Festivals are withering due to high costs for permitting

Fee for service versus community building and economic development. A challenge with street festivals is the desire for community building, and local economic development--festivals bring out lots of customers, and this can be significant at the scale of a city's economy.  From the Detroit News article, "Chinatown Block Party seeks to build unity, grow community in Detroit":

"And more festivals like this, more activations like this, where people can come together, learn, build and grow, are needed today," Sweets said. "As a Filipino American and a Detroiter, it's really nice to see an opportunity for not only Chinatown, but other Asian American businesses owners, individuals, cultures, to come and be represented, to show up what we are, who we are, what we do."

Artscape in Baltimore is one of my favorite festivals, not just with arts and crafts vendors, but the participation of programs at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art, students presenting their work and projects, nonprofits, and arts organizations, along with music stages.

But covid and changes in government support make the festival very different and less successful today.

The H Street Festival in DC attracts more than 100,000 patrons to its one day event.

But cities focused on reimbursement fees for services--for street closure, inspection, and emergency services, etc.--make it increasingly difficult to hold events ("The economics are rapidly becoming impossible for your favorite street festival," Sherwood News).  

Covid didn't help because many festivals were cancelled during that time, and festivals lost their financing momentum and have had a difficult time getting it back ("The economic ripples of events canceled due to COVID-19," Marketplace, "Festivals in the COVID Age of Crisis," Contemporary Theatre Review).

Events are usually paid for by a mix of sponsorships and booth rental fees, but these "revenues" are often not much more, or less than the cost of the fees to the city, managing the event, and entertainment fees for bands and musicians.

-- "The tension between monetizing public space and placemaking | rethinking how neighborhoods are supported by local governments," 2018
-- "Two sides of the same coin: how to support community events in the face of high charges for permits etc.?," 2011
-- New Visions for New York Street Fairs , Center for an Urban Future, NYC

Security concerns/bollards.  Some reimbursement is justified, with increased concerns over security, as there have been terrorist attacks or devastating accidents at festivals, with deaths, from inadequately closed roads.  Streets closed frequently, such as for farmers markets, and large festivals, should have permanent retractable bollards installed.

Better bollards than vehicles, which can be displaced by a fast moving heavy vehicle.  The best bollards are rated for crashes at 50 mph.

Technical support.  10+ years ago, the Celebrate Fairfax (County, Virginia) organization used to sponsor workshops for organizations wanting to put on festivals.  While many cities have "Special Events Offices," they seem to be more about the regulatory aspect rather than also being charged with providing technical assistance to organizations so that festivals are both more successful and safe.

The Manayunk Arts Festival held on Main Street, which is closed for the occasion.  Tyger Williams, Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rising costs make festivals uneconomic ("Street festival organizers say the rising costs of Philadelphia police patrols are crushing them," Philadelphia Inquirer).

In 2019, the Manayunk Development Corp. paid just over $18,800 for the police patrols, sanitation services, and health and safety inspections required to throw the neighborhood’s beloved Manayunk Arts Festival. In 2023, the same amount barely covered the cost of the Philadelphia Police Department alone.

The two-day event is one of the largest outdoor arts festivals in the area, drawing an average of 40,000 people to a four-block stretch of Main Street every June since 1990 to peruse offerings from upward of 250 artists. At first, said executive director Gwen McCauley, the festival was so profitable it could help bankroll other community events. Now, she said, it’s barely breaking even amid increasing bills.

“We’re limping along,” McCauley said.

Also see "The Northern Liberties Night Market is canceled after the costs of required police patrols and sanitation services have more than doubled" and "Midtown Village cancels its fall festival after 20 years, citing rising costs," PI).

Thousands of visitors stroll down Danforth Avenue during the formerly annual street festival Taste of the Danforth, in Toronto, on August 11, 2019. Steve Russell/Toronto Star

Toronto ("When Toronto loses a public event like Taste of the Danforth, it loses more than just a street festival," Toronto Star).

There was a time when Taste of the Danforth, recently cancelled again this year, was a red dot on Toronto summer calendars: free to attend, with delicious food and drink and clever musical programming on offer. A relatively sober urban strip would become a bustling quasi-European thoroughfare; you’d see elders among the teens, interlopers from the west end making their annual pilgrimage to the east. .

Events like DoWest Fest, MixTO, Salsa on St. Clair, Geary Artcrawl and OssFest have supplanted Taste of the Danforth, but in a city of Toronto’s size, no number of street festivals is too high. Owing to our relatively orderly, responsible and respectful nature, Do West Fest, for instance, never rings too far off the hook despite more than a million visitors coursing through its veins over two and a half days.

Festivals are hard to pull off, even with a lot of resources.  It isn't always, but mostly, the "city's fault" that festivals don't reoccur.  At least in Toronto the city has formalized a $3.25 million fund to support festivals ("Here’s why the Taste of the Danforth festival keeps getting cancelled," Star).

Wicker Park Fest.  Photo: JMiller.

Chicago ("Chicago street festivals are struggling. Here's why," Crain's Chicago Business).  According to Crain's, Chicago festivals are having problems, some cancelling, because of a loss of sponsors and a decline in gate revenues.

