National Farmers Market Week, August 2nd - 8th

Food is more than just picking up the item and buying it:  Farm and farming issues.  I've been keeping track of some of the broader issues concerning farms and farming, as something we should be thinking about all the time, but especially when it comes to National Farmers Market Week.

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Farmers markets as events.  Most people think of farmers markets as events--I call them activation devices--to go out and do something.  

WRT activation, many years ago I wrote a piece outlining the different reasons to sponsor a market, and how that should shape policy wrt what can be sold, and the distance away by which a farm can be considered local.  

-- "The reason(s) why a farmers market is created shapes the type and mix of vendors allowed to sell" (2011)

One reason is to support farm income and the regional economy.

In DC, you get lots of vendors from West Virginia and Pennsylvania because they get better prices in the big city.

For example, there is research about the social value of markets as community hubs--that's great for the attendees, but what about the value to the farmers? ("Do Farmers Markets Build Community? New Research Says Yes," PPS)

Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Market, University District Farmers Market, Seattle, Washington. Credit: Redstone Photography

Farmers markets are supposed to be places to buy food first and foremost, food that is locally produced ("Local, organic, and bipartisan: How Vermont is challenging Big Food,," Christian Science Monitor).  

Secondarily we think about how farmers markets are supposed to be ways to cut out the middleman in a quest to get better and local (regionally sourced) food, ideally at a cost lower than from the supermarket.  

This is an old photo.  This year stone fruits are in short supply in Utah because of a late freeze in early June.

Well, maybe just maybe cheaper than Whole Foods--last week at the Downtown Farmers Market in Salt Lake City, which is a great one, in large part because there aren't dozens of markets in the area, but a handful, making it worthwhile for a large number of vendors to show up, vendors were selling corn for $8 per dozen.  

Granted it's not the 70s when you could get that many ears from a truck farmer for $1.  Still that's a shocker.

While a lot of the items sold at markets are value added products--e.g., hot sauce made from locally grown peppers, and the sauce costs more than selling raw peppers--the fact is food comes from farms.  And cost-wise, inputs, labor, taxes, it might not be enough ("Massachusetts loves its small farms. Will that be enough to save them?," Christian Science Monitor). 

BLT at Middle Child.

Farm to Table/Featuring local foods in special ways promotes the regional food system.  Farm to table is a longstanding movement where restaurants make items based on what they can source from local farms and farmers markets.  Some restaurants even have their own farms.

Middle Child in Philadelphia features for one month heirloom tomatoes grown at Philadelphia's Urban Roots Farm in BLTs--also with locally grown arugula and bread from the artisan Merzbacher’s Bakery ("Middle Child’s BLT season has arrived. This is how they prepare for the frenzy," Philadelphia Inquirer).  They also offer tomato agua fresca, tomato water ice, frozen tomato pops, and tomato martinis.  

An increasing number of bakeries are using regionally-grown harvested and milled grains, rather than standardized industrial seed varieties ("Regionalizing Michigan’s Small Grains: Highlights from the 2026 Food-grade Grains Field Day," Michigan State University).

VINE Foods, a new agricultural innovator to the market, starts its inaugural harvest of vine-ripened tomatoes on June 25, 2026 at 4451 Knight Arnold Road in Memphis.  Photo: Stu Boyd II-The Commercial Appeal

Relatedly, VINE Foods in Memphis is a small urban farm aiming to grow items that are best grown and consumed locally, like tomatoes ("VINE Foods plants roots in Memphis with innovative urban farm," Memphis Commercial Appeal).  

This is sort of what Urban Roots Farm is doing, and could be done in more places.  They also focus on the recovery and reuse of vacant lots, which is important in cities that have lost population ("Memphis-founded VINE Foods turns abandoned lots into organic produce farms," ActionNews5).

Years ago, I came across the Tomato Independence Project initiative in Treasure Valley/Boise, which now seems inactive ("Building a Better Tomato" Edible Idaho) and if you've tasted a great heirloom tomato off the vine, you know how important it is to spread the understanding of food that is not so industrialized that the flavor is gone, which is a problem with most tomatoes sold at the supermarket.  

More farming and promotion initiatives like this need to be developed throughout the country, to promote the consumption of what is otherwise highly perishable but super tasty locally grown foods.  The Dwarf Tomato Project is a national version, still at a small scale, of the TIP.

Wasatch Community Gardens in Salt Lake holds an annual "Tomato Sandwich Party." (Photo at right.)

Now, VINE Foods needs to find a restaurant partner like Middle Child.

Food needs sun and water (and other inputs) to grow | Climate change.  Crops need sun and water and other inputs to grow.  And labor to tend to the crops and then to pick them.  Bad weather can be catastrophic ("Spring’s bizarre weather caused up to $200 million in lost crops in Pa. N.J. farmers also suffered." Philadelphia Inquirer, "A late spring frost wiped out much of Utah’s tree fruit crop. Here’s what growers are selling instead," Salt Lake Tribune).  Weather is becoming much more extreme due to climate change, and the geographic areas where food can be grown are shifting in response to higher temperatures.

Weeks after December’s historic floods, water remains on Yeng Lee Cha’s farm in Snohomish. Cha says her farm experienced up to 9 feet of flooding, and the water didn’t recede for nearly two months in certain areas. The rushing water damaged farm... (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)

Flooding too ("WA’s Hmong farmers face floods at generational crossroads," Seattle Times).  Not just flooding, but land sinking as water is drained from underground aquifers ("Study finds California farmland is sinking shockingly fast," SFGATE).

