 Welcome to the stage, Mary Rowe, Executive Vice President of the Municipal Art Society of New York. Very much, hello, you're a responsive group. I'm very pleased to be here, and I was just saying to the Chair of the Trust, what a wonderful, wonderful leadership role this organization plays for those of us who are toiling in the vineyards and communities and cities around the country to have this kind of leadership from them and this kind of venue annually, wonderful. So I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the work we do, and then I'm gonna be joined by very knowledgeable compatriots who will fill in everything that I said wrong, thank goodness. MAS is one of the oldest civic organizations in the country, founded in the Victorian age, 1893, 122 years old, and we were the early, early preservation organization in New York that then led to many, many of the kinds of approaches that we have across the country to understanding the intersection between place and people, and the mission of the organization is this to inspire and educate and empower New Yorkers to engage in the betterment of our city, and we ground that in the physical city, the spatial city, the way it's actually planned and the land is used and it's designed, and we've been at this, as I suggested, for a century, and some of the things that you're most familiar with are things like Grand Central that we were able to be successful in making sure it wasn't demolished, and now this is one of the great, great iconic aspects of New York City, but known around the world as one of the wonderful, wonderful places where all sorts of things can occur. It's a transportation hub, it's also a commercial hub, it's a social hub, lots of people in New York say, I'll meet you at Grand Central for a drink. It's one of the things we talk about, you want a place where people say they want to meet, and we carried that campaign, we missed this one. This is one of the sad things. Penn Station came down in New York and actually what led many, many, many folks to be concerned about this, that we were letting industrialization and different kinds of development actually take down some of the important aspects and fabrics of the city. And so Penn Station came down, and it now looks like this. I don't know how many of you have come through Penn Station. It's not exactly the highlight of your experience in New York, and it is the most trafficked transportation hub in the country. It feeds the whole North Eastern corridor. It is grossly inhibited by the way in which it was really not designed and planned, and it has an athletic facility sitting over at Madison Square Garden, which makes it very difficult for us to be able to improve the efficiency of it. It now serves three times the daily population of trends of commuters that it was intended to, but also the neighborhood around it suffers as a result because a Madison Square Garden has to be there with the way it's structured, the pillars below it make it impossible for us to adjust it, and the neighborhood around suffers. And so one of our current campaigns is to actually talk about how Penn Station needs to be renewed. I'm gonna show you a slide later. The other piece is Times Square. Many of you have been reading about this more lately, more recently, about some of the debates about how public space is actually being deployed. We feel in New York that we're kind of the bellwether of a lot of these issues that many other communities experience versions of these kinds of struggles. When they happen to us, they happen to get in the front of the newspapers. But Times Square is one of those great contested spaces, and we were the ones that advocated to make sure that the light stayed on and that it was an iconic place that we thought was valuable. So part of what I wanna talk to you about is MAS being a century old, one of the early, early voices for historic preservation, and how do you take that kind of legacy, that kind of established reputation and move it into the 21st century so that you're not seen as just organizations that wanna keep things back and prevent change from happening, but you actually wanna propel forward and talk about how you build on the basics, the existing fabric and strengthen it. And of course, who do we rely on, but Jane Jacobs, who talked again and again and again about why old buildings are so fundamentally important to the future and to the way in which the city evolves and that new ideas have to use old buildings. So more recently, in the last 10 years, we've been involved in discussing with the city of New York, with the city of New York, with the city government of New York, how zoning actually is affecting the fabric of the city and how it's changing. There's been lots and lots of activity in New York to upzone, to be able to make more density happen and more mixed uses. And for us in East Midtown, that meant, when that proposal came through, that there wasn't actually the time being taken to look at the existing assets and to look at what the preservation strategy needed to be in that neighborhood. So again, we don't wanna hold change back, but we wanted to recognize that class B and C space actually enables all sorts of different kinds of activities in a neighborhood. And if you're going to upzone those neighborhoods and create incentives for more and more new development, you lose not only the aesthetic appeal of the neighborhood and the kind of ways in which things fit together so uniquely in cities like New York, but you also lose that affordable space that is where new things can happen, where small startups can occur, where artists have traditionally been able to operate and where local retail can get a foothold. So we started in East