If there’s been a constant in the three-plus years I’ve covered real estate for the Eagle, it’s been WaterWalk and the steady drumbeat of citizen criticism of a largely inactive project.
Those critics, who largely are justified because as taxpayers they’re equity partners, have reason to be heartened by the aggressive first steps announced by the new man in charge on the east bank, veteran Wichita entrepreneur Jack DeBoer.
A very sage developer told me years ago that there are two kinds of Wichitans: The people unafraid to act, and the people paralyzed by fear, more intent on pointing fingers.
Make no mistake about it: DeBoer falls into the first category, and his decision to pursue commercial traffic at WaterWalk is a decision playing very well, even with some of the project’s harshest critics in the local development industry.
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Here’s a little required reading for my commodities speculation fans, courtesy of Rolling Stone.
It becomes a little more obvious, doesn’t it, why all the great verve to convince the easily fooled that commodities markets are governed by supply and demand? Greed.
I remain annoyed, frankly, that President Obama continues to fiddle while these scandals burn.
But as the article points out, the depths to which people have gone over the past 60 years to turn the commodities floor into a casino where only the ordinary man loses probably aren’t correctable in one presidential term.
Or two. Or three. Or four.
The following blog includes translation captions:
Chris Dodd, the day-late and dollar-long U.S. senator from UConn land, has stepped to the plate with a bill to freeze credit card rates immediately – a month or more after those moneychangers stepped out of their temples long enough to jack the rates up to loan sharking levels.
At the risk of causing the heads of all our free market pals to explode, Dodd’s bill, while doubtlessly well-intentioned (Editor’s note: Well-intentioned, meaning “a meaningless cosmetic action designed to fool the electorate into thinking we’ve done something”), is predictably dead on arrival in the Senate, where the poor, unfortunate banks – some of them flush with TARP funds – have convinced senators (read: sent contribution checks) they need more time to comply with the stringent new regulations (read: blast our card holders into bankruptcy to help cover our bad loans).
It evokes memories of President Obama’s pledge to reel in financial derivatives and oil speculators – which has now been quietly replaced by a Barney Frank bill to help both continue running amok.
As does my cynicism about this extremely belated piece of legislation from Sen. Dodd.
Here’s a shocker: More national analysts say speculators are responsible for the current rise in prices, at a time when gas prices historically fall.
Funny how the nonsense about supply and demand has died down, isn’t it?
I’ll say this for the long-struggling WaterWalk development: Its latest call to the bullpen has summoned the Mariano Rivera of Wichita entrepreneurs.
And we’re going to find out soon how much fastball Jack DeBoer has left, because the bases are loaded down there on the east bank and WaterWalk has nobody at all out. And the fans in the stands are hot under the collar, pointing fingers all the way.
DeBoer’s got a ton of challenges on his plate: The public’s angry about their investment and the lack of progress at the development, retailers and restaurateurs are running, not walking, from leases in this credit environment. His one retailer down there has a front door pointing the wrong way.
And perhaps most significantly, as we’ve seen this week, the only support he’s going to get from City Hall – the same building where the 2003 budget cuts that doomed the project got their start – is moral. This city council certainly wants DeBoer to succeed. But they’re out of money.
City Manager Bob Layton on Friday professed his confidence in DeBoer, which is more than some of the city’s commercial development crowd voiced this week. Some fear that the development will fail, leaving a financially strapped City Hall on the hook for $41 million in infrastructure scheduled to be paid back by the tax revenues WaterWalk has yet to generate.
DeBoer is a brilliant man, a fountain of ideas that he maps out on his trademark legal pad. He’ll need all of them to strike out the side down on the east bank.
But don’t bet against that happening quite yet. It’ll be fascinating to watch DeBoer’s work in the bottom of WaterWalk’s ninth inning.
Interestingly, a little more than a half-hour of this morning’s brainstorming in Chattanooga was devoted to the “vocal minority,” a group of Wichitans who oppose public-private partnerships to redevelop downtown.
There were several calls to action, including one from Mayor Carl Brewer, who said, “We cannot be intimidated.” Others called out Wichita blogger Bob Weeks and one near the front of the room, away from me, said bluntly, “We have to watch who we elect.”
Quite clearly, the information battle on downtown redevelopment has been joined. I’ll have more on the brainstorming sessions, including the focus on the anti-tax crowd, in Saturday’s Eagle.
Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey and Chattanooga Chamber chief Tom Edd Wilson are at the lecturn, talking about how they landed a Volkswagen plant.
It gives you an appreciation for the capriciousness of economic development.