1.  Food borne illness is a symptom of regulatory failure and the perils of large scale mass agriculture.  The media is full of reporting on cyclosporiasis associated with lettuce.  "Cyc­lospora isn’t new. Why it’s dif­fer­ent now," USA Today:

Every sum­mer, it seems, we get the same headline: a cluster of cyc­lospori­asis cases traced to fresh pro­duce, a recall, a brief wave of concern and then silence until next year. The news cov­er­age almost always frames this as a food safety story – con­tam­in­ated basil, bad lettuce, a sup­plier that slipped through the cracks.

I want to offer a dif­fer­ent dia­gnosis, because I’ve watched this exact pat­tern before, in a very dif­fer­ent dis­ease. This is a slow, envir­on­ment­ally depend­ent para­site with no capa­city to out­run a func­tion­ing sur­veil­lance sys­tem. It has no abil­ity to evolve its way past inspec­tion. It only needs one thing to spread fur­ther than it used to: for us to stop look­ing as care­fully as we once did. That’s the part of this story nobody is telling.

Import inspec­tion capa­city, pro­duce sampling at the bor­der, the state pub­lic health labor­at­or­ies run­ning whole-gen­ome sequen­cing to match an isol­ate from a sick patient to a spe­cific lot num­ber, the epi­demi­olo­gists con­vert­ing scattered case reports into a recog­nized cluster – this is the immune sys­tem pro­tect­ing our food sup­ply. And like any immune sys­tem, when you starve it of resources, you don’t get a health­ier host. You get a slower, blinder response to a threat that was always there.

Decades ago Jim Hightower wrote a book, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, criticizing Agricultural Colleges and their research programs designed to promote big agriculture by creating nee tools and crop seeds modified for easier picking and distribution over great distances rather than for nutrition and flavor.

Who knew that one of the outcomes of Big Agriculture/Big Farming could be Big Diarrhea.

Trading farm futures on your phone.

2.  Tariffs, foreign policy fights, etc.  Many farmers have lost access to markets because of tariffs or responses to US foreign policy ("Already under financial pressure, farmers squeezed further by tariffs and Iran war," PBS).  

Plus the Iran War has impacted the production of fertilizer inputs and the transport of fertilizer using the Strait of Hormuz ("The Iran War threatened a food crisis. The next Gulf conflict could do the same," Reuters).

... another reason why many farmers are active in buying and selling futures.  Or going bankrupt ("Minnesota bankruptcies rise as a ‘perfect storm’ of challenges roils farm country," MinnPost).

3.  Farming is hard work and its hard to convince younger people to take it up ( "Why The Kids Won't Farm," New York Times).

4.  Food science and technology.  Growing food involves scientific research ("Her Lab Worked to Future-Proof Fruits and Vegetables," New York Times), some of which the US under the Trump Administration doesn't want to fund anymore.  Some favor large scale production--industrial food--others don't ("Stop Worrying, and Learn to Love Industrial Food,," and "What Our Industrial Food System Can't Do," NYT).

5.  Food as intellectual property/Big corporations and massive supply chains.  As seeds beome patented, problems are created for farmers, including if they aren't licensed ("A California farmer is giving away tons of nectarines that he’s not allowed to sell" AP).  

Driscoll's has shifted from being a large farming operation to a massive "systems integrator" operating across the globe to make strawberries available every month of the year ("Why Are Berries Everywhere, in Every Season? Driscoll’s," NYT).

A fire burns piles of grapevines and stakes after they were ripped out at Sarmento Vineyard. Photo: Nic Coury for The New York Times

6.  Big farmers are less flexible with major changes in conditions.  For example, because people are buying fewer canned peaches, Del Monte is closing canneries and peach orchards need new markets (s ("California farmers must destroy 420,000 peach trees after Del Monte closes its canneries and cancels more than $550 million in long-term contracts," Fortune Magazine).  

As people drink less alcohol, including wine, more vineyards are shutting down ("Sales Are So Low, California Wineries Are Burning Their Vineyards," NYT).

7.  Right to repair.  Like with the concept of food as intellectual property, farm equipment has become much more technologically complex, full of electronics and sensors and connections to data systems and services that make recommendations on how to plow particularly plots, how much seed and fertilizer, etc.  

As equipment becomes more complex companies like John Deere had licensing agreements that prevented farmers from fixing the equipment themselves.  They had to wait for registered technicians, which can put equipment out of service for days. 

For years farmers have been fighting for the "right to repair."  They made some gains at the state level ("Colorado gave farmers the right to repair their own equipment, but Great Plains, Oklahoma farmers continue waiting," KOSU/Oklahoma Public Radio) but enacting federal legislation was impossible.  

Nevertheless, John Deere, the leading manufacturer, finally capitulated ("John Deere owners will get the right to repair their own equipment under a new FTC settlement," AP).

Farmers Andrew Cadwallader and his father David Cadwallader (front) at Waldac Farms in Salem, N.J., on Jan. 29. Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

8.  Smaller farms need multiple revenue streams to survive.  In the past, there has been opposition to farms adding event spaces and agritourism accommodations, new types of facilities,  

There was a dairy selling ice cream issue years ago in Baltimore County, selling out to housing developers, now solar and wind farms, which some farms aim to add to increase and stabilize revenues.  

Boston Globe photo.

Salem, Pennsylvania wouldn't allow a dairy farm to add solar panel electricity generation to add revenue ("Will this Salem County town love its last dairy farm to death?," Philadelphia Inquirer).  So they got rid of their cows.  From the article: 

The future of a family farm in rural Salem County was at stake, and after multiple meetings and hours of presentations, questions, pleas, and complaints, a local planning board was set to vote.