Midtown and that continues, the debate continues. And as one of you, this slide talks about another aspect of pressure that's going on in New York is what we're talking about the rise of the monoculture. This is the skyline five or six years ago looking from Central Park back. And I don't know how many of you have been tracking this, but over the last few years, because of the merging of global capital coming into New York and the enhanced technology that allows you to go tall, tall, tall in a building in a very short, small footprint that we wouldn't have anticipated when the zoning was established here. It says all as a bright zoning. So as a result, all of a sudden we have these very, very thin towers going up. And so we have districts in the city that are, in our view, threatened to become monocultures because the only kind of activity, real estate activity you'll see there are high end residential or potentially class A commercial. So West Midtown, the other side of the Manhattan Island which is where Penn Station is, and this is our famous Madison Square Garden, which you can see the neighborhood around it has not exactly thrived, let's say, in when this activity has been predominant there. And what we're suggesting is that if you were able to free Penn Station up and take the existing asset and move it, then you could potentially unlock all sorts of value and continue to create a kind of heterogeneous, diverse mix of uses in buildings in West Midtown. And this is a diagram showing you specifically where Penn Station is and where we're suggesting we need to consider it to move. The other thing that's happening in terms of Manhattan development is those black buildings on the west side are Hudson Yards where we're going to introduce into New York City over the space of two decades the population of Minneapolis is going to come and begin to live in those new neighborhoods just above the High Line, do you know where I mean? And so it's going to be an extraordinary infusion of people and whether or not we have the infrastructure that's ready and how do we make sure that, basically, for the M.A.S.'s point of view, how do we make sure that West Midtown continues to be a mix, a rich mix of local retail and innovative startups and new businesses and older established businesses so that it doesn't start to look like a monoculture. That's Hudson Yards, those are the renderings of what those tires will look like and you can see that we still have in New York all sorts of a varied urban fabric and we want to maintain that, we want to make sure that we densify, obviously because we have more and more population and we have more and more needs, but we don't want to lose that kind of fine-grained granular urbanism that allows us to continue to incubate ideas. We have a couple of famous economic districts in New York City, the Garmin District, the Flower District, the Jewelry District. These are all very, they started as immigrant businesses, they continue to employ large, large numbers of people on the first floor, second floor, third floor, fourth floor and they are places that continue to have all sorts of nascent value, peacemaking, different kinds of capacities, craft capacities that are, in fact, part of the new economy that's emerging, part of what we talked about this morning at an urban entrepreneurship session, that the economy is still, we're still able to make things, we still are making things and entrepreneurs still look for opportunities in cities in America and particularly in New York City, but it's not the way it once was, but it doesn't mean that we want to lose this capacity to be able to get something on the second floor, walk it down, go two blocks over and find somebody on the ground floor who can use what I just made on the second floor. We're trying to figure out how do we do that in a competitive real estate environment. So one of the other ways we're seeing this manifesto course is vanishing local retail and there's quite a lot of challenge for those of us who are preservationists about how do we make sure that we look at really imaginative policies that will allow us to continue to be able to foster these kinds of businesses, legacy businesses or startups, but the idea that they're small and they're modest and they employ a limited number of people, but they make yours in my experience of the street extremely vital. And so it's not just about the economic piece, it's about the experience of place and the fact that we all live in cities and communities where our neighborhoods are so important and one of the reasons they're important is because they're unique. And so we're seeing increasing efforts to try to get policy makers to be really imaginative about this. How do we actually retain these local businesses? Does that mean we need a formula retail policy? Does that mean we should look at different kinds of incentives? Should we have different rules around commercial leases? These are all the kinds of things that we'll talk about because a lot of this activity takes place in older buildings that are more affordable. Also part of our discussion, just so you can get a sense of how I'm as framing this, has also been to talk about what we refer to as the civic commons, that the reason you and I moved to a city is because we want to have some kind of an experience we can make happen together that we can't actually have happen by ourselves. And so that's what cities do, they enable that kind of self-organization. And that's very dependent on the structures and the ways the streets interact, the way the public space interacts, but also the way we interact in private spaces, lobbies, different kinds of ways in which buildings are designed. And so we started a discussion