A site selector gets lost, and you drop into third place. The Germans who run Volkswagen hate mosquitoes. And tornadoes.
And they’re not excited about cynical citizens – and especially cynical members of the print and electronic media.
Here’s one statistic that struck me this week in Chattanooga:
Staff at the RiverCity Company, which oversees the local revitalization effort: 12.
Staff at the Wichita Downtown Development Corp., the point organization for Wichita’s growth plan: 3, and sometimes 4.
One of the thoughts percolating through the Visioneering Wichita delegation Thursday was WDDC staffing. President Jeff Fluhr will need more bodies as the effort ramps up.
Philanthropy is going to be essential to get Wichita’s downtown program going. Chattanoogans talk a lot about “motivated local money.”
And one good starting point for a Wichitan who’d like to buy into downtown’s future would be to fund an increase in the WDDC staff.
It’s been another frantic day in Chattanooga, for which I owe the undying energy of WDDC president Jeff Fluhr.
A couple of thoughts:
I hope you’ve seen the earlier blog about Create Here, a group of vibrant folks charged with harnessing Chattanooga’s creativity, largely by blending the arts and business acumen in a community-wide outreach.
Out of that grows a tangible idea for Wichita: Get the ROK ICT folks down here for some mentoring and idea exchange.
Sounds good from here. Wichita’s pretty good at the arts, entrepreneurship and outreach – but the three need to be blended, and the ROK ICT folks look like the people to do it.
Next, ice cream. As my colleagues will tell you, rarely do I wax in rhapsody about food. FAR more criticism than praise comes from my lips.
But I have to tell you about the best ice cream of my life, Clumpie’s, in Chattanooga’s Old Town.
Eat your hearts out: Homemade ice cream, from fresh products, made without air and jam-packed with enough fat to take five years off my life.
That’s OK. It was worth it.
It’s a terrible football analogy, but the central theme of Thursday’s Visioneering Wichita presentations applies: Chattanooga isn’t building a modern downtown by reading the market and reacting; they’re running a full-scale blitz.
We’ll have more on the theme in Friday’s Eagle, but one fascinating example is partially hidden in a south Chattanooga storefront: Create Here is a one-stop shop melding the arts and business education that’s all about “talent retention,” according to Helen Johnson, one of the founders. It’s goal is to give Chattanooga residents the tools to profit from their creativity, growing the city’s talent base and thus its economic foundation.
Create Here doesn’t have anything that Wichita doesn’t: the arts, business education, community activisim.
But what it does remarkably, as Johnson puts it, is fight the perception that all those functions need to be “siloed,” or segregated as separate community institutions.
“What we do, instead, is encourage people to think across all these disciplines as a platform for community change,” Johnson said.
Create Here won’t be around forever, Johnson said. She has no interest in perpetuating it as an institution. But she intends for its wide-ranging programs, from artist recruitment to business planning classes, to live on.
One of the interesting themes emerging in this morning’s discussion in Chattanooga is the cooperative hospitality effort to recruit convention and corporate business.
“We truly work together, and we’re always interested in bringing new business to Chattanooga rather than fighting back and forth,” said Tom Cupo, general manager of The Chattanoogan, the city-owned hotel and convention center.
“We’re interested in making the pie bigger rather than stealing marketshare.”
There’s a lesson there for Wichita, in hospitality business recruitment and on a broader downtown revitalization scale.
We’re nowhere near the end of a whirlwind first day in Chattanooga as I write this, but wow.
Just wow.
What we’ve seen in less than a day on the Tennessee River is the culmination of 40 years of planning. From a tightly constructed arts and entertainment corridor that connects the river with a historic American arts complex to a green housing development to a double-pronged transit plan that makes the city easy to navigate, it’s not hard to see why Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer said at midday, “This is what we want to be.”
Chattanooga has transformed itself in four decades in a massive public-private investment partnership that’s run into the billions. City leaders here consider it a success, and who can doubt them? New, modern private development is everywhere. Volkswagen and two other major industries have signed on, thanks to the quality of life the city has created and its willingness to give those companies incentives.
That’s not to say that Chattanooga doesn’t have its rundown areas. But city leaders have ideas in place for the most moribund areas, and they’re able to chuckle at some of the long-forgotten businesses there, such as the “State of Confusion” frontage on one downtown street.
One big dream here is a plan to use passenger rail to connect a billion-dollar development project in the south part of the city with downtown and UT-Chattanooga.
If there’s a message in what we’ve seen today, it’s that dreaming isn’t a junket and it isn’t a boondoggle. Because without dreams, progress is impossible.