Before the vote, one longtime resident of Mannington Township came to the podium with a warning. In preparation for this crowded, mid-March meeting, Alice Waddington, 98, said she’d made a list of dairy farms she remembered from her decades in the little town.

At one time, she said, there were close to a dozen. “There’s only one farm left milking cows,” Waddington told the board, “and that’s the Cadwalladers.”

In Vermont, farmers are fighting similar kinds of restrictions ("A rural rebellion in Vermont is on the verge of unlikely success," Boston Globe).

9.  Some farmers are making more money off social media than farming ("The Family Farmers Making More From Clicks Than Crops," Wall Street Journal).  This is led by younger generations of the family.

Revisiting Strip shopping centers as loci for retail innovation

Bill Lindeke of the MinnPost wrote a column, "In praise of Twin Cities strip malls" that gets at why strip shopping centers, cursed by urban revitalization advocates like me (seemingly), actually have the potential to do what Jane Jacobs said old buildings did, "support innovative new uses because rents are low because the building is paid off."

In cities, depending we revitalization advocates saw 1980s urban renewal strip centers as opportunities for multistory buildings with ground floor retail.  As the market changed, that became possible, and centers in Columbia Heights and on H Street NE among others, were converted.

We didn't see these spaces as places of innovation so much.  Just parking fronted spaces that were counter to urban design principles.

Suburban hipness.  With the type, depending on the location, I wrote a couple pieces about this in 2013, "More thoughts on suburban hipness (it's really about commercial hipness generally, not urban vs. suburban)," and "Millennials and suburban hipness and Montgomery County, Maryland," infused by visits to Phoenix and Seattle, and seeing some really interesting retail businesses operating in "un-cool" strip shopping center spaces.  

Spaces of innovation.  And again in 2025, "Place breaking versus place making: Making people places | independent coffee shops, small business spaces, outdoor spaces."  I wrote:

One of the major precepts of Jane Jacobs Life and Death of the Great American City is that cities need "a large stock of old buildings."  

East Ohio Street, Allegheny City, Pittsburgh.

This wasn't because she was a historic preservationist, but because old, mostly paid off buildings were cheaper to rent space from than new buildings ("Big Data Backs Jane Jacobs: Cities Need Old Buildings," Smart Cities Dive, Older, Smaller, Better Measuring how the character of buildings and blocks influences urban vitality, NTHP).

1. Older, mixed-use neighborhoods are more walkable. 
2. Young people love old buildings.
3. Nightlife is most alive on streets with a diverse range of building ages. 
4. Older business districts provide affordable, flexible space for entrepreneurs from all backgrounds. 
5. The creative economy thrives in older, mixed-use neighborhoods.
6. Older, smaller buildings provide space for a strong local economy. 
7. Older commercial and mixed-use districts contain hidden density.  

What she didn't anticipate is that in strong markets, either at the city-wide or sub-district scale, regional, national and international real estate actors would bid up the space and improve it, so that even "old buildings," became the equivalent of flashy and new and not cheap to rent.

Early on when I got involved in commercial district revitalization, I believed that only historic buildings were capable of supporting the kind of innovation that Jacobs wrote about.

But later I came to understand it was more about the building as an envelope.

Points #1 to #7 can be re-written and applied to the strip center.  Maybe not all of them, but some:

1. (old 2) Young people love cool spaces..
2. (old 3) Nightlife is most alive in places with a diverse range of uses, ideally but not required is attractive architecture.. 
3. (old 4) Older strip shopping centers provide affordable, flexible space for entrepreneurs from all backgrounds. 
4. (old 5) The creative economy thrives in low cost real estate.
5. (old 6) Older, smaller buildings provide space for a strong local economy. 
6. (old 7) Older commercial and mixed-use districts contain hidden density--maybe not so much but it can be created.

Still I wouldn't want strip centers in the core of a central city, but they can be useful in the outer city, and in fact can be quite powerful.  In the suburbs specifically, strip centers are known for being home to innovative ethnic restaurants--Tim Carman of the Washington Post and Karon Liu of the Toronto Star have been calling our attention to such places for years.

Magleby's is in the Historic H.T. Reynolds Building in Springville, Utah.  Springville is noteworthy separately for its arts museum, which has promoted the work of local artists for more than a century.  The city positions itself as "Art City" and leans into it by various promotions and urban design interventions.

I was just in a restaurant called Magleby's in an "old" building in Springville, Utah and it rocked, putting a lot of Salt Lake City restaurants to shame--but that space is what you make of it, the building is an envelope and you can use and makeover the space creatively, or not.  But the low cost of entry in a strip center, provided the owner is amenable to proposals from independent businesses, makes it a lot easier to do.

The first strip center:  Urban streets lined by block after block of low scale retail buildings.  As a child, my experience in Detroit was the major arterials were "shopping centers," as they were lined block after block by retail buildings of various sizes.  

There were "centers" within the miles of buildings often at intersections of major roads where more of a "shopping center" or conglomeration developed.  (This happened in Chicago too.)  

The one I remember when I was in elementary school was still corridor strip, but there was a grocer (Packer, then it was bought out by Wrigley), an independent neighborhood "department store" with a focus on apparel, Woolworth's--not Kresge, even though Kresge was headquartered in Detroit, that's where I would buy Matchbox cars, I don't remember if it had a soda fountain, and a branch of Federal's, a regional downscale department store chain by comparison to more upscale chains Hudson's--which still had its downtown store but was developing suburban malls and Crowley's/Demery's (they merged), which was noteworthy for having a downtown store, but also stores in major shopping districts (Wieboldt's did this in Chicago) and suburban town centers like Birmingham and Farmington.  (Oddly, Grosse Pointe was bypassed except for high end apparel, a small company called Himmelhoch's, which went out of business around 1980.)

