The Political Whore

The National Civic League ’s 2009 All-America City Awards conference starts today in Tampa, and a common theme for cities is revitalizing downtowns. Here is Erie, Penn.’s effort along those lines:

Erie, Pennsylvania
Erie’s Downtown Revitalization Masterplan

Just as in many other urban communities in the latter half of the 20th century, residents began moving outside the city limits and into the suburbs.  Part of the city’s present day vision is to bring those families and young professionals back downtown by offering new and attractive urban living options. Downtown Erie’s 70-block core has been broken up into phases with different projects designed to fit each area.  Some of the projects include streetscaping, façade renovations, and lighting and park improvements.  In several other areas, the goal is to provide different levels of housing including market rate housing, low to moderate income housing, and some luxury housing, as well as office space and opportunity for commercial and retail development.  The plan calls for approximately $56 million in real estate development, representing 40,000 square feet of commercial development, 143 residential units, parks and street improvements.  Presently the Erie Redevelopment Authority and various development partners have approximately $6 million of mixed-use development under construction and another $12 million in projects are planned for construction in the next 6 to 24 months.

Thirty cities, towns, neighborhoods and communities are vying for recognition as an All-America City at the June 16-19 conference at the Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel. Each will give a short presentation on three public-private civic projects they undertook before a panel of judges names the best. Tampa is one of the finalists.

Former Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman is the president of the National Civic League this year and a big proponent of these kinds of partnership projects. During her tenure, in 1990, Tampa was named an All-America City. Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason is also involved, as a member of the Host Committee.

Construction at Eddy Street Commons, a mixed-use development that is part of the NNRO project.

This afternoon’s featured community in the National Civic League’s 2009 All-America City Awards (the conference convenes in Tampa next week) is South Bend, Ind.:

South Bend, Indiana
The Northeast Neighborhood Revitalization Organization (NNRO)

Facing dismal retail and housing trends in its Northeast Neighborhood, the City of South Bend brought together neighbors and leaders from the University of Notre Dame along with three key institutions within or on the neighborhood borders: Madison Center, Memorial Hospital of South Bend and Saint Joseph’s Regional Medical Center. They incorporated the NNRO in 2000 as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit for the neighborhood’s social, physical and economic revitalization. The institutions served as funding partners, committing a collective $1.75 million over the initial five years. This community partnership has resulted in transformed relationships among neighbors, the university, and private and public sectors, as well as in hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in retail, residential, and commercial development.

Thirty cities, towns, neighborhoods and communities are vying for recognition as an All-America City at the June 16-18 conference at the Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel. Each will give a short presentation on three public-private civic projects they undertook before a panel of judges names the best. Tampa is one of the finalists.

Former Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman is the president of the National Civic League this year and a big proponent of these kinds of partnership projects. During her tenure, in 1990, Tampa was named an All-America City. Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason is also involved, as a member of the Host Committee.

New feature time: I’m going to point out great conversations that occur on our comments, as well as the comment of the week. You win nothing except your 15 minutes of fame.

This week, the best conversation occurred in response to my latest post about the doings of Sen. Ronda Storms, and an anti-city law that would limit the finances of urban redevelopment districts, between Chris, Chris W, Bill Peak and Can’t We All Just Get Along. Here’s a sample:

1. Chris W Says:
   March 5th, 2008 at 6:07 pm eMaybe it’s time for Tampa and points west to form West Hillsborough County and leave the rest of it to the social conservatives so they can form their own inbred utopia.
2. Chris Says:
   March 5th, 2008 at 6:42 pm eLOL Chris W

   I grew up on the “west side” and to me anything east of US 301 was foreign territory.

   However, many younger, up and coming families have moved into Brandon, FIshhawk, etc in recent years (b/c of jobs and waning affordbility of home in Tampa proper)…give them some time to stay and get acclimated (unless the market drives them right back out first), and you might see a “moderation” across the county in a few years.

