The Atlanta BeltLine is explicitly deigned to both improve the quality of life of current city residents and to attract new residents to the city, particularly mobile young professionals. This dual purpose is how placemaking should be done everywhere.

The BeltLine is 33 miles of multi-use trails, parks, and a network of pedestrian-friendly transit links. Serving 40 neighborhoods, not just downtown. Light rail is a central design feature of the BeltLine.

For years we have made the case that placemaking should be central to Michigan’s economic-growth strategy. The data are clear that the most prosperous places across the country are those with the largest talent concentrations. And that mobile talent is choosing to live in places with quality basic services, infrastructure and amenities.

But the economic development need to retain and attract mobile talent should not be at the expense of current residents. For cities this must be a both/and––not an either/or––proposition. Both current and future city residents should be provided with quality basic services, infrastructure and amenities that make the city an attractive place to live, play and work.

Clearly, far too often, cities have chosen to focus on providing service and amenities on downtown and near downtown neighborhoods so as to retain and attract affluent/college educated households. This needs to change.

Improving the quality of life of current city residents and attracting new residents to the city was the dual mission of the new Austin transit plan. Transit Now––the cross-sector supporters of the initiative––described the benefits of the light rail plus initiative this way:

It’s time we invest in a new future for Austin that gives our transit-dependent neighbors dignity, that gives everyone else a viable option to sitting in traffic, that helps prevent climate change and protects the quality of our air and water, that prevents displacement and creates complete communities with expanded access to opportunities to all residents, and that keeps our economy humming now and for decades to come.

The Atlanta BeltLine also was designed both to improve the quality of life of current city residents and to attract new residents to the city. The Atlanta Beltline describes itself as:

As one of the largest, most wide ranging urban redevelopment programs in the United States, the Atlanta BeltLine is the catalyst for making Atlanta a global beacon for equitable, inclusive, and sustainable city life.

The story of the Atlanta Beltline is told in Ryan Gravel’s highly recommended Where We Want To Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities. Gravel first proposed the BeltLine a little more than twenty years ago in his masters thesis at Georgian Tech.

From its inception the BeltLine was designed to be far more that a walking and bike path with light rail running along side the trail. It lists it goals as: 33 miles of multi-use urban trails; $10 billion of economic development; 30,000 permanent jobs; 22 miles of pedestrian friendly rail transit; 5,600 units of affordable housing; 1,100 acres of environmental cleanup; 1,300 acres of new greenspace; 46 miles of improved streetscapes, and the largest public art exhibition in the south

Gravel calls it catalyst infrastructure. A catalyst for economic development, community development, affordable housing, etc. The BeltLine is the infrastructure that creates the kind of amenities where people prefer to live and thus drives where development occurs. And changes the nature of that development from what Chris Leinberger in the Option of Urbanism calls driveable suburbanism to walkable urbanism.

Turns out that both current residents, across race and class, as well as potential new residents all want walkable urbansim. That communities can do both/and placemaking. And when they do the result is a place that both improves the quality of life of current residents and attracts mobile talent that drive future economic growth.

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A Gap in College Graduates Leaves Some Cities Behind, from the New York Times on a new analysis from Brookings. More evidence that the metropolitan areas doing the best are those with the highest proportion of adults with a four year degree or more. And that many of the metros lagging are traditional manufacturing hubs. Of course, including all of Michigan metros. What is most troublesome is the growth rates differential in college graduates in the factory based metros compared to the more prosperous metros.

Susan Demas continues her terrific writing about higher education in an MLive column entitled Why universities are being targeted with state funding cuts and raising tuition. Its a must read. Demas demonstrates that the opposition to supporting higher education in the Michigan legislature is now largely driven by the culture wars. She writes: “Unfortunately, our universities are victims of the GOP culture war, which some not-so-bright trilobites from the Paleozoic era believe will return this country to its former glory (and win the 2012 election).”

Students of Online Schools Are Lagging from the New York Times. More evidence that if you care about Michigan kids getting a quality education the recently passed legislation to make it far easier for online k-12 schooling without having to meet any quality standards is bad policy. As the Times writes: “The number of students in virtual schools run by educational management organizations rose sharply last year, according to a new report being published Friday, and far fewer of them are proving proficient on standardized tests compared with their peers in other privately managed charter schools and in traditional public schools.”

Now Coveted: A Walkable, Convenient Place a column from Chris Leinberger on a new study he did for Brookings with Mariela Alfonzo. More evidence of shifting consumer preferences away from low density suburbs to high density, walkable central city neighborhoods. Leinberger and Alfonzo found that “real estate values increase as neighborhoods became more walkable, where everyday needs, including working, can be met by walking, transit or biking.”  Central cities – as many in Michigan continue to believe – are not relics from a bygone past, but places where many now want to live.

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At the core Basile – a private sector knowledge-based employer – affirms two central beliefs of ours: 1. That it is talent – not taxes or big government – that matters most to enterprise success. 2. That talent is so important and in such short supply that knowledge-based employers will move to where the talent is rather than the other way around. Conventional wisdom is people move to where the jobs are. In a knowledge-based economy there is growing evidence that enterprises move to where talent is concentrated.

Unless we get thought leaders and policy makers to understand both we have little chance of getting our agenda debated, let alone enacted. And the best way to get them accepted is from employers. What is so unique about the Basile email is that he put what many employers have said to me over the years off the record in writing and then allowed me to distribute widely what he wrote.

That brings me to the push back. Two main items

1. The firm should be in Detroit. Obviously I would prefer that it be in the city. But I do not believe if it were that it would change their recruitment challenge. Are there a small number of young professionals that won’t take a job unless they can walk or bike to it, probably yes. But not at any scale. So I don’t think where a firm is located has much to do with the ability to attract talent. Before the Great Recession I heard the same story for years from knowledge-based enterprises in the city. Available jobs, not enough qualified applicants, applicants not wanting to live/work in the region. Microsoft, along with many Seattle knowledge-based employers are in the suburbs. The outbound commute in Seattle is as crowed as the inbound commute. The notion that the company has to be in the city (or walkable suburb) to be attractive to young professionals does not appear to be the pattern across the country. Central cities are increasingly the new bedroom suburbs where a segment of talent wants to live, not necessarily work. That is what is missing here –  vibrant neighborhoods where talent wants to live, not work – plus the ability to commute by rail.

2. If they would market our assets better talent will come. This is the one critique I didn’t expect. That some of us believe that we have a competitive quality of place today. Should our firms do a better job selling the city/region to their recruits? Absolutely. I’m convinced most employers don’t know the assets to showcase. But if they did would it change at any scale talent’s willingness to move here? Highly unlikely. I agree with Basile when he writes “We don’t have a perception problem, we have a reality problem.” We have a region, in Chris Leinberger’s terminology, which is dominated by driveable suburbanism, not walkable urbanism, in a market where an increasing proportion of mobile talent wants/demands walkable urbanism.

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