Partly what made a shopping center maybe was a parking lot behind the liner buildings.

Corridor revitalization.  Now block after block of retail liner buildings is a problem, especially in areas where travel has shifted to the car from transit.  Addressing it is called corridor revitalization.  And it's hard.  

My recommendation has always been to focus on strengthening nodes and as they are successful, they expand outward, hopefully connecting more closely to other nodes on the street.  The community development corporation technical support organization, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, has had a focus on this for decades, Commercial Corridor Resource Hub

The Germantown Business District in better days, when the transit line was a streetcar, not a bus, and the suburbs were still minimally populated.

Another example of a very long corridor and revitalization is Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia ("Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia is finally improving").  

The Mt. Airy and Chestnut Hill districts in the outer city thrive.  The inner districts do not.  Part of the problem may be that the main Germantown district once thrived with big department stores, and now those spaces are almost impossible to fill.

Separately, there are initiatives in Philadelphia where locally focused community development groups buy and hold properties in order to keep them accessible to and affordable by independent businesses ("BTMFBA + programs to lease the properties to local businesses | Philadelphia").  Also see "BTMFBA Chronicles: Seattle coffee shop raises money to buy its building."

The car changes the form: Park and Shop centers.  The shopping district at Plymouth and Evergreen in Detroit had parking in the back, while Hudson's malls had parking around the building.  In the 1930s, in response to the rise in car ownership, the "park and shop" was born.  It was often an L type shape with a parking lot in front.  

One of the first was in Cleveland Park DC ("The spot to Park and Shop," Washington Post).

Others that come to mind are in Silver Spring, on Cary Street in Richmond, and one in the Brookland neighborhood of DC.  

Given the strength of the real estate market, the Cleveland Park and Silver Spring examples are more chained up and restaurant focused.  

Brookland's is poorly located and has some management issues and doesn't thrive in the same way as the others.

Richmond's strip center is an integral part of Cary Street/Carytown, which is a particularly great example of a successful urban neighborhood commercial district.

Destroy or Save the Park and Shop.  Urbanists today argue that Park and Shops should be rebuilt as dense buildings, like what we advocated for on H Street NE.  From the H Street Connection to a mixed use development:

I argue that on historic preservation architectural history grounds that it's important to save historic Park and Shops ("Blacktop History," National Council on Public History), but not the 1970s-1990s strip centers.  But something is lost when those sites are converted, the retail space is no longer cheap, and independent businesses get displaced.

Cary Court Park and Shop in Richmond, Virginia.

Ideally there would be programs in place to assist those businesses in transitioning to other spaces, in having them have return rights to the new building with lowered rents, etc.

Revitalization.  In 2001, the Urban Land Institute published Ten Principles for Reinventing America’s Suburban Strips.  Although again as I have said, the various "Ten Principles" ULI publications are equally relevant to cities, even when ostensibly about suburbs.

It's possible to add housing to some.  But these days according to Chain Store Age Magazine, it's a high performing real estate "product type," especially when anchored by a grocery store.  So while it's true that as some suburbs densify (often called "urbanize") strip centers get built over ("The Future of the Strip," ULI), they're providing low cost space and attractive retail amenities keeps many in business.

Drone photo of plazaPOPS urban design interventions in Wexford Heights, Scarborough, at 2020 Lawrence Avenue East. 

In Toronto there have been initiatives to incorporate public space and urban design improvements in these centers because they are vital economically but are "meh" architecturally ("Toronto-area strip malls are foodie havens. Here’s how this project is helping them become places for people, not just cars," Toronto Star, "Messy Cities: The Ballet of the Parking Lot").

While not exactly a secret, strip malls were an underappreciated urban aspect of the city for years. In 2002, former mayor Mel Lastman even said, “Strip plazas have got to go. These things are a holy mess. Their time is over.” 

Yet they’re essential parts of our urban landscape and throughout the Greater Toronto Area have been recognized as great retail expressions of multiculturalism. Cheaper than downtown main streets, small businesses can flourish, especially true in the food scene. Previously ignored strip mall eateries are routinely celebrated, while a place like Ridgeway Plaza in Mississauga, with nearly 100 ethnic food options, has become such a foodie haven it suffers from the strain of so many people visiting. 

Seeing how strip malls, designed sometimes decades ago for motorists, have evolved into vibrant, walkable places on their own has been fascinating. Now the plazaPops project is helping them adapt more formally.

Or, communities can have big revitalization plans, like for the Takoma Crossroads Langley district spanning Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland, and soon to be a stop on the Purple Line light rail, but as Bill Lindeke points out:

Owners of these properties are reluctant to give that up a passive income stream for an expensive, risky investment.

Aerial view, Takoma Langley Crossroads at the intersection of New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard.  The retail mix is mostly independents, with some chains.

Why should they?  The centers are thriving, with few vacancies, and are full of businesses catering to the Latino population of "East County," even if they don't look pretty, are fronted by parking, car sewers etc.

Although I do believe these districts can be rebuilt, more urbanistically and with housing, especially when paired with rail transit.

The challenge is to maintain the uses and the proprietorship of independent businesses through and after the changes.  

That's one of the reasons wrt this district that I suggested that Montgomery and Prince George's County create a "transportation renewal district" to fund a bi-county community development corporation to buy, hold, and operate properties in the catchment area of the Purple Line, to best mitigate these types of issues in ways that the private sector isn't accustomed to doing.