Unlike festivals I've gone to in other cities, many Chicago festivals charge for admission.  And, like Philadelphia and Toronto, a rise in the various charges by government agencies for the provision of services like inspection and policing.  From the article:

Gate donations are a main revenue stream for Chicago street festivals, which are usually hosted by chambers of commerce to raise money for neighborhood improvement. Because the festivals are held on public ways — i.e., in the middle of the street — Chicago rules stipulate organizers cannot charge an entry fee. Instead, they ask for donations. Though it varies, gate donations typically comprise about one-third of a street festival’s revenue. Vendor fees and sponsorship are other primary revenue streams.

Music festivals.  Community festival issues are different from music festivals ("High costs leaving festivals 'struggling to survive'," BBC, "‘It becomes a no-go zone all summer’: How music festivals are ruining British parks," Daily Telegraph), which are more focused on arts as presentation, especially the presentation of non-local artists, with a place-based focused that is less connected than a community festival.

WRT music festivals, the Philadelphia Inquirer offers an observation that multi-day music festivals do better when they aren't generic, have a distinctive identity and a focus on community building ("How has the Roots Picnic continued to thrive while Made in America has been canceled again?").

Brockwell Park damage after a music festival. Alamy photo.

Another issue is damage, with ticketed or private events in regular public parks like Grant Park in Chicago, home to the Lollapalooza music festival.

There is a tension in holding ticketed/exclusive events in regular parks between the revenue they generate for the park system versus damage and other costs ("Lollapalooza producers to pay $410,000 to clean up Grant Park after this year’s music festival," Chicago Tribune, "The Tough Mudder run ripped up our London park, and residents are paying the price," Guardian), "One-third of Central Park's Great Lawn 'fully destroyed' after damage from Global Citizen Festival, rains," Fox News) and access restrictions ("A New Home for New York Fashion Week," New York Times). 

Solution: Cities should budget monies for festivals.  For community building, neighborhood planning, and local economic development reasons, cities should allocate monies to support these events functioning at the neighborhood and city-wide scales.  

Some cities make some monies available, but it can be very arbitrary on who gets money--connections matter.

Better to set up funding guidelines and a systematic process for awarding funding.

Apartment building reaches out to local Single Family Residents as potential marketers of the neighborhood

In community revitalization, property owners are seen as more valuable then renters, and most of our local involvement methods focus on property owners, except for interest groups which expand the range of participation, such as tenants unions, or anti-poverty groups.

I've wondered about the dilemma of community involvement in neighborhoods with a mix of renters and owners.  In the Carrollsburg neighborhood of DC, which was built on the grounds of a public housing project, and mixes owner-occupied (the majority of housing), with apartments set to look like rowhouses, managed by the DC Housing Authority, the resident association is for owners only.

Segregation of the poor.  It reminds me of "poor doors" in mixed income housing developments ("City Has Gone from Allowing ‘Poor Doors’ to Permitting ‘Poor Buildings’," City Limits, "‘There’s no way I can pay’: London residents despair of steep costs and forced use of ‘poor door’" and "Poor doors: the segregation of London's inner-city flat dwellers," Guardian).  

The playground at Baylis Old School development in south London ‘where an impenetrable hedge separates the owner occupiers’ kids playground from the narrow strip allotted to families in social and affordable rented housing in the same block’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian 

Some developments in London even precluded low income residents from using public facilities associated with the building (" This article is more than 6 years old Too poor to play: children in social housing blocked from communal playground" and "Playgrounds only for the rich kids? What grotesque social apartheid," Guardian).

So this act by a local apartment building in Salt Lake is very interesting, where they had an open house and invited area residents, in part to convert them as "salespeople" for promoting living in the neighborhood and in their particular apartment building.

Relatedly, years ago I had the idea--when urban living was at the beginning of its resurgence--that apartment buildings should set up a couple of B&B apartments so people could experiment with the choice at a low cost.

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A charter school by my house in DC for its first years invited residents to participate in events as a way to increase involvement and likely reduce complaints from people not happy with living near an institutional use.

Church and social spaces: grant opportunity

Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Duquesne, Pennsylvania. Photo: Matthew Christopher, Abandoned America.  From "Why Are There So Many Abandoned Churches?," Atlas Obscura.

My writings on churches have been somewhat negative, shaped by my agnosticism-atheism, and my experience in DC, where many churches built large property portfolios that they didn't take care of, bought buildings to tear them down for parking, and the phenomenon of urban church closure, abetted by the high cost of maintenance and repair, alongside neighborhood change and suburban outmigration, etc.  

-- "Churches, community, religion and change," 2012/2015

Note that Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. lamented not wanting the religious part of church but still wanting the connection ("I left the church — and now long for a ‘church for the nones’" and letters to the editor, "Perry Bacon is not alone in his search for connection without church").

I am not religious, but I definitely respect the social justice strain of Christianity.  In DC, there is the Sojourners group, and also Luther Place Memorial Church (Evangelical Lutheran), which in the 1980s started leveraging their property portfolio on Thomas Circle to house people in need. There are probably more positive examples than I realize, and that's the case in many cities across the country.

Sign on what is mutual aid at the Steinbruck Center for Social Justicer at Luther Place.

I've written about third spaces ("Third Place Issues," 2024), including how church social halls helped the nascent DC punk music scene develop in the 1970s and 1980s, where social halls were the venue for all ages concerts.

