans (which I joined yesterday in solidarity--long before Katrina I was impressed with their efforts).

But even before Katrina, New Orleans had at least 40,000 vacant houses.

Distressed neighborhoods need the same kind of assistance with capacity and leadership development that I identified above as necessary success factors for successful commercial district revitalization programs. Frankly, these are essential to any community development effort, but distressed neighborhoods tend to have even fewer social and organizational capacity resources than the average neighborhood.

New Orleans also needs to deal with touristification, or the "commodification of authenticity," and how commercial offerings get reproduced to focus away from a balance that also serves local residential markets. I wrote about this with regard to Georgetown in this entry a couple months ago, "Is there a link between historic designation and chaining up of retail in neighborhood commercial districts?".

In New Orleans, the negative consequence of the dominance of tourism is far more pronounced, especially in places like Bourbon Street. It has to be seen to be understood, and it reminds me of the description of the areas alongside now abandoned U.S. military bases in the Phillipines such as Subic Bay.

New Orleans also needs to be firmly committed to urban design and retaining as many of the historic building stock as possible. Many of the failed projects in the city (such as the New Orleans Shopping Collection) have turned their backs on the precepts of urban design and street vitality. And the vitality at the street level defines New Orleans.

Lt. Governor Landrieu already knows the creative-cultural economy issues backwards and forwards. Of course, cultural heritage-tourism will be connected to the Main Street effort, as the state is increasingly making this connection already. For example, the Louisiana Main Street effort is part of the Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism.

But part of this is local political leadership and resources. The urban regime theorists argue that New Orleans doesn't have a functioning "Growth Machine," working together to move the city forward. (There is an article about this in the March Urban Affairs Review.)

The resurgence of the center city of Washington, DC happened after a fundamental change in political leadership, from Marion Barry to Anthony Williams. This led to a change in the risk climate for investment and was accompanied by a marginal increase in demand for urban living (thank "Friends").

Washington is hardly over the hump, I do worry about serious back-sliding as Mayor Williams moves off the scene and more people are more successful in wearing down resistance to the government being looked upon as a money and job teet disconnected from the need to perform.

Anyway, Temali writes in the introduction to Community Economic Development Handbook that:

Community economic development is not just about developing buildings and businesses. At the core, it is about developing the talent, skills, and living conditions of the people who live in those buildings, the people who own those businesses and the people who work there, and the people who become their customers.

The vision is both simple and complex--economic progress for the entire neighborhood.This vision is achieved through activities that focus on increasing the income and assets of local residents; through building the community up as a whole; and through continual, visible changes that make the community a better place to live.

For an urban Main Streets program to work in New Orleans, an awful lot has to go right, in a place that in a variety of dimensions, is quite distressed. (Note that a similar kind of analysis of the DC Great Streets program accounts for my concern that the program is not likely to succeed, without a much greater focus on capacity development within the neighborhoods.)

As Kingsfield says to the students taking his final exam (from the movie "Paper Chase"):

Good luck.
You'll need it.

The fact is that it's not just luck, but organization and preparation. And what people in tourism call "destination readiness."

I don't write this to tear down hope, but to identify the factors that make success difficult, and to "suggest that efforts be directed to address this in advance of possible program failure."

Index Keywords: Main-Street