-- "Creating a transportation development authority in Montgomery and Prince George's County to effectuate placemaking, retail development, and housing programs in association with the Purple Line"

Mitigation.  Ridgeway Plaza, Mississauga, Ontario. Note that Ridgeway is actually a newly constructed shopping strip, less than four years old.

The product type is still being built where it can be successful.  The relatively new Ridgeway Plaza in Mississauga, Ontario, is wildly successful because of its ethnic restaurants ("The suburb that won't sleep," New York Times, "Suburban ethnic enclaves").  But it makes it a destination for which its traffic load and patron volume was never considered.  From the NYT:

But Ridgeway’s unexpected popularity has created problems for Mississauga. The vast plaza attracts crowds at all hours of the day and night, resulting in noise and littering, too much traffic and not enough parking. There have been confrontations and even physical fights; illegal fireworks; and nuisance from vehicles, including street racing.

Such quality-of-life concerns have arisen at the same time that Mississauga’s population has been growing fast with an influx of immigrants — local developments that coincide with a broader souring of public opinion in Canada toward newcomers

In a weak housing market, will Cleveland's Housing Innovation District move the needle?

Cleveland's biggest problem is that the city is shrinking.  The population in 1990 was 505,000 and 372,000 in 2020. 

Now that's a store.

For example the famed Heinin supermarkets local chain announced they're closing their landmark downtown store, located in a historic bank--after downsizing and rebuilding after George Floyd riots closed the store ("Heinen’s closure in downtown Cleveland raises questions about sustaining development").

 And so is the metropolitan area.  The 2020 population was about 2.1 million.  The estimate for 2026 is 1.72 million.  

1836 E. 79th Street, Cleveland, Ohio.

In that context, there's a lot of vacant buildings and lots ("Finding the Potential in Vacant Lots," New York Times) not just in the city proper, but in the suburbs too.  

I know that years ago, Cleveland's inner ring suburbs were leaders in trying to do suburban revitalization (The Northeast Ohio First Suburbs Consortium), but not quite how Arlington County, Virginia was able to because the DC metropolitan area was growing, and they could leverage the addition of Metrorail ("How DC [really Arlington County] densified," Works in Progress).

Still, Cleveland has incredibly social, community and organizational capital. In the 1990s, Cleveland  foundations worked together to force accountability and consolidation on community development corporations.  There are many foundations doing great housing work like the Catholic social justice based Famikos Foundation.  When I was there in 2002, the city had a great facade improvement program and manual.

The Cleveland Restoration Society was a leader in leveraging city monies in bank accounts to fund housing renovation.  They have a revolving fund to invest in property development.  

There are a number of firms specializing in historic preservation financing and rehabilitation of big projects like Sandvik Architects.  And the state has a historic preservation tax credit too.

And they have a program to help churches light their steeples, which I think is really cool.

The Metroparks system is fabulous, with many on the Lake Erie waterfront.  

There are great civic assets like the West Side Market and business improvement districts and community development initiatives all over.  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Terminal Tower is a fabulous train station.  (But all the old department store buildings, massive 1 million s.f. or more are all defunct.)

I always tout there "Business Revitalization Overlay District" as a way to coordinate investment with the public and private sectors.  They have strong design review requirements.  And the State has a strong receivership statute that allows nonprofits to take over properties, cure the title, fix them, and sell them, to bring houses back into use.

They are an example of a line I have, that cities like Cleveland 

"have a desperate willingness to experiment because they have no other choice."

More alternative weeklies need to publish "worst of" articles. Page 1, Page 2.

They still have legacy heavy rail service although it's not well used.  A great system for evaluating bus stops for amenities.  The transit system provides decent coverage, and it was the first one to connect heavy rail service to the local airport in the late 1970s.  A big Midwestern bank is still based there, and there are some other corporations.  In nearby Akron, LeBron James has invested a lot, so has the Knight Foundation.  

The Cleveland Scene alternative weekly still publishes once a month print issues, although the Cleveland Plain Dealer only prints a couple of editions each week. But their urban design writer who was great, Steven Litt, has retired.

Both the Akron and Cleveland areas have great regional bikeway plans and systems.  Plus the universities and the Cleveland Clinic constantly grow.  There are investments in public spaces, the (in my opinion) over touted Health Line BRT, etc.

Creating Cleveland heavy rail is a fascinating story.  The Van Sweringen brothers were developing Shaker Square and Cleveland Heights and they wanted transit service.  To get it, they bought the Nickel Plate Railroad system, to get the necessary right of way.  They also built Terminal Tower.  But they were ruined by the Depression.

Forest City, a regional hardware store chain, was based in Cleveland, and is long since shut down, but the firm shifted to large scale revitalization oriented real estate development in many cities, including DC.  Value City, a regional department store chain specializing in low income markets, was based their too.  It's last iteration in furniture, finally closed this year.  But the founding family, the Schottensteins, when on to be big in vulture investing.

And Playhouse Square is a national best practice example of historic preservation and arts focused development.  They've since created a CDC to build and hold property around the theaters.  

The Gordon Square Arts District is a best practice neighborhood focused arts district revitalization initiative ("A Cleveland Arts District Hustles and Rebounds," NYT).  A number of new developments complement the Capitol Theatre and two buildings converted into smaller community theaters.  Reasonably well designed new buildings too.

To me, Cleveland has a lot going on, and if I could have found gainful employment there, I would have liked to live in the city, despite its cold winters.

I think the Housing Innovation District is interesting, it aligns a wide variety of programs and systems so that both small and larger developers can participate and work with small parcels, not just big ones.  From "'Amazing neighborhoods' that deserve investment. Cleveland proposes East Side improvement district" (Ideastream/NPR)

Cleveland is proposing sweeping development efforts in the historically redlined East Side neighborhoods of Hough, Central and St. Clair-Superior.