Last year, Eerdman's published Gone for Good: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition. It asks the very good question about what do you do with church spaces, especially those serving community purposes, when a church closes?  Who picks up the slack, if anyone? (Interview)

Note that there is the phenomenon of the "non church" ex-religious building still used for community events, like the 6th and I Synagogue in DC ("Born Again," Washingtonian).  This, the Atlanta Freethought Society ("Smyrna Atheist Helps Revive 140-Year-Old Primitive Baptist Church," Patch), and the Washington Ethical Society, an offshoot of the Unitarian-Universalist Church, is probably what Perry Bacon is looking for.

That's a provocative question, making me more aware of my previous bias.  

I realized that my thinking about "the church in the city" was too narrow, and at the same time, how to translate the idea or concept of social infrastructure as laid out by Eric Klinenberg in Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life could use examples of religious facilities as part of the exploration into facilities and programming that could make social infrastructure real.  This is a long term writing project.

The idea of facilities and programming isn't different from my writings on how to support the development and maintenance of a local arts ecosystem.

-- "Reprinting with a slight update, 'Arts, culture districts and revitalization'," 2009/2019

Church Brew Works, Pittsburgh.

Note that one trend in church recapture in the face of abandonment has been conversion to housing ("These old Maine churches are being transformed into homes," Bangor Daily News, although DC has had instances of this since the 1980s) or other types of for profit development ("As Hundreds of Churches Sit Empty, Some Become Hotels and Restaurants," New York Times).

Like the Church Brew Works in Pittsburgh (which is pretty cool--but its creation led the Cardinal of the Milwaukee diocese to put strict restrictions on what could go into sold off church property, "What to do with a closed church? Why, you sell it, of course," AP); and we stayed in an airbnb in a converted church in Savannah once, as well).  Also see "What should we do with all of those empty churches?," BigThink.

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Because time is of the essence, I thought it would be worth bringing this up even though I'm nowhere near the stage of a review because the National Fund for Sacred Places has a small grant fund:

Apply by Mar 15, 2025 

to provid[e] technical and financial support for congregations to repair or improve the functionality of their community spaces. To apply for the grant, the space must have been originally built to be a house of worship and owned by a faith community; the congregation must be at least three years old; the property must possess historical, cultural, or architectural significance; and the congregation must be community-minded and serve nonmembers, among a few other considerations.

Little Free Bakery, Seattle

The Little Free Library initiative has spawned a number of extensions including Seed Libraries, Community Refrigerators and Pantries, dog toy sharing (at least in Salt Lake), etc.

FWIW, I thought the norm for LFLs would be a default to schlock fiction, but I've found plenty of good nonfiction and schlock fiction that I like.  I try to save magazines and such that I don't rip up to provide people with an opportunity for a second read.

Occasional contributions from the Columbia City neighborhood include unsold day-old pastries from a nearby cafe. (Jill Lightner)

In Seattle, has created a Little Free Bakery to share baked goods ("These brownies are a huge hit at Taste writer’s Little Free Bakery," Seattle Times).  

I like to bake--pies, cakes and bread (GO! no knead bread recipes) but my cancer treatment has messed up my taste buds big time and I am not much into this stuff now.  I do wonder about savory breads more, but even then, it just doesn't seem that appealing.

It's a shame because I have lost massive amounts of weight.

From the article:

After too many months of this nonsense, my friend Lanne Stauffer came up with the perfect solution. When she opened her Little Free Bakery in Magnolia — picture a Little Free Library, but giving away baked goods instead of books — it took her about 10 minutes to convince me to open one, and about half that for my spouse to offer to build the box as his contribution. Hers will turn 3 this year, and mine has its second anniversary this week. There’s a scattering of them around town (mainly north of the Ship Canal; mine stands alone in the South End), and a thriving box in North Carolina, along with some pending in Pennsylvania and California. Type “littlefreebakery” into Instagram’s search, and you’ll find the list. 

Because I fill the box on a random schedule and live near the Columbia City business district, I’ve met dozens of employees who staff counseling services, restaurants, food pantries and schools, along with those who live in the neighborhood. When my neighbors were looking for a new roommate, the bakery box was a selling point. Kids bring their friends when they’re walking home from school. It turns out that all sorts of people appreciate home-baked treats, whether they know the baker or not.

Expert articulators of problems | a derisive term from new Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker

When I was in college, a lot of people criticized activists over "not having solutions" when they articulated problems. 

For decades, I've believed that identifying problems is a worthy skill, even if you don't have "the" answer--especially because many people who think they have "the answer" don't, they have an answer to one eensy element of the whole problem. 

Of course, having a good solution as well as an articulation of the problem is even better. That's what I aim to do in my blogwriting. Although I argue that half of what I write about is systems failure and bad decision making; the other half best practice ("solutions") although not every best practice is universally applicable.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas is somewhat derisive of the new mayor's declaration of a state of emergency giving the designees for action 100 days to come up with a plan to deal with the city's crime problems, including the massive set of drug markets and decay in the Kensington neighborhood ("Business and Bloodshed").
 

She figures they should focus on doing, that there are already plenty of plans in the bookshelves and computers in city offices ("We’ve finally declared a public safety emergency in Philadelphia. But why do we have to wait to act on it?").

