Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. Planning Manager Tim Kelly emails a weekly GR Forward update to the project Steering Committee. Here's this week's communication:

Good Morning Everyone,

I hope you are all finishing up a great week.

Our neighborhood meetings continued this week. Monday we met with our friends in West Grand and Creston, while last night we were in the Black Hills. Despite the cold, we still had a good turnout at each meeting, and gathered some important feedback around the draft strategies.

Below is a listing of the dates, times, and locations for our upcoming meetings. Aa reminder, these are open to anyone, not just those that live in the neighborhood. We hope you can join us!

  • Riverhouse HOA: Thursday, March 5 at 6p at Riverhouse Condominiums
  • LINC First Friday: Friday, March 6 at 5:30p at LINC Community Revitalization Inc.
  • Heritage Hill: Tuesday, March 10 at 5:30p at Cornerstone Church
  • Belknap Lookout: Wednesday, March 11 at 6:00p at Belknap Commons

Along with the neighborhood meetings this week, we also gave presentations to the groups listed below. Again, if anyone is interested in having a representative of GR Forward come give a presentation, please let me know.

  • Grand Rapids Kiwanis Club
  • Weston Apartments Resident Council

Web Numbers

The latest web and social media numbers are below. Though we continue to see positive trends, our activity slowed a bit this week. We expect those numbers to pick up a bit with our upcoming activities.

Resources

A couple of resources for you this week.

First is this article from the San Francisco Chronicle about identifying the privately owned public spaces throughout their Downtown.

These spaces were created after the City enacted a policy requiring 1 square foot of public space be created for every 50 square feet of new commercial space developed, Since passing the ordinance, more than 20 of those spaces have been developed, but frequently they are located on rooftops or indoors, and are difficult to identify. To combat this, the City has created a map identifying all of the spaces, and has required improved signage to identify where the spaces exist. This has helped increase knowledge of these spaces, and closer to achieving their goal of increased access to public space in some of the dense areas of the City.

In addition, this article from The Atlantic on the success of Minneapolis – St. Paul metro area is really interesting.

Among the successes identified most recently for the Twin Cities was a place in the top 10 for highest college-graduation rate, highest median earnings, and lowest poverty rate. Further, according to the Center for Housing Policy, low-income families can rent a home and commute to work more affordably in Minneapolis–St. Paul than in all but one other major metro area (Washington, D.C.). Perhaps most impressive, is the highest employment rate for 18-to-34-year-olds in the country.

While there are likely multiple factors for the success of the area, the conventional thinking points to the Twin Cities unusual approach to regional governance that requires high-income communities to share their tax revenues and their real estate with the lower and middle classes.

This regional approach to governance grew out of local realities in the 1960s, where districts and towns in the region began offering competing tax breaks to lure in new businesses, diminishing their revenues and depleting their social services in an effort to steal jobs from elsewhere within the area. To combat this, in 1971, the region came up with a plan that would help halt this race to the bottom, and address widening inequality. The Minnesota state legislature passed a law requiring all of the region’s local governments—in Minneapolis and St. Paul and throughout their ring of suburbs—to contribute almost half of the growth in their commercial tax revenues to a regional pool, from which the money would be distributed to tax-poor areas. Today, business taxes are used to enrich some of the region’s poorest communities.

As the article points out, this was the first time such a plan—known as “fiscal equalization”—was tried at the metropolitan level. “In a typical U.S. metro, the disparities between the poor and rich areas are dramatic, because well-off suburbs don’t share the wealth they build,” says Bruce Katz, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. But for generations now, the Twin Cities’ downtown area, inner-ring neighborhoods, and suburbs have shared in the metro’s commercial success. By spreading the wealth to its poorest neighborhoods, the metro area provides more-equal services in low-income places, and keeps quality of life high just about everywhere.

In addition to their regional sharing of tax revenues, in 1976 Minnesota state legislature also passed a law requiring local governments to plan for their fair share of affordable housing. The Twin Cities enforced this rule vigorously, compelling low-income housing throughout the fastest-growing suburbs. “In the 1970s and early ’80s, we built 70 percent of our subsidized units in the wealthiest districts,” Myron Orfield, Director of the Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota said. “The metro’s affordable-housing plan was one of the best in the country.”

While the policies at play in the Twin Cities have yet to be re-created elsewhere in the United States, cities and states would do well to learn from their creative approach to address metropolitan level issues.

As always, if you have any questions let me know. Otherwise, have great weekend!