Using a suite of economic development tools, including waived permit fees for new construction, modernized zoning codes and a new tax increment financing district, the city plans to put millions toward spurring new housing, businesses and walkable communities in neighborhoods that have been challenged by decades of disinvestment. Cleveland officials are referring to the area as a Housing Innovation District.

"When we think about the Housing Innovation District, it's 'How can we create an area that really incentivizes people to bring new housing,' but [also] really builds wealth block by block in the neighborhood for the existing residents that are here," Tom McNair, the city's Chief of Integrated Development, told reporters in St. Clair-Superior on Wednesday morning. "Because St. Clair Superior, Hough, Central: these are amazing neighborhoods that for far too long haven't gotten the type of investment they deserve."

Lake Erie beach, Cleveland Metroparks.

BUT, at the end of the day, you need households to live in the buildings.  It's not about what the neighborhoods deserve, it's about what the market will support.  

I read a couple of articles on small developers in Chicago and Pittsburgh ("Six new townhomes. Zero buyers. And one developer on the brink," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) who built market rate housing in emerging neighborhoods (so weak not strong) and they couldn't sell them.  Or the houses wouldn't appraise for a mortgage, because of the prevailing housing prices.

I am constantly amazed to see community revitalization programs in specific areas that have spent many hundreds of millions, and it's hard to see improvements, even though they are and usually key civic assets, plus housing--although my line from decades ago, that building better housing for poor people doesn't rebuild broken micro economies all that much, which was my lesson from H Street DC ("Ah, the H Street Community Development Corporation"). 

An awesome house for $325,000 in the Ohio City neighborhood across the river.

OTOH, even marginal additions of population make a difference ("Community revitalization initiatives for smaller communities | marginal attraction of people and commerce even in small amounts makes a difference").

And to be fair, they've really pulled together a lot of policy changes, financing, land etc. to make things happen.  It will be interesting to watch even though I think that it's really tough to move the needle in weak markets.

Boston wonders if they can re-support nightlife based on the results so far from the World Cup

People waited to be seated outside The Union Bar. Photo: Christian Kantosky, Boston Globe.

The Boston Globe has been writing about the impact of the World Cup on the city's nightlife.

Where the Scots cleaned out alcohol supplies ("‘We’ve never seen anything like it’: Patrons emptied bars and liquor stores in Boston this weekend"), the city extended open hours till 3 am ("Governor Healey signs bill allowing 3 a.m. last call for the World Cup, expanding public drinking through July"), outdoor public drinking zones, like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, etc.  

So the Boston Globe wonders if "Boston nightlife is in the midst of a grand social experiment. Can the good vibes last?."

As someone who worked on commercial district revitalization for 20 years in DC and wrote a lot about this issue, they missed the biggest possible point and difference, the addition of many tens of thousands of people from out of the area who were there for nightlife.

-- "Aging cities | Maintaining economic dynamism in the face of aging populations at the city and metropolitan scale" (2025)

-- "Richard's Rules for Restaurant-Based Revitalization: New business models are needed for 2025" (especially the comments where I quote from relevant articles I come across)

-- "Experience economy/nightlife: Boston, LA, Pittsburgh, London, Santa Monica" (2025)

-- "Planning programming by daypart, month, season: and Boston Winter Garden, DC's Holiday Market, etc." (2016)

Bourbon Street.

Temporarily, World Cup cities are functioning more like 24/7 nightlife districts in Las Vegas, Miami, and not quite NYC, plus Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Beale Street in Memphis?.  People go to those cities to party.  

I follow Reddit Las Vegas and people write about going there and being drunk and/or high for most of their stay.  Maybe the Scots were like that.  Not Bostonians.

Plus the super posh clubs with bottle service and all night dancing, massive pool parties in Vegas, etc.

Beale Street.

A traditional city, at least in the US, just doesn't have that kind of latent populations always going out, and willing to be shitfaced and then go to work.  Concerns like:

• Having to work two jobs
• mobility when drunk
• the impact of smartphones on entertainment choices, less ability to socialize
• the cost of going out
• consumption of experiences
• labor for the establishments and the the rise of the cost of goods sold, 
• rents and changing business models due to work from home reducing office visits
• people drinking less
• People consuming edibles instead of drinking, 
• mocktails (just as expensive to produce, lower margins, 
• etc.

Make it a lot harder to go out.

Ah, the H Street Community Development Corporation

The Washington City Paper reports that the former director of the H Street CDC paid himself more than $1 million of unjustified bonuses, without notifying the board ("Former Housing Nonprofit Director Found To Have Diverted Funds for Six-Figure Bonuses").  

This was complicated by the fact that a long time ago, the CDC created a for profit division which allowed them more shenanigans with little oversight.  A previous director had created a janitorial service which got the contract to maintain facilities, but as the potential conflict of interest was disclosed, it was allowed, etc.  So top staff were able to generate additional revenue streams beyond their paychecks.

The DC Superior Court ruled that Kenneth Brewer, Sr. has to return more than $1.2 million.  Looking over the board members mentioned in the article, and on their website, I recognize a bunch of the names still, not all, even though that was 20+ years ago.   And I think it's interesting that on the current board there are no white people to reflect neighborhood demographics.

But as the neighborhood improved, the HSCDC could no longer compete in the market for property, so it moved to doing projects in still distressed areas of the city.

Things haven't changed much from 20 years ago.