Her column mentions how the Mayor has a term that is derisive of the activists and others who call on the city to constantly do better.  From the PI:

 “Expert articulators of problems,” also know[n] as “AOPs”: These are people who like to point out, for example, that Philly has the highest poverty rate among the 10 largest U.S. cities, but are “very, very, very short on delivering solutions,” as Parker said Tuesday. She is not a fan of AOPs.

Parker is no different from the professors who tried to denigrate our arguments 40 years ago, "because we didn't offer solutions simultaneously with identifying problems."  Note that's an illogical argument.

The failure to not avail oneself of the knowledge and insights of AOPs is close to criminal.  Although granted I joke that there is a fine line between "critical analysis" (me) and "whining" (Greater Greater Washington blog).

Every once in awhile I get "despondent" about DC Government, and all the job interviews I had to no avail (I did get a job offer once, but they then reneged with no explanation--I figure it was because of my "outspokenness").  But all I wanted to do was help to make the city better.

And my all too brief* planning job in Baltimore County proved I was fully capable of working "within the system" without being a super huge PITA, but a PITA nonetheless because I wasn't satisfied with the status quo.  (* Bad timing there too.  I was on a grant.  The director wanted to hire me back, but then wasn't retained after the next election, so I lost my chance.)

Anyway, I am proud to be an AOP.

Improving the food system related host/ess gifts for Thanksgiving

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This is a pipe dream.  People don't really want to think at Thanksgiving, they want to eat.  

This is partly a reprint and I haven't necessarily re-checked the links.

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Thanksgiving is Thursday November 23rd.

A few years ago I started writing a Thanksgiving piece, with the aim of suggestions of "guest-brought gifts" that touched somehow on food issues, lasting longer than the contents of a bottle of wine, along with the opportunity to discuss broader foodways and access issues.  

Previous year's entries discussed issues like "Native Americans and the Pilgrims," takings of land, etc. ("Happy Thanksgiving: Stay Home!") and food security ("Happy Thanksgiving").

Pandemic: Cooking at home.  The pandemic shifted how we eat at least for a time.  After decades of increasing consumption of prepared meals, to the point where more than 50% of dollars spent on food was out of home, more people cooked their meals out of necessity.

Of course, restaurants were decimated by the pandemic, many closed.  Many shifted to take out operations.  Some were good at it, many sucked.  Online grocery delivery took off too, but it's still unprofitable (picking orders and delivery is expensive--in the old way, those elements were "off loaded" to the customer).

For example one change was a massive increase in baking like with sourdough starters--flour producers had 3x and 6x increases in sales compared to their previous best seasons during the holiday, canning (I learned how to do freezer jam, which is easier), etc. ("One Year Later: How the Pandemic Changed Home Cooking," Allrecipes, "Survey: 7 in 10 consumers say they will keep cooking at home after the pandemic," FoodDive).

People are eating out more now, as vaccination rates increase, but there is still a greater amount of home-based cooking than there was before.

Photo: Jonathan Wiggs, Boston Globe.

Restaurants are still closing in 2023.  And restaurants are still feeling the effects, as of 2023, restaurants continue to close at disproportionate rates ("Why are so many restaurants closing in Washington DC?," AS, "Roughly 17% of US restaurants have permanently shut down since the start of the pandemic as industry leaders warn of an 'unprecedented economic decline'," BI) as work from home reduces patronage in business districts, and as inflationary boosts to the cost of restaurant meals leads people to reduce the number of times they go out to eat in a typical week or month.

Inflation along with rising wage rates have also affected restaurants.

Pandemic: Supply chain and now inflation.  When I wrote this in 2021, a new issue was the impact of the pandemic on global supply chains especially of food--prices are rising significantly at least for some items as much as 10%, 20%, or more, and foods, like turkey, pumpkin, and cranberries, typically part of the Thanksgiving food array are increasingly difficult to source ("Buying turkey and pie for Thanksgiving? Get ready for higher prices and ‘don’t wait until Wednesday night'," Chicago Tribune).

It's just as bad now.  Most of the price increases are baked in.  But in our area, in terms of best price, mayonnaise has more than doubled, skinless chicken breasts are up 75%.  The specific coffee we buy is up 60%.  

Source: SmartSense

Source: Mexicom Logistics

Thoughtful Thanksgiving host/ess gifts beyond wine.  The first time I wrote this post was in 2016, but I've never done it early enough in the month, when you can actually procure an item in time, without paying for expedited shipping.  Some of these items I've probably mentioned before, some are new.

1.  A gift subscription to a regional food magazine.  A gift subscription to one of the Edible Communities regional publications on the local food system would be great.  They now have 83 affiliates in the US and Canada. Each magazine covers its local food scene, from farmers and restaurants to markets and recipes.  Some areas have publications outside of the Edible Communities publications, like Savor Virginia.

2. How about Cook's Illustrated, Cook's County, or Fine Cooking, independently published specialty recipe magazines produced to a high quality, with a great deal of research.

3.  Gift subscription to a regional lifestyle magazine that covers foodways issues.  If you live in the South (Southern Living), in California/Pacific Northwest (Sunset) or New England (Yankee Magazine) these magazines are great guides about homes, regional traditions, travel, and food, with great recipes.

4.  Are there children in the house?  ChopChop Family is an initiative promoting healthier eating for families, and greater engagement by children in preparing meals.

They publish a quarterly magazine, ChopChop.  They also promote bulk subscriptions of the magazine for schools, health clinics, and other institutional settings, to promote access to the publication so that it can reach audiences that may not otherwise come across it.

