Posted on 08/14/2009 5:28:56 AM PDT by Cheap_Hessian
DAYTON, Ohio -- Here's an idea for saving Rust Belt cities: Tell bloggers and radio stations to stop calling your town a basket case.
That was one suggestion from representatives of eight of the 10 cities labeled last year as America's fastest dying. They met at the Dayton Convention Center last weekend to swap ideas about how to halt the long skid that's turned cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, N.Y., into shorthand for dystopia.
The city representatives lunched on $6 sloppy Joes and commiserated through Power Point strategy sessions: Lure back former residents, entice entrepreneurs and artists, convert blighted pockets into parkland.
What emerged was a sense of desperation over the difficulty of rebounding from both real problems -- declining populations, dwindling tax bases -- and perceived woes.
Valarie McCall expressed frustration at marketing a city that still echoed the image of the polluted Cuyahoga River catching fire. "That was 1969," said Ms. McCall, Cleveland's chief of governmental affairs. "Come on, I wasn't even born then."
Last year, Forbes.com used long-term trends of unemployment, population loss and economic output to devise a list of "America's Fastest Dying Cities." A few months later, Peter Benkendorf was eating chicken tacos when he hatched the idea for the symposium.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
But in modern business (and education and government), because heavy investment factors are taken into consideration, other strategies are often tried with dead horses, including the following:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Threatening the horse with termination.
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Reclassifying the dead horse as “living-impaired”.
8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.
11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
12. Declaring that the dead horse carries lower overhead and therefore contributes more to the bottom line than some other horses.
13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
Does this ring a bell, with you?
I hope they come up with a plan because my city (Houston) is full.
While some problems in the rust belt are the result of manufacturing jobs leaving, most are caused by liberal taxation and development policies. Virtually every decaying city is liberal controlled and run. If I had a choice between opening a business in Detroit, Cleveland or Fort Worth where do you think I am going to go?
I’m always amazed each winter when I see Buffalo get buried in what looks like 10 feet of snow. It looks like “The Day After Tomorrow” which was a pretty bad movie, of course.
Cities are about jobs. No jobs no need for a city.
Ironically, cities will be the hardest hit by Obamacare.
The healthcare bill is actually a tax on employment.
Given the competitive factors businesses will simply pay
the 8% tax on payroll an not provide any health care coverage.
They will make up more than the 8% by outsourceing and off shoring as much payroll as possible.
As cities primarily exist on payroll tax their incomes will be devastated.
As for individuals, most will simply default to the 2.5% income tax to pay for coverage.
Obama laughs all the way home with a 10.5% tax increase on all workers that have an agi > $85,000.
It's perfect. Works in all organizations. See too, promoting the crippled horse, so the dead one has performance that more closely approaches that of "the high performers" who have obtained management positions.
Smoke and mirrors has always, and in all areas, been a reliable substitute for getting honest work done -- until the whole house of cards collapses.
The problem with your logic is that there are many liberal cities that are thriving or at the least not dying. New York, Boston, Chicago, SanFrancisco. It is more than just politics.
Full of what?
Yeah, I think New Orleans took over all your vacancies.
SF is not thriving. Do not know about Chicago or Boston. NYC IS not thriving it is being crushed with it’s tax burden and BILLIONS of $$$$ are leaving NYC weekly. The rich a fleeing. Vacancy rates on high end apartments are very high and several large financial firms are planning to move out. In 5 years NYC will be back to the 1960’s $hithole it used to be. Just this morning on CNBC there was a discussion about funding development in NYC. Trump’s daughter said she is not seeing “value†and probably will not for sometime.
Cleveland made an attempt to draw people back, but it didn’t quite pan out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM&NR=1
Well, I say, the proof is in the pudding. Look at which states and cities are on the losing side: ones that are 'Rat-dominated, tax businesses instead of growing them, focus on things like unions and workman's compensation laws. Look at where the businesses are going: red states that have incentives to attract business, right-to-work laws, lower taxes, a work force motivated by a desire to get ahead and self-improve rather than be handed things by the government.
I hope people in these formerly red states will remember this when it comes time to vote. I hope they do, but the majority being sheeple, they probably won't.
I don’t have time to do the research, but I’ll bet every one of those cities is blue.
Dayton Ohio’s mayor can’t figure out what style glasses she likes so she wears both.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FjonZ-K_VA&feature=related
“Full of what?”
As an ex-Houstonian, I can say it’s full of Shiitte!
As I think about it...modern cities are the consequence of the industrial revolution..which required centralization of resources. The information age does’nt need a city...