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Community development corporations were created in the 1960s to stabilize inner city neighborhoods  in the face of outmigration.  Back then cities had two main types of neighborhoods: 

-- areas that could be stabilized: those with building stock that was attractive and that in turn attracted "urban pioneers,"-- basically white people willing to live in the center city when housing choice trends favored the suburbs.  Interest rates were high, neighborhoods were run down, city services constrained, and overall the city faced a loss of population.  Historic preservation efforts were the primary tool for neighborhood stabilization.

Preservation had the benefit of being low cost to cities.  Some regulation and staff time--supported in part by the federal government, and some investments in elements like brick sidewalks and historic facsimile light poles.  Otherwise the residents bore the costs of rehabilitation.

-- more distressed areas with a lot of population leakage and a preponderance of low income residents.  Cities tended to put their limited resources in these areas on equity grounds.  But the return on investment was minimal.

The areas were CDCs were directed to act were istressed and challenging economically. This was complicated/accentuated by and in areas of cities that experienced riots.  Riots decimated commercial districts especially, destroying the local micro economy.  A lot of housing stock deteriorated.

CDCs were created to address these issues in distressed areas, but mostly focused on what I call "building housing for poor people." Great on equity grounds, but didn't have much positive effect on the micro economy.

Some addressed commercial district issues but mostly focused on housing.

DC did create historic districts in two historically black areas of the city, one East of the River, that remains impoverish, and Le Droit Park, which is better situated in the NW quadrant is pretty central, abuts Howard University and became "gentrified" by income if not originally by race.

Lack of accountability.  Many CDCs lacked accountability and much success.  Although to be fair, CDCs were given difficult areas to try to fix.  The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story, "The Myth of Community Development" in 1994, in excoriating CDCs as an economic lever.

Some were good, some places had too many, there was always more demand for action than money, and the process of financing these kinds of deals was hard, even though back then the US Department of Housing and Urban Development actually provided money to cities for these purposes, which is a far cry from how it's been the last 20 years.

Leinberger's book made the point that before the change in attitudes, 70% of people wanted to live in the suburbs.  With the change, it was 30% cities, 30% suburbs, and 40% either.  That's changed though since covid.

Times changed: c. 2000 and the new demand for urban living.  OTOH, with the change in willingness to live in cities around 2000, momentum from private investment of large real estate developers and individual households reached a point of critical mass and was self-replicating.  Although distressed areas still lagged, and needed city and other subsidies to fund improvements.

Improvements also came through gentrification and displacement, where relatively low cost housing was bought by people with more money--they weren't necessarily rich but they definitely had more money than the people they may have replaced.  

For a long time you didn't see displacement in DC, because with the exception of converting four unit apartment buildings to condos, a lot of the housing that was acquired and renovated had been vacant.  After all, the overbuilding of housing in the suburbs left a massive inventory of vacant housing in the cities.  

But this started to change after 2000.  For example, one subsidized development in Columbia Heights with great views was warehoused to be able to upscale it ("HUD Set To Seize D.C. Housing Complex," Washington Post).  I visited that complex as a Census worker in 2000 and I was astounded at the number of vacant units. And the beautiful hill over the city from being on the hill of the escarpment.  From the article:

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros announced plans yesterday to seize ownership of a federally subsidized apartment complex in Northwest Washington that he said is one of the 100 worst-maintained developments in the country.

There was a reason  Now it's a fine example of a market rate development

CDCs are a mixed bag.  An organization created in response to urban poverty, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, was created by the Ford Foundation to provide technical support and access to funds.  In some cities, LISC branches were robust and demanded accountability.  In other cities LISC was so so and definitely not pushing internal improvement.

Buildings weren't valuable.  Design wasn't valuable.  Only the ability to assemble land.  When I started getting involved, the H Street Community Development Corporation was the primary revitalization actor in the neighborhood.  The leadership didn't see any value in the historic building stock and the attractive architectural design it represented, either in the commercial district or the neighborhood, even though just a few blocks south, Capitol Hill was revitalizing because of people attracted to the "pretty buildings" and proximity to the US Capitol Complex and Downtown.   

H Street NE from the top of the Hopscotch Bridge (over the Union Station railyard.

Flickr photo by Mr. T in DC (he's in Maryland now).

They tore down one of the oldest and most historic buildings to build a s**** looking 3 bay retail unit.  And the strip shopping center, now replaced with an amazing building, was typical crap.  None of the buildings they constructed were designed sensitively in a manner that would complement and extend the historic architecture of the commercial district and the neighborhood.

It wasn't pretty, but this similar building in Brooklyn that tends to be a restaurant on the ground floor with apartments above show that rehabilitation was possible.  The building that replaced it is terrible, and the "second floor" is fake, it's just an extended facade.  In fact, I came across that building when it was the Hope & Anchor Diner, and I immediately thought it was relevant to the 8th and H Street NE intersection

Two more examples of historic preservation driven rehabilitation.  The now defunct Taylor deli on the 1200 block of H Street NE and a corner building at 7th Street and New York Avenue NW.

H Street Connection has since been replaced with...

The Avec Apartments on the 800 and 900 blocks of H Street NE.  

Now the corner space is operated by an Aldi Supermarket.  

Interestingly, Aldi still operates its first DC store which is just over one mile to the east.

Live Baltimore used to run ads in the Express, making the point that Baltimore houses were often bigger, but definitely cheaper, compared to rising prices in DC.

The Greater H Street neighborhood had the same conditions, except for poorer residents, and at the time maybe it could have flourished with a residential recruitment program like Live Baltimore, but it would have come with displacement.