Raddish is a cooking club for children, that is subscription based.  Each month the child receives a kit with recipes, a cooking tool, and projects.  (Food isn't provided, but a grocery list for the recipes is.)

5.  Books on regional foodways/cookbooks.  There are a number of books published that explore regional foodways and systems, and I think it would be cool to come in hand with a great book on regional foodways. Darrin Nordahl's newest book, Eating Appalachia: Rediscovering Regional American Flavors, explores the Appalachian region. Writing primarily about (but not limited to) the Southwest, Gary Nabhun has written many books about food, cuisine, and agriculture.

Chesapeake Table is about foods and recipes for the Chesapeake Bay region, while This is the Plate is published by the University of Utah Press and is about all aspects of Utah foodways.  

In a way, it reminds me of the book The Edible City, part of the uTOpia book series on re-envisioning Toronto, although that book is more about the food system, less about individual foods.

A good locally-focused bookstore ought to be able to make recommendations relevant to your region.  I'm still looking for a killer recipe for Brunswick Stew, a dish that both Georgia and Virginia claim as their own.

For example, I never knew about Sweet Potato Pie until I moved to Washington, DC and started eating in soul food restaurants.  

From the La Cocina cookbook.

Or oyster stuffing, which is common in the Chesapeake Bay region and the Pacific Northwest, where oysters are grown.  Or Mashed Turnips instead of mashed potatoes--they're really really good.

Many public markets and farmers markets publish cookbooks, which would be a great regionally-relevant gift.

Maine Farm Table Cookbook and the Chelsea Market Cookbook are great.  So are books published by artisan markets like San Francisco's Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food and Seattle's Cooking from Scratch cookbook by the PCC Community Markets, or community food entrepreneurship programs, like San Francisco's We Are La Cocina: Recipes in Pursuit of the American Dream.

Many farmer's and public markets have cookbooks.  Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Public Market has at least three.  I like the one from St. Paul's Farmer's Market.

Photo © Victoria Harley / Nourish Books

Baking.  The Slow Dough Real Bread Book, published by the Real Bread Campaign in the UK is interesting.  

Their focus is on shifting people from manufactured mass production bread to artisan bread, even the creation of micro-bakeries and "community supported bakeries."  

Real Bread Campaign's book on CSBs, Knead to Know ... More has just been re-published in a second edition.    

It's maybe a bit hard core for me, but Bread on the Table is another bread baking book that is incredible in its detail.  

But hands down, the easiest bread to bake comes from the recipes by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City, first popularized by an article in the New York Times in 2006--although it took me til 2020 to finally start baking it regularly.  He compiled recipes into My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method.

As long as you have a Dutch Oven, no knead bread is simple.  If you don't, even this no knead ciabatta bread is quite easy.

Although The Good Book of Southern Baking: A revival of biscuits, cakes, and cornbread looks interesting too.   (Although I have good recipes for biscuits and cornbread.  The Indian Head cornmeal recipe--IH was once milled in Ellicott City, Maryland--is fine.)

Vegetables.  Roasting vegetables is easy and makes them taste so great.  Same with grilling.  Although Steve Raichlen--he of the various BBQ shows on PBS and author of many cookbooks--takes grilling vegetables to new levels in How to Grill Vegetables.

Cooking at Home: Dinner.  NYT food editor Sam Sifton's book See You on Sunday: A Cookbook for Family and Friends has a nice discussion of the value of eating together and great recipes.

African-American Foods.  Chef and food personality Marcus Samuelsson has recently published The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food ("Marcus Samuelsson: Erasing Black Culinary History Ignores 'The Soul Of American Food'," NPR).  Samuelsson's PBS show "No Passport Required" is well worth watching.  

Another good book is Jubilee (Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking) by food journalist Toni Tipton-Martin ("Toni Tipton-Martin Writes Her Own Legacy," NYT).

Garden/Yard.  How about 50 ways to help save the bees or Composting For a New Generation: Latest Techniques for the Bin and Beyond.

6.  Books on food activism.  If your host is interested in food-related activism, how about:

-- Feed the Resistance: Recipes + Ideas for Getting Involved

-- The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement, about the repositioning of a food bank to a community food center in Toronto, which also touched off a national movement to shift how food banks operate in Canada ("Food activist Nick Saul on why we’re ripe for a revolution" and "Nick Saul: The man who built the foodie bank," Toronto Star).

A similar book was published in the US earlier in the year, but when I commented on a website article about it that the website failed to acknowledge that The Stop had been published many years before, they eliminated comments on that article.  Still, Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries: New Tools to End Hunger looks to be an important book.

And also by Island Press, Food Town, USA: Seven Unlikely Cities That are Changing the Way We Eat, which discusses community food systems and innovative programs in seven communities across the country, including Lehigh Valley Pennsylvania and Boise--home to the Tomato Independence Project, which encourages people to grow their own ("Building a Better Tomato," Edible Idaho).

A couple of older books in this vein, are The Town that Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food, about the development of a more locally based food economy in Hardwick, Vermont ("Frontlines of a food revolution," Los Angeles Times), and Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement is Changing the Way We Eat, which features short chapters on various best practice initiatives across the county.

National Volunteer Week: April 16th-22nd

You'd think I'd know about National Volunteer Week, the third week of April, but either I didn't know or I forgot.  But there have been a bunch of Associated Press articles in my newsfeed, which clued me in.