   And Tampa, the city, could stand to do a better job of moving itself out of the bubble for which it has viewed the world for years…Wayne was right in the aritcle, there’s 3x as many unincorported residents than city denizens…that’s a political fight the city lost 2 decades ago and will never get back.

3. BillPeak Says:
   March 5th, 2008 at 7:11 pm eOf course Help me Ronda would want to renew the city-county wars, these kooks thrive on dissension and the “us against them” attitude that is killing our county. Ronda and her master Hughes simply would never let the city and the county unite and heal towards the common goal of making the area a better place to live…”them gays is wiked”. In the united world of ideas and creativity they’d be lost and insignificant. They are only head honchos when they can mis-inform, play dirty politics, and buy off politicians….i.e. make things shitty for the rest of us.

   Without the “us and them” theatrics these losers would be exposed as the short-sighted cowards they really are.

4. Can’t We all Just Get Along Says:
   March 6th, 2008 at 1:11 pm eBill, I don’t disagree with your vew ont the policy issues.

   However, it’s not like the City of Tampa is brimming with gracious comraderie as well.

   The fact is the County – by nature of the role of local governments and by electoral facts – will always politically and fiscally hold the upper hand.

   That puts the city in a position of “suck it up and deal with it if you want to accomplish anything” that it frankly has never embraced, nor gotten past the denial that it is no longer top dog.

   And at the end of the day, perhaps the BOCC is representing their constituents well. Have you ever asked residents in the unincorporated county what defines their quality of life?

   If it comes down to 3 county residents opposed to mass transit versus one city resident in pro, you know how that vote is always going to go.

   And the more shrill you get calling those residents names like hillbilly, rube, ignorant, etc., the more they will glady exert that 3:1 power they have to strike you down in opposition.

Read the entire exchange here.

A rent-subsidized apartment complex in Belmont Heights, part of the East Tampa CRA, which would be impacted by Sen. Ronda Storms’ new legislation. (photo courtesy of tampagov.net)

The Times reports today that Sen. Ronda Storms has filed a bill that would make it tougher for cities across Florida to revitalize their decaying urban neighborhoods:

Storms, a Republican from Brandon, has proposed limiting to 15 years the life of special taxing districts intended to boost economic development in blighted areas. She also wants any district already in place for 15 years dissolved in 2009.

Such districts, called community redevelopment areas, redirect property taxes raised in their borders toward improving infrastructure and the economy in the area. They typically remain in place 20 to 30 years.

“It takes some time to build up resources that can be used to cure some of the more significant blight conditions in a community,” said Mark Huey, Tampa’s manager of economic development.

The motivation, ostensibly, is to get those property taxes now locked up in CRAs returned to county governments. It is part of Storms’ and her allies’ longtime power struggle against the city of Tampa. It is SB 1528, for those keeping score.

In the past year, Hillsborough County leaders have locked horns with the city over several issues, from Jim Norman’s insistence that county paramedics have a shot at extra-hours jobs at Raymond James Stadium to the possibility of consolidating some city-county services. That last idea, a pretty good one, was scuttled by Iorio because of the county’s anti-gay stance, which (and now we come full circle) was initiated by then-County Commissioner Ronda Storms.

All of this is the result of the fact that city leaders lorded over the unincorporated county and county commission for years until suburban sprawl in the ’80s and ’90s saw so much population growth that the county ended up with three times as many residents as the city. In the power struggle that ensued (and continues today), fiscal and social conservatives came to dominate county politics, which Tampa’s political structure remained more ethnic and more progressive. I wrote about the phenomenon in 2006, and not much has changed since then:

It is about control. It is about who will run Hillsborough. It is about growth and increasing the raw numbers of voters.

It is all about power.

Few of Tampa’s urban power brokers realize the depth of dislike out in the ‘burbs and beyond for their brand of politics. For decades, Tampa and its downtown set called the shots for the entire county. Tampa’s mayor sat atop that heap.