last year saying let's reimagine the civic commons because we know people are still, they still have the instinct to come together, but they may not be coming together the way they once did, so they might once have used a church in one particular way, a church hall, they might now use a co-working space, or they might use part of their library, or maybe it's a maker space, or maybe it's a club, or maybe it's a public park, or maybe it's the local social assistance office, it may be any number of things, but the idea that we wanted to start is to have that conversation, how do we create the civic commons? And so we started to have conversations, which we did with the Support of the Night Foundation around the country, to say what does the civic commons look like for you? And it's quite different city to city, but what it shares is this sense that living in a collective environment, no matter what the scale of the city is, is extremely, you're extremely dependent on serendipity. You're dependent on being able to encounter someone who's not like you, who is different from you, and who has something different to offer. And that's what the role of these places that you've been spending your careers preserving, often play, is they play that kind of opportunity to take me out of my own particular narrow experience and have an interaction with someone else. And so we started to have that conversation and say, well, maybe it's in a post office. This is one of the post offices in the Bronx. And as we know, because postal services are changing and information technology is altering that, industry significantly, these post offices now no longer need to have the kind of huge footprint that they have. But in the case of this one, with these Gordos, you can see them, but they have gorgeous murals above them just after the WPA mural period. This is a situation where the post office can't afford the real estate, doesn't need the wickets anymore. And so it says to itself, how do we actually transfer the ownership of this property because we can't maintain it to some other entity? Well, in this case, a developer has bought it and it's working with a designer in a very imaginative way to continue to play that kind of civic hub role, even though it's owned privately and they're gonna maintain these murals, even though it's owned privately, that they could actually create a new kind of civic commons there so that we don't have to maybe be quite as hung up as we have been about who actually owns the building if the use can be stewarded in a way that we think delivers the civic benefit. And this is worth seeing. It's in the Bronx at 163rd and the Grand Concourse and is in the process of being redeveloped. It'll still have a couple of wickets, but it's becoming something quite different with a market space and some community space and all being co-developed by the owner of the building, the developer, the architect and the community and the borough president's office. This is another example where a particular kind of intervention can really spark a much broader conversation beyond the building. This is the old Bronx courthouse. It has been owned privately by developer real estate owner in New York for three or four decades, had sat pretty much dormant and along comes that wonderful organization No Longer Empty, I know Naomi's here and they say we can animate this space differently. We're gonna get artists engaged and we're going to inhabit this space in a new kind of way. And so they did for several months, had artists put in installations. Now what an extraordinary achievement this was to negotiate this because as I said, private landowner and a community that was very suspicious what's gonna happen to that courthouse? Who is the owner? Where's the owner? Who's No Longer Empty? Why are those artists coming? You can imagine not exactly a quiet time in the Bronx and Naomi was able to do this with her colleagues to not only catalyze the space and have people understand how it could be enlivened in a new way but also she created a whole conversation with that community about the future of that neighborhood, how this could fit and was able to get people to imagine it differently. Such an important role of understanding how we adaptively reuse and what the historic preservation intervention can look like. We put this one up because one of the things that we're aware of in New York with all our neighborhood work is communities define their assets differently. So you're in a particular neighborhood, the asset that you, there may be three or four assets that you really value and it's no, there's no real predictability as to why one neighborhood picks the library and the other neighborhood picks a coffee shop. It has just to do with the organic nature of the neighborhood. So part of what we're suggesting is that one of the ways that we can like an MAS in New York and you and your cities and us nationally, we can start to animate neighborhoods to identify what is the asset or assets that they really are concerned about. And let's recover them. Let's recover our assets. Let's take a really imaginative approach and create images like this. This is the old, I'm old enough to remember these posters that we all got when I was in university in the 80s and this is what we had in our walls. And we wanna do one on basically showing what neighborhood assets look like because there are many, many, many of these and every neighborhood has some. And they may in fact be abandoned. They may be unclear who owns them. It may be that they've fallen into disrepair and part of, and it's all very complicated. And that's part of the thing that we think we have to kind of bash forward through to not let complexity or complications