-- "Volunteers speak on why they serve and why more people don’t"
-- "Nonprofits scramble for help amid dearth of volunteers"
-- "New to volunteering? A How-To-Guide to find the right fit"
-- "Why are volunteerism rates uneven? Florida, Wyoming explain"
-- "Corporate volunteerism: ‘Not charity. It’s good business'" 

One of the many regrets I have is not getting a PhD in planning.  My intended thesis was around urban planning and civic participation and engagement, because local land use issues are the issue most likely to get people involved in local civic affairs, other than having children and being involved in education issues.

Because of my own journey of involvement in planning, I have always advocated for structuring planning processes in ways that educate participants, build their skills, and obviously, provide opportunities for substantive input and shaping the process.

I think that parks, libraries, sustainable mobility programs, and other civic assets are potential touchpoints for civic engagement and participation.  But that our management processes aren't set up to do that.  And this is increasingly important as our country becomes more polarized, and even outside of this, people are very quick to criticize elected officials and government processes as uniformly corrupt, etc.

But parks agencies and libraries aren't set up to do this purposively. And they don't acknowledge civic engagement as an important element of parks practice in their master plans.

WRT parks, I always use the example of Park Pride, the friends group for Greater Atlanta, and Park People in Canada, which publish a lot of interesting guides on parks as platforms for community and engagement.

National Trails Day (June), National Public Lands Day (September),  and Parks Month (July) are good times to promote civic engagement and volunteerism, as is Earth Day, which is Saturday.

Schools have PTAs, but there isn't the kind of investment in capacity building and technical assistance to make it happen.  

Lots of libraries have friends groups.  The Friends of the Salt Lake City Library, which covers all of the libraries in the city, is particularly good ("Outdoor library book sale as an opportunity for "social bridging"/triangulation").

Filling sandbags at Sugar House Park, Salt Lake City.

This week: How about volunteering in something?  This past week, many people in the Salt Lake Valley have come together to fill sandbags, to ward off the flooding expected from the melting of the record snows.  My neighborhood is crossed by a couple of these creeks, and flooding has been happening already.

The sandbags are used by city and county agencies, and residents who abut creeks and other places likely to flood.

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a lot of this section is reprinted from other entries
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Citizen engaged planning practice.  (These are just some examples.)  What distinguished the no longer extant Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program is that it was citizen-led.  Using money from TIF bonds, funds were provided to neighborhood groups to work with the school system, parks board, and other agencies.

Neighborhood groups had to come together to come up with and implement a program of community improvements.  The city developed a capacity building and training infrastructure to support it, after they realized the average community group didn't have the capacity to do it on their own.

In DC, a great example is community-initiated urban design improvement planning by the Bloomingdale Civic Association in their Bloomingdale Village Center Project, which stepped in amidst the failure of the DC Office of Planning and Department of Transportation to pursue transformational planning approaches despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on community planning.

In Calgary, where neighborhood recreation centers are run by community organizations, the Federation of Calgary Communities provides technical support and an extensive schedule of training classes for community groups, including having urban planners on staff to assist neighborhoods dealing with difficult problems and new development  ("Community association planning committees a hidden gem?," Calgary Herald)

The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods sponsors a variety of programs where citizens undertake community projects with financial and training support from the city.  Unlike DC's "constituency service" programs by Councilmembers and the Mayor's Office, these initiatives are designed to support DIY self-help efforts driven independently of elected officials.  While out of date in terms of current programs, the book Neighbor Power describes the first couple decades of the program.

Safe Routes to School programs can be a system for civic engagement and neighborhood improvement.  Interestingly, the Tacoma Washington SRTS program adds "Engagement" to the traditional 5/6 E's framework for bike and pedestrian planning.  

Nationally, the Safe Routes to School Partnership is the primary resource.

Starkville in Motion is an advocacy group in Mississippi that used "walking and biking to school" as a way to engage the community on improving pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure more generally, which is a point made by the Washington State guidebook, School Walk and Bike Routes: A Guide for Planning and Improving Walk and Bike to School Options for Students, that infrastructure improvements for children walking and biking to school also benefit neighborhoods and builds support for the program.

Pedestrian advocacy organizations like Feet First in Seattle have provided a great deal of support to Walk to School efforts.  

Models for technical assistance and capacity development

• Decades ago, there was an organization called the Nonprofit Support Center, which provided training in a number of cities, including DC.
• Dallas Public Library has an Urban Information Center with special information and publications on urban issues.
• The Massachusetts Citizen Planner Training Collaborative is a statewide training program for members of planning and zoning boards, but this concept can be extended to civic engagement more generally 
• The 1970-1980s Citizen Involvement Training Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst produced training materials and workshops (not unlike the ABCD Institute
• The Project for Public Spaces produced a workbook, now in a second edition, called How to Turn A Place Around, which they also offered as a workshop.  It's a great model for urban design focused workshops for neighborhoods that can also be used as civic engagement training.
• The Asset Based Community Development Institute, now at DePaul University, is focused on supporting the development of ground up citizen capacity and projects
• Community Design Centers were a 1960s and 1970s initiative to provide urban design assistance to neighborhoods.  Funded by HUD, and typically based at universities, many communities still are served by such programs, as well as urban design studio programs for architecture and planning schools.
• The Chicago Bungalow Association is a great example of a historic preservation initiative focused on stabilizing neighborhoods through historic preservation.
• Park Pride, the city- and county-wide park support organization in Atlanta, sponsors an annual conference for park professionals and advocates (they need to do more to get park advocates to participate), which is a great way to communicate best practices and build the knowledge-base of the park community.  They also have a small grant program for friends of parks groups.