They’ll have meetings like this until the end of time, and they will never recommend the one sacred cow that could actually change things around for their communities........
LOWER TAXES on business and the middle/upper-class
shhh!!! Don’t blaspheme!
It is the 4th largest city in the US and people are still pouring in here. You would not believe the building that is going on everywhere. The inner city is being torn down and rebuilt with condos and high rises and the outer edges are being cleared for new construction, houses and apartment complexes as far as you can see! STOP already, it's FULL!
Not to worry, new ones are being constructed as we speak.
I suppose it hasn’t occurred to them that their cessation of actually BEING a basket case would probably move the bloggers and talkers to stop calling them that?!?
Dayton...an appropriate place for such an event.
Hell, all of Ohio is dying only second to Michigan.
I can’t move to KY fast enough...
Anyone know how many of the 10 have a history of being run by the DemocRATSs?
These idiots want to lure people back to the cities? People are leaving high tax/ high crime cities for a better quality of life, especially those with kids. And for those who stay, they are rewarded with higher taxes which leads to more people leaving, which leads to higher taxes whick leads to....
Liberal appears incapable of learning how to attract businesses and families. I guess they look at us as little lemmings that will voluntarily turn over more and more of our pay for the good of the colletive. Bull....
I left Houston in 1989 and haven’t looked back. My last year there, my house was broken into 3 times. To make a claim with my insurance, I had to have a police report. A cop came out on a Sunday afternoon with his flak jacket on. Bad sign. Then the city accused me of running a business out of my house, and wanted me to pay the business taxes. The last straw was when I noticed that my property taxes had risen 10% per year for 3 years. Didn’t see that changing. So AMF. See ya. Out to rural Texas and don’t miss it one bit.
high taxes
regulations that punish business
taxes that punish businesse
high government spending
city is controlled by unions
city is controlled by democrats for several generations
public schools are hellholes, controlled by democrats and unions
Look who is attending this “symposium.” It’s the people who have helped wreck the cities to begin with. I guarantee you their “solutions” will be:
1. More government “programs” designed to “rebuild” their cities and, you guessed it...
2. Federal tax dollars to finance the same.
It won’t work, it will waste money, the decline will continue. Because it never has. But that’s all these people are capable of coming up with. They know nothing else.
I lived in Cleveland when Carl Stokes was elected as the first black mayor of a major city. After the initial hoopla (sort of like Obama) the incompetence and corruption ensued.
Later came boy wonder Kucinich who took my hometown into bankruptcy.
At that point I decided it was time to get out.
I view it as a natural selection type process. The energetic, the entrepreneurs, the self sufficient leave, and these towns are left with the rest.
It’s real simple how to save these cities.
1. Cut taxes until it hurts, especially on businesses and other productive behavior.
2.Reduce City Spending and Re-Prioritize Funds on eliminating urban blight, improving quality of life, infrastructure, and first responders. Eliminate everything else.
3. Focus on bringing in as much cultural, entertainment, shopping, and dining venues as possible.
4. If there are universities in the city, partner with them to increase Research and Entrepreneurial activity in the city.
5. Not only are most of these cities ugly rusting hunks of urban decay, they also tend to be in crappy climates. The cities should develop robust advertising campaigns that really sell there cities “unique value”, what ever that may be.
Good one.
When we elect a conservative Dayton City Council and Mayor, I’ll stop calling Dayton a basket case. It’s actually worse than a basket case.
There is another factor involved; education.
Would you send your kids to the public schools in any of these cities? Didn’t think so.
No matter whether it’s us here on this forum or even the hypocrite libs over at DU or huffpo, people vote their true beliefs in where they live and where they send their kids to school.
One of the reasons these cities are dying is that their education systems are complete NEA controlled failures, and productive citizens abandon them in favor of decent suburban schools where their kids can learn without too much fear of being shot or stabbed.
One mention is tax burden. This state does happen to have a low one and, by virtue of that, a much lower cost of living. The city has had democratic leadership for as long as I can remember and the current mayor, who is a dem, is actually one of the most decent and hardworking politicians in the city. He's done a lot of good. In the statehouse, it's a different story.
Honestly, bringing a city back is a decades long prospect that takes vision and patience - and a willingness to take chances. It can happen. 30 years ago, who would have thought that San Jose, Atlanta, Minneapolis, etc., would turn out to be the boomtowns they are. Taxes are just one piece of the puzzle. The rest is a bit harder to define, but has a lot to do with quality of life and public perception of that. Marketing can't mask everything, and that's a huge part of what we all seek in finding a place to live.