In any case, the H Street CDC only saw value in the opportunity to capture and assemble land for bigger projects, and they rebuilt housing that had been frame (worth a lot more today) in 1980s style rowhouses in a number of places around the neighborhood, helped fund a suburban style shopping strip, etc.  

Houses built by the H Street CDC on the 700 block of 8th Street NE.  While I think they're ugly, some have an asking price of $1+ million.  Maybe I'm the person whose position is wrong-headed.

They did buy and hold the Atlas Theater, but they wanted to convert the interior to parking, or to build a roller rink.  Creating an entertainment focus for the business corridor never crossed their minds.

So when we created the historic preservation focused Main Street commercial district revitalization program for the corridor, complemented by a revitalization plan commissioned by the rejuvenated Office of Planning, we were at odds.  

(I wrote about this tension on the anniversary of LISC, "The community development approach and the revitalization of DC's H Street corridor: congruent or oppositional approaches?," in 2013, in response to a laudatory op-ed, "The seeds of the H Street ‘miracle’," in the Post.)

Banner from the Montana Community Development Corporation.

I thought CDCs sucked by definition ("The Community Development Corporation Model of Urban Redevelopment: A Political Economy Critique and an Alternative").  

But then I went to the National Trust for Historic Preservation conference in Cleveland in 2002, and their CDCs blew me away.  It turns out that the philanthropic community joined together to demand accountability and for a bunch of the CDCs to merge, since they covered similar areas, and would have more heft.  Funding was dependent on these changes.

That never happened in DC.  LISC was weak.  A couple CDCs did some decent work, but even then they had a hard time showing quantum improvement.

The Washington Post did a hard hitting series in 2002 ("Falling up -- Accountability and DC Community Development Corporations").  We thought we were vindicated but nothing came of it.  And this was when the Post was still doing important local coverage and investigative reporting.

-- "Federal Money Flowed With Little Oversight: City Promises to Cut Off Ineffectual Groups"
-- "D.C. Revitalization Promised, Not Delivered: Nonprofits Collect Millions as Work Goes Undone, Neighborhoods Left With Eyesores"
-'"Risky Ventures, Little Accountability: After Years of Public Funding, Nonprofits Have Completed Few Projects"
-- "Blighted Sites May Revert To D.C.: Revival Has Stalled Under Nonprofits"
-- "$100 Million Down the Drain" [Editorial]
-- "D.C. Housing Authority Fines Nonprofit: Development Group Sold Two Row Houses, Meant for Individuals, to Investor"

I guess that's when I learned that $100 million didn't go very far anyway, let alone when grift and graft is involved. 

Conclusion.  A few years later the groups won awards from the DC Building Industry Association.  And in 2011 the Post ran similar stories ("(Some) Community Development Corporations still screwing up").

Now in 2026, we basically have embezzlement.  That's 39 years of experience all right.

All the stuff I've experienced gets referenced in my thinking.  The point about accountability mechanisms that I wrote about in terms of best practice revitalization, was based on good and bad examples in Europe in a series I wrote for the EU National Institutes of Culture Washington Chapter on culture based revitalization in Europe.

From "Updating the best practice elements of revitalization to include elements 7 and 8 | Transformational Projects Action Planning at a large scale":

1. A commitment to the development and production of a broad, comprehensive, visionary, and detailed revitalization plan/s (Bilbao, Hamburg, Liverpool);
2. the creation of innovative and successful implementation organizations, with representatives from the public sector and private firms, to carry out the program. Typically, the organizations have some distance from the local government so that the plan and program aren't subject to the vicissitudes of changing political administrations, parties and representatives (Bilbao, Hamburg, Liverpool, Helsinki);
3. strong accountability mechanisms that ensure that the critical distance provided by semi-independent implementation organizations isn't taken advantage of in terms of deleterious actions (for example Dublin's Temple Bar Cultural Trust was amazingly successful but over time became somewhat disconnected from local government and spent money somewhat injudiciously, even though they generated their own revenues--this came to a head during the economic downturn and the organization was widely criticized; in response the City Council decided to fold the TBCT and incorporate it into the city government structure, which may have negative ramifications for continued program effectiveness as its revenues get siphoned off and political priorities of elected officials shift elsewhere);
4. funding to realize the plan, usually a combination of local, regional, state, and national sources, and in Europe, "structural adjustment" and other programmatic funding from the European Regional Development Fund and related programs is also available (Hamburg, as a city-state, has extra-normal access to funds beyond what may normally be available to the average city);
5. integrated branding and marketing programs to support the realization of the plan (Hamburg, Vienna, Liverpool, Bilbao, Dublin);
6. flexibility and a willingness to take advantage of serendipitous events and opportunities and integrate new projects into the overall planning and implementation framework (examples include Bilbao's "acquisition" of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum and the creation of a light rail system to complement its new subway system, Liverpool City Council's agreement with a developer to create the Liverpool One mixed use retail, office, and residential development in parallel to the regeneration plan and the hosting of the Capital of Culture program in 2008, and how multifaceted arts centers were developed in otherwise vacated properties rented out cheaply by their owners in Dublin, Helsinki, and Marseille).
7. commitment and time.  Revitalization is a forever process that takes a long time to begin to see results.  It needs to continue beyond the vicissitudes of changing political administrations.
8. adaptive management. Visionary revitalization requires continuous process improvement.  Other ways to think about it are using the design method or adaptive management instead of remaining static.  Programs can always be improved and should be.

But we have plenty of our own good and bad examples in the US. DC CDCs and the H Street CDC in particular.  Fleetwood Mac sang the song, "You can go your own way."  That hasn't worked out so well for DC ("Urban economic development best practice is not found in DC").