But starting in the 1990s, a group of political activists in eastern and southern Hillsborough worked to change that mix. They knew that the Tampa political base had something they didn’t: access to money, and lots of it. Developers and captains of industry played their politics and elected officials who hewed to a pro-downtown line. Tampa, with its working-class ethnic population, also skewed more Democrat.

So, armed with computers that constantly ran voter statistics, fueled by money from a handful of key supporters to pay for intensive polling that showed how and why certain candidates won races, and aided by a national swing to the right in 1994, these activists were ready to level the playing field. They brought together a working coalition to support conservative suburban candidates: anti-impact fee advocate Ralph Hughes, fiscal conservative Sam Rashid and anti-abortion financier Lorena Jaeb, to name a few.

They tapped into a basic reality: Most suburbanites live outside the city of Tampa because they want to. They don’t like the city, with its urban ways, its ethnic flavors, its rundown sections and its too-exclusive, too-expensive neighborhoods.

They also realized much better than their city counterparts how to use grassroots support, mainly along social conservative lines.

And so slowly and surely — to paraphrase H.G. Wells — they drew their plans against Tampa.

On the surface, a proposal by the latest owners of Hyde Park Village to construct more condos, office space and other retail amenities seems crazy, smacked right down in the middle of an established, if not the highest profile, historic neighborhood in Tampa Bay.

But the issue of urban redevelopment goes beyond just the well-bungalowed streets of Hyde Park in Tampa. This is a lesson for every government and every neighborhood in Tampa Bay — if we really want to solve our problems in transportation, the environment, urban sprawl and (most importantly) rebuild a sense of community and the social capital that comes with it.

Unfortunately, some Tampa City Council members who understand that lesson are just too close to this proposal (living in and representing South Tampa) to see their way past the angry neighbors who jammed last night’s council meeting and took the meeting well past daily newspaper printing deadlines. As we find out this morning, the council was split and did not make a final decision. This from tampabay.com:

TAMPA — After listening to deliberations for six hours on Thursday night, City Council was unable to reach a consensus on a controversial Hyde Park Village rezoning.

The meeting, which ended around 1:20 a.m. Friday, resulted in an indecisive 3-2 vote in favor of rezoning. Councilman Charlie Miranda, who was absent from the meeting, will cast the deciding vote. City Council will revisit the unfinished business on Dec. 20.

Councilman John Dingfelder recused himself from voting because of a possible conflict of interest — his law firm is located in Hyde Park. And councilwoman Mary Mulhern vehemently opposed the development, shunning the high density of residential and retail space in a historic district.

Linda Saul-Sena initially moved to approve the project, then withdrew her motion.

“This is so hard,” she said. “I have gone back and forth about ten times. It’s not that I’m tired. I’m just conflicted.”

I’m sure we could nitpick some parts of the proposal, but it is exactly the kind of urban development Tampa Bay needs: close to food shopping, restaurants, entertainment and jobs. Residents could walk to all of those instead of choking the roads with cars. If they do need to drive, the new condo towers would be within spitting distance of the Selmon Crosstown Expressway, in an already urbanized shopping village that was once the pride of Tampa Bay’s retail scene and a hip place to gather.

That’s the way Hyde Park Village was viewed when I first moved to Hyde Park in 1989. I lived there a year, and it was the first near-urban living experience I found in Florida. It was sad to see it decline, its shops empty, its restaurants close, its movie theater shuttered in favor of the stadium-seating megaplexes at the mall or in the ‘burbs.

If we are going to revive the hope of such an urban landscape, and all the good civic and community benefits that come from it, we must take the pain of building upward, of changing some established neighborhoods, not to ruin them but to strengthen them. West Tampa needs 5-6 story buildings lining Howard and Armenia avenues; Channelside has made a good start but needs more life and shops and restaurants; Westshore and Feather Sound need to develop better living communities as an option for the untold office workers who now toil there but get on the highways to drive home to FishHawk Ranch or Pasco County or Palm Harbor.

I know the neighborhood leaders are going to hate to hear this, but our survival depends on change — urban change.