The “Information Age” does require enough people in one location to man the factories that make all the neat techie stuff that runs the “Information Age”.
Power plants, computer chips, LCD screens, iPods, etc. Also, cars, airplanes, air conditioning, lights, furniture, etc require factories that require at least small to medium sized towns to support them.
BTW, I very much dislike cities.
While they mentioned 10 cities, I could only find 8 listed: Detroit, Cleveland, Dayton, Buffalo, Canton/Youngstown, Flint and Charleston, W.Va. I guess the representatives of the other two cities already left....
hh
Providence,RI should be on that list. A once beautiful city it is now riddled with debt, crime, and unemployment. RI ranks second in unemployment after Michigan. And yes it is a Blue state. The biggest employer in RI is the health care industry. If this health care bill passes and more money is taken out of health care Providence will top Michigan’s unemployment rate.
Show me a dying city and I will show you a corrupt town leadership comprised of Democrats.
Since the population of Dayton has gone down by 33% since 1970, can we assume the per-capita spending by the city has gone down by 33%? (Ha!! no need to answer that one....)
hh
Ah! I got that wrong: per-capita spending should be the same. Total spending should decline by 33%....
hh
I really don't care if city governments are bankrupt. They have done that to themselves. I'm just saying economically those cities are not in decay. NYC has been up and down several times before. Everyone is always saying this time is the end for NYC and they are always wrong. Kinda like those Euro-weenies who are always predicting the demise of the U.S.A.
I'm not saying the governments do not have any blame I'm just saying the problems are more than politics.
Like BNBLFlag I too lived in Houston for a couple years before returning to Pittsburgh (note the "h").
I moved back because this place is worth fighting for. This is a good place to live w/ lots to offer. I've invested my life's work into making it better, not w/ any grand public schemes but by simply taking pride in place and working, everyday, to produce profit and to improve those things that I come in contact w/.
And that's what's required in those cities that are having such a hard time; people that love their homes and their neighbors and who will stand up and take resposibility for their towns.
I have nothing bad to say about Houston, I enjoyed my time there, but its not where I wanted to spend my life, and I expect that many of the folks moving there now will ultimately realize that as well, at least I hope so for your sake.
One more thing; stop over building and you'll avoid the recurring real estate collaspes.
4. If there are universities in the city, partner with them to increase Research and Entrepreneurial activity in the city.
Respectfully, what the hell do universities know about entreprenurial activity?
And cultural, entertainment, shopping and dining don't have to be lured in. If an area is prosperous, those activities will appear. If the area is not prosperous, no way in hell will those activities appear.
They tried all those things in Cleveland about 15 years ago.
It didn’t work.
More than you know. In the most entrepreneurial places other than Las Vegas, they are part of the pipeline. There are a number of academic papers written on "The Austin Model" that utilized the University of Texas as part of the system in the 70's, thus making the Austin area a VERY entrepreneurial city. Here, I can name three universities that have incubators and a fourth that has a great entrepreneurial program. The universities are actually ahead of the curve in this case.
LOL.
Hint: Don’t run the government like Detroit.
Hint: Ask if you can have some of that globull warming stuff.
Good ideas, but climate isn’t the reason for dying cities. There are cities in America with absolutely horrible climates that are doing very well. Exhibit A: Houston. Imagine a city with the charm of the San Fernando Valley and the weather of Saigon. That’s Houston. Exhibit B: Dallas. The climate is not quite as bad as Houston, but Lord knows it’s bad enough. Long, hot, humid summers + freezing Midwestern prairie winter + smog = yuck.
I think you were right the first time, I’m sure both total AND per-capita spending has increased, even though the population has fallen.
uh....yeah those cities are just f'ing heaven on earth. puhleeze, make sure you pass that list around so that every flaming liberal a##hole moves there. Start in Austin and provide a one way ticket.
I work in a profession that allowed me the "privilege" to study in Boston and NYC. After looking at my state tax, commonwealth tax, commuting tax, having to listen to how smart everybody in NYC and Boston were compared to everybody else, I made a vow that I've kept of never living north of the Red River.
Those cities are just great.. especially when I visited Frisco and got to see the nice men taking a dump in the park and the pan handlers bugging the cr#p out of me.
Chicago is a great place to visit, but as far as "business", you're kidding me, right?
I would love to get rid of the democrat government in my city. Boston was a dead decaying city in the 70’s and today it is not. The government here has not gone conservative. My point is that it is more than politics.
By the way San Francisco has cracked down on panhandlers recently. Not very liberal of them.
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