Locally Grown

Attorney David Hvistendahl met with me on Tuesday afternoon in a conference room in his law firm, which is adjacent to Froggy Bottoms, which he owns. Hvistendahl said he has learned to be an efficient businessman over the years and would like to use that skill to streamline Northfield’s government.

DavidHvistendahlPlatform from Bonnie Obremski on Vimeo.

(I saw this tonight on the way to the Contented Cow and couldn’t help myself.)

I’m sure Griff will have plenty of pics in this year’s “Taste of Northfield” album after tonight, but I wanted to post live from the scene - because I can. Come on down and join the fun, it’s going on till 11.

Northfield City Administrator Al Roder publishes a memo to the mayor and city council each week on Friday. It summarizes many of the staff activities for the week. The Friday memos are published and archived in PDF form at the bottom of his web page.

See his Friday memo for this past week and then comment or ask questions about it here.

See the Northfield city calendar for public meetings that are scheduled this week.

NOTE: There’s a Council meeting on Monday.

Eastbound traffic into Northfield is being re-routed north just west of St. Olaf right now…

I continue to work through my “to-read” pile. Most recently, it was “Coney Island’s Bumpy Ride”, by Eric Wills, in the July/August 2007 Preservation magazine.

In 2003, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and other city officials, created the not-for-profit Coney Island Development Corporation (CIDC) and appropriated $85 million for renovation of the neighborhood. Thor Equities, a for-profit real estate development company, responded by buying up three-fourths of the available land, with plans to build condos, even though the land is not zoned for residential uses.

During its golden age, in the late 19th century, Coney Island was the most famous amusement park in the country, maybe the world. In a time of widespread, and perhaps more convenient, electronic entertainments, Coney Island has fallen on hard times. Some people view the condos as economic salvation, others view them as the death knell of one of the last vestiges of old, and real, New York. The go-cart and mini-golf courses have already been cleared away by Thor Equities. Astroland was slated to be next, after the 2007 season.

Although it’s had a colorful past, brothels, gambling dens and crooked real estate deals earned the area the title “Sodom by the Sea”, Coney Island was a place of great innovation. In 1867, the hot dog was invented there, in 1884, it was the roller coaster, and, in 1895, the first enclosed amusement park, featuring a water slide and artificial lagoon, opened. It was also a place of great popularity; 20 million people visited during each season.

No one disagrees that this 150 year-old model is no longer working. The CIDC’s strategic plan is to make Coney Island a year-round destination by attracting restaurants and retail to the amusement core. The CIDC supports rezoning areas on the fringes for housing. Thor Equities, however, argues that residential construction in the heart of the amusement district is necessary for financial feasibility.

Critics of Thor’s plan contend that the approach of completely razing and rebuilding threatens the essential sense of place of the community. Author Charles Denson puts it this way, “this is the last place where you can come down and see this kind of funkiness and spirit”. He continues, “it’s kind of anarchy really”. The kind of anarchy that gave us hot dogs, roller coasters and water slides.

The President of the CIDC, Lynn Kelly, seems to agree. Small, unique businesses she says, “keep Coney Island authentic” and give it its “charm and sassiness”. Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz also has concerns about Thor’s plans. “I don’t mind seeing a hotel, trade center, convention center, things like that, but if we allow housing in the heart of the amusement area, what’s going to happen, clearly, is that the residential section will grow, amusements will decrease, and Coney Island will be gone”.

Thor Equities has already made substantial financial commitments to their plan. They clearly feel that at least some people led them to believe that their was political support for their vision.

The conclusion that I drew from this controversial situation is that development plans need to be clear from the very beginning. Municipalities need to define the acceptable land uses in the master development plan before proceeding with financing and construction. Furthermore, decision-makers need to understand the financial feasibility, including the assumptions, estimated costs and expected returns, of the big picture before giving approval to individual projects or phases.

After reading my post on the current housing market, friend of LG Margit Johnson dropped off a copy of an article in the March Atlantic Monthly for me to read. I finally got around to it.

In “The Next Slum?”, Chris Leinberger contends that “the story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the [subprime-mortgage] crisis, and will not end with it”. He goes on to argue that “a structural change is under way in the housing market - a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work”. The author argues that these trends will benefit cities and hurt suburbs.

Leinberger reviews the history of the suburbs that he traces back to 1946. In the pursuit of fresh air and open space and to escape the problems of the cities, the population shifted to the suburbs. For over half a century, the suburbs grew.

Now the trend seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Leinberger cites the rapid change in the price relationship between suburbs and cities as a key indicator, “per square foot, urban residential neighborhood space goes for 40 to 200 percent more” than suburban residential space and this relationship holds true throughout the country.

As the Businessweek article that Jim Herreid gave me also indicated, demographics are moving against the suburbs too. Back in the early days of the suburban boom, families with children made up more than half of all households; by 2025, they will be closer to a quarter. Compounding this shift, single-person households will also account for about a quarter of American households by 2025.

Different people may draw different conclusions from these trends and develop different recommendations. Personally, I think the trends support those Northfielders who have called for more compact future development, better connectivity between neighborhoods, and stronger support for our historic grid in the Comp Plan revision. These are characteristics increasingly valued by tomorrow’s housing market and they are a good investment for Northfield.

Minnesota artist Bob Dylan was awarded America’s highest honor for music, literature and print journalism, the Pulitzer Prize. He received the recognition for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power”.

As most Minnesotans are aware, Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth on May 24th, 1941, graduated from Hibbing High School in 1959, and for a brief period was enrolled in the University of Minnesota. His professional education began in the coffeehouses of Dinkytown before continuing in the folk venues of Greenwich Village. In addition to selling millions of records, he wrote a best-selling autobiography and has published both his poetry and visual art.