Instead of contracting with consultants like most planning departments, Salt Lake City has developed a "civic engagement unit" that works across all city agencies for public projects (transportation and planning mostly, but other agencies too.  But there isn't a capacity building and training program to build citizen capacity like conferences, workshops, and trainings.  

Civic engagement in Savannah in the 1980s-1990s (no longer operational)

After finding that top-down community improvement programs weren't successful in terms of retaining and attracting residents, in the late 1980s, Savannah began developing an approach to community improvement that complemented city improvement and nuisance abatement programs by engaging citizens as "designers of neighborhood programs and producers of community change," assisted by financing, capacity building and technical support from the city government.  

It's comparable to the point Rolf Goetze makes in Building Neighborhood Confidence, that the point of government assistance in revitalization isn't to foster dependence, but to provide the spark and help to get the community back to the point where it is (re)investing in itself.  

This is the reverse of how many city governments approach community improvement, and what Savannah did is described in detail in Leading by Stepping Back: A Guide for City Officials on Building Neighborhood Capacity, published in 1999. 

Ward Halls/Democracy House.  In "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," calling it "Democracy House," I suggested that ward offices be created (not unlike ward/precinct halls in cities "back in the day") and that as part of the function, space and resources be provided to community groups involved in ward-specific activities.  Ward Democracy Houses should also include at least one annual "community organization fair" which could also serve as a volunteer recruitment event.

Funds for small projects.  A fund for small projects should be created for each ward, and the Participatory Budgeting process should be used to allocate funds ("An update on Participatory Budgeting practice in New York City," 2018).

Some cities already do this.

Savannah's "Grants for Blocks" program was aimed at micro projects, providing micro grants ($500 was the maximum, today it would be about $1,000, with inflation), supporting house and community improvements without a great deal of bureaucracy.

Each year a "Neighborhood Convention" unveiled the projects to the community.

London has a similar grants program for sustainable mobility improvements.

Salt Lake has a small grants program too, mostly targeting lower income areas.  But there are also funding opportunities for arts projects and events.  The amounts are maybe too small, especially with inflation, but that the programs exist is pretty amazing.

And a big funding tranche for capital improvement projects ("Salt Lake City Capital Improvement Program process allows for citizen initiated projects").  Not quite 10% of the projects each year are citizen initiated.  (I wrote an application for a study on improving park restrooms.  It's likely to be approved.)

Volunteer Expo, Asheville, North Carolina

With the decline in public media--newspapers and alternative weeklies especially, it's increasingly difficult for organizations to get the word out about volunteer opportunities.  

In Asheville ("Volunteer expo seeks to recruit help for over 65 local nonprofit organizations," WLOS-TV) the Junior League of Asheville just sponsored the fifth edition of its Annual Volunteer Expo.

The Hill Center on Capitol Hill in DC sponsors something similar, focused on the Capitol Hill neighborhood, but the room they hold it in is too small.  I suggested they move it to Eastern Market's North Hall, but they evinced zero interest.

In "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda" (2015), I suggested each city political district should sponsor a volunteer expo, based on the Hill Center effort, but of course, a city-wide event can be just as good.

More opportunities need to be provided to seed community involvement.

Flyer, Park City (Utah) Community Events for September 2022

 

 

 

This flyer is from Park City Utah, and was placed at the library.

 

With the decline of metropolitan newspapers, special city sections with calendars ("One more blow against community media: Washington Post drops Thursday "county" news special sections," ), community newspapers ("DC's community newspaper weekly, the Northwest Current, goes out of business," 2018), the cessation of printing of alternative weeklies ("Staff And Locals React To End Of Washington City Paper Print Edition," DCist) although fortunately not in Salt Lake City, it becomes that much harder to find out about community events.

 

In the old days, when I'd travel I would pick up community newspapers and alternative weeklies and weekend sections in local newspapers to find other things to do, along with visitor centers (there should be community calendars posted there too), etc.  We found cool things like a concert at a church in Germantown in Philadelphia, and riding ferries for free when they were first introduced in Queens, New York, etc.

-- "Community cleanups (and other activities) as community building and civic engagement activities," 2011

 

Bulletin board, Lamplighter Coffee Roasters, Richmond

 

The libraries have bulletin boards for flyers, and coffee shops, grocery stores, etc.  

 

Community Notice Board, Merseytravel, Queens Square Bus Station, Liverpool

 

I've argued there need to be bulletin boards/kiosks in commercial districts and at transit stations.

 

-- "http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-not-post-outdoor-community.html," 2018

I guess we need to go back to kiosks and telephone poles.  But in communities where most people get around by car, that isn't a particularly good method.

Yard signs definitely need to be added to the mix.

The City of Salt Lake uses yard signs, banners at parks, and for some issues, like budget hearings flyers, to get the word out, along with postings on NextDoor and Reddit, Twitter feeds, etc.