When not performing, Dylan greatly values his privacy. The Pulitzer Prize committee was still wondering how to reach Dylan on Monday.

There’s been some buzzing in Basecamp, and at least a couple of comments on Locally Grown, about an article in the March 31st issue of The New Yorker. It’s titled “Out of Print” and was written by Eric Alterman. I drew the short straw and agreed to write a post about it. To oversimplify, it’s about the adverse impacts on newspapers resulting from the expansion of the web.

It’s a now familiar litany of problems: loss of advertisers, readers, market value, and, according to the author, “in some cases, their sense of mission”. The industry has reacted with budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. The late columnist Molly Ivins complained that it’s a response that makes “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting”.

Of more interest to me was the decline of the public’s trust of newspapers. A recent study by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty percent of Americans said that they could believe “all or most” media reporting. Newspapers faired even more poorly in the public’s evaluation of their objectivity. Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say the media consciously seeks to influence public policies.

The article goes on to study the apparently emerging model. It uses a website called the Huffington Post as an example. This site aggregates political news (and, based on my own observation, celebrity scandals), as well as organizes a group of (unpaid) bloggers. The site advocates that news is not something handed down from above but is a shared enterprise between its producers and its consumers.

The site is definitely popular. According to the article, in the last thirty days the site’s “unique visitors” jumped to more than eleven million. The bloggers’ posts often inspire a thousand comments. The author also states, “occasionally, these comments present original perspectives and arguments, but many resemble the graffiti on a bathroom wall”.

Newspapers have their strengths to be sure. There are at least a half dozen of papers in the country that spend millions of dollars researching stories from around the world. The author cites the front page of the February 11th New York Times which included a report from Nairobi, a dispatch from Doha, and a story about the existence of a study by the RAND Corporation “which offered a harsh critique of the Bush Administration’s performance in Iraq”. His point is that this quality of information is not currently generated, or financed, by websites. He argues, and I agree, that there is significant social and political value to this product and/or service.

He believes that the tensions between the mainstream media and the web-based challengers were foreshadowed by a great debate that began in the 1920s, between uberjournalist Walter Lippmann and iconoclast philosopher John Dewey. Lippmann suggested that democracy’s need for an informed electorate was unrealistic in an age of such complexity. He argued for essentially a tripartite of leaders from the public sector, the private sector and the press that would be more effective than citizens’ opinions in judging government’s actions. Dewey mistrusted this knowledge-based elite. He viewed the process of citizen discussion, deliberation, and debate to be as valuable as the resulting decisions for th strength and vitality of a democracy.

In fact, the author suggests, this elite came to be. First, it was the unintentional development of a “liberal bias” supporting some of the political and social initiatives coming out of the sixties. Then in was the thoughtful “counter-establishment” movement that brought conservatives to power in Washington. Although the perspectives changed, the “insider status” was continuously celebrated by the members of the media.

Then there was the “run-up to the Iraq War”, the Dan Rather Affair, and the Albert Gonzalez Scandal. The emerging media revealed that the mainstream media was, in the author’s words, “blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders”. Citizen journalists began taking on the responsibility for questioning the authorities, whether they were government bureaucrats, media mainstays, or elected officials, going well beyond the letter to the editor option offered by the elite.

The Huffington Post is not going to replace the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for my information dietary needs. My quick trip through the site made me think that perhaps citizen journalism is taking on some characteristics of People magazine. As for this participant in a democracy, I believe that I need both the quality of information offered by the elite newspapers and the questioning of authorities championed by the citizen journalists.

Who knows if we’ll all get the particular mix that meets our individual needs. Perhaps we’re just experiencing the curse, or opportunity, of living in exciting times.

The keys to fostering new businesses are economic conditions, start-up activity, physical beauty of the location, and cultural amenities such as museums and universities, according to Fortune Small Business Magazine. At least that’s what was reported in today’s (3/31/08) StarTribune BusinessInsider.

Three Minnesota cities made the top 100 list, Minneapolis (23rd), Rochester (53rd), and St. Cloud (75th). Minneapolis was recognized for its “active recruitment of small businesses, the University of Minnesota and other Twin Cities colleges, its lakes and its arts community”, Rochester is “touted as a center for information technology and medical research”, and St. Cloud is “advantageously positioned along major highways and rail lines, which is good for manufacturing and wholesale distribution”.

In my opinion, Northfield (on an admittedly smaller scale) has many of these advantages. Perhaps by leveraging our strengths, adjusting to our weaknesses, and focusing our recruitment targets to match our portfolio of offerings, we might further stimulate our start-up activity.

Schools are closing two hours early today. (This is a moblogging experiment done with my cell phone.)

It’s Jeff Hasse, President of the Northfield Area Chamber of Commerce, Mary Rossing, President of the Northfield Downtown Development Corporation, and Rick Estenson, President of the Northfield Economic Development Authority, hanging out together tonight at the Chamber’s Annual Banquet at the Grand Event Center.

It was recently reported by a local media outlet that their organizations have trouble working together for the economic vitality of Northfield.

Where do those media people get that [deleted]?

Bruce Morlan seemed to suggest vague ethical questions about the chance meeting of the three citizen bloggers at one of Northfield’s many fine independent bookstores. If Clifford Green were to ask me about it, I would tell him that it was purely coincidental (I generally try to avoid those two people), without ethical violation (although I will admit that I didn’t check it with the city attorney), and that we were all wearing our private citizens hats (seriously, no self-respecting city official or staff person would wear a hat like mine in public).

But back to Mr. Bruce Morlan. Here’s a photo of another trio of almost famous people, taken not long ago at one of Northfield’s many fine independent coffeehouses. It was an unannounced meeting, caught only by the chance passing of Mr. Griff Wigley’s camera.

What does Mr. Morlan have to say about this trinitine gathering?

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