 

 Lately I've been thinking about more formal community information kiosks in public buildings, definitely libraries and city hall, and wrt schools, in the foyers of schools, or outside.

A now closed small branch of the Salt Lake County Library located in the City of South Salt Lake posted official notices for that city, as well as for the County Library board.  I don't know if they've brought that practice yet to the new Granite Library branch which has replaced it, although the Mayor of City of South Salt Lake sets up drop in information/meeting sessions there ("New Granite Library, Salt Lake County Public Library System")..

(I just realized that they blew it when designing this library by not including a coffee shop.)

 

It could be modeled on the transit information kiosks that Arlington County does, but I'm thinking a multi-sided kiosk.

 

 Another idea is community organization/volunteer fairs.

Is this a fix for U.S. teen mass shooters? We are losing our 18-year-olds, especially men. A universal ‘gap year’ could help

Headline and subhead taken from the Will Bunch newsletter

Before the 2020 election, reading all the polls that called for a Democratic landslide, feeling optimistic, I started writing a piece on the necessity of refocusing on civic engagement and development of a sense of community and collective purpose ("Civic involvement and national service as a way to rebuild a sense of collective community").

But other than Trump losing to Biden, the election results were dismal.  Mostly, Democrats loss key seats--barely holding on to the House and seemingly not getting control of the Senate*. So I was seriously "depressed" and didn't finish the piece.

I do need to get back to it, although the way our system privileges minoritarian control of the Senate, Electoral College, and now the Supreme Court, I am not particularly hopeful anymore about the prospect and promise of "America"--although I still feel compelled to try to improve things. 

One reason to finish the piece is because Will Bunch, the opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, makes a brilliant point in this week's e-letter, that a way to deal with the anomie of young men is a national gap year ("Is this a fix for U.S. teen mass shooters?").  From the article:

But today I want to focus on the other commonality — that each of these mass murderers was a young man in the 18-21 age bracket, and that each had a similar biography in which their time after high school seemed a descent into an abyss of domestic violence at home and weird conspiracy theorizing or posturing on the internet. ...

America’s young men didn’t always go off the grid so easily and so often. A few decades ago, in a time when the rate of college attendance was lower, there were also more decent, better-paying job opportunities for teens looking to enter the workforce, which fostered the ability to establish a home or get married at a younger age, in working-class communities that felt more stable. Today, this cohort is increasingly lost and in crisis. ...

Young people who don’t attend college — but again, especially men — also are increasingly prone to so-called “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, suicide, or alcohol abuse. Yet many young people who do better academically are also stressed out to the max from the pressure they feel to get into “the right college,” or because of the exorbitant loans many need to pay for it. Even an elite campus like the University of Pennsylvania can struggle with suicide.

Part of the issue might be what I sometimes call “the college problem” in America — a shorthand for how the dream of higher education instead became a source of resentment for some and anxiety for others, and how these bitter reactions have fueled our political divide. But calling it a “college problem” undersells the real issue: the U.S. abandons its young citizens at age 18.

We need to broaden our ideas of what higher education — both in terms of job training, including trade school, but also critical thinking — can become, and to make this a “public good” like K-12 education. That could take the form of a so-called “gap year” for 18-year-olds of universal, mostly civilian (such as working on environmental projects or in public schools) national service, funded by the government.

The benefits of such a program would run well beyond spruced-up national parks. Instead of falling off the grid, 18-year-olds would be getting a helping hand to find themselves and maybe find something they love. The widespread acceptance of a “gap year” could encourage us to stop putting so much pressure on these teens to “figure it all out” their senior year of high school. If well run, programs like the proposed Civilian Climate Corps would bring together young people from the silos they now live in — including, yes, “red states” and “blue states” — and have them working toward a common purpose.

“We need to be reintroduced to each other in a place where we are all on the same team,” the University of Maryland professor Lilliana Mason wrote in a 2019 essay, along with her observation that a study showed Korean War veterans who fought in newly desegregated units came home scoring higher in racial tolerance than those who did not. Today, we’re very good at knowing everything that’s wrong with America, and terrible at doing anything about it. Universal civilian national service is one way of doing something about it.

 You should be reading Will Bunch anyway, but in particular this is a brilliant insight.  It's the basic argument in my half-written piece, about connection between otherwise dissimilar people, but I hadn't made the leap to the violence, adoption of conspiratorial outlooks, etc., that is fostered by this, especially by the people who don't go to college, and in the interim, aren't doing much else.,

Apparently Will Bunch's forthcoming book, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — And How To Fix It, has a chapter on national service.

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* It seemed likely the Democrats would lose the Senate because while both Senate seats in Georgia were thrown into a runoff because of a fluke, previously Democrats pretty much lost in runoffs.  But it turned out on January 5th both Democratic candidates won.  Halelulah.  

The next day was the Insurrection, so I returned to my political depression, which has only been made worse by Krysten Sinema ("Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema More Popular With Republicans Than Her Own Party, Polls Suggest," Forbes) and Joe Manchin ("Manchin says he won’t support new climate spending or tax hikes on wealthy," Washington Post) basically handing control of the Senate to the Republicans, and the rise of the theocratic majority on the Supreme Court.   

Manchin and Sinema basically doom the Midterms--I see the Democrats losing both the Senate and House, in part because of inflation, but also because of the failure to move a Democratic agenda forward + the Supreme Court.