inhibit us from actually doing something about these places. And in fact, if we can empower local communities to champion them directly, then I suspect they'll be much more successful than a bunch of activists sitting up in our offices saying, why don't we try to take this on? If we could actually mobilize people at the community level to say, we need this asset and we need to develop it. And I wanna show you in terms of how this, the rubber hits the road literally in New York City. After Hurricane Sandy, what we found is that one of the extraordinary pieces of resilience that needed to occur that actually organically formed up and that we now feel that we have to try to plan for is that communities found their own hubs. They remit their community together and they just instinctively did it by gathering in places. And often they were civic asset places. They were a library. I think the next slide is of a library. No, it's not, it's of a shop. But there were different kinds of spaces that people took and they basically took them over and appropriated them for the use that they needed right then, which is that they needed a cell phone charge or they needed a hot meal or they needed to find out how their neighborhood made out. I worked in New Orleans for five years. Hello, New Orleans people. And we really saw this, that the existing fabric is extremely important to building resilience in advance events and extraordinarily important after events like this. So the same kind of argument you can make about local retail that this becomes your touchstone. And so I know preservationists sort of, I don't know how to categorize preservationists, so forgive me if I give you the wrong category, but a high aesthetic preservationist. Is that a category that anyone knows that I mean? Might not say that this is something worth saving, but in fact, if the community identifies it as an asset and it's important to their identity and to the economic functioning and social functioning of the neighborhood, they would argue they should be able to preserve it. This is a library. So libraries post-Sandy became basically hostels. They became drop-in centers. They had to adapt. They had to become more multifunctional. So I think the last image that I wanna leave with you is that this is what I think the challenges for preservationists and for preservation organizations like ours. If we're not able to actually speak out to the people that are in communities and animate them and motivate them to care themselves about what the actual existing fabric is. And for them to do the diagnostic and determine what is it about the neighborhood that you want to preserve? Whether that's public housing, whether that's the streetscape, whether it's the old industrial space, whether it's the mixed buildings that you've really come to appreciate, whether it's affordable spaces for artists, all of that. The local community have to be the ones that are empowered. And until we can get ourselves to a place where we're mobilizing tens of thousands of people to start to see their neighborhood holistically, then we're never gonna have the success that we need to have city-wide or region-wide or statewide or country-wide that basically moves to an understanding that the city is an interconnected piece, completely dependent on the fabric that we've inherited, needs to be built upon and strengthened and that we're gonna be resourceful about the way we continue to make opportunities to make room. Because that's what a city does, it makes room. And preservation is such an incredibly important part, a first step in understanding what you're making room in as you build the city. So that's my tour de force on how we're approaching preservation and I hope my colleagues will come up and join me and we'll talk about the future of preservation with them as well. And now, please welcome to the stage our session moderator, Jim Lindberg and our trust-live responders, honor Ressio Harvey, Marimba Millions and Lorenzo Perez. Thank you, Mary. That was wonderful, as always. Things are happening fast in New York and actually fast everywhere, I think. Our cities are changing. I think we all sense this change in the air and so much of it that's positive. So many good things happening that I think a lot of us have been looking for for years, neighborhoods, all of a sudden, popular old buildings are where a lot of people want to work. We're even reintroducing old 19th century ideas of how to get around cities, street cars, bicycles, sort of a back to the future moment. But in so many good things, but also I think you've raised some challenges for us and thank you for that. So many important themes I think we want to talk about and I think one of them that's super important is how we make sure that this moment we have here, this moment of change and transition and re-energizing of our urban places benefits our full community, that more people are involved. I mean, I think we all see that this isn't necessarily bringing everyone into this new era of urban revitalization, that there are people who are being left out, there are people who are being forced out, the rising tide is not necessarily lifting all boats. So I think we want to talk about that and how we can make sure that the energy that you conveyed is benefiting so many more of our cities. And I think a number of other themes that really resonate with some of the work that we're doing at the Preservation Green Lab, the importance of local and small scale activity and incremental change, building on those lessons of Jane Jacobs, so important. And I think too, and you pointed to a couple of these, that the fact that these changes are big, they're fast, they're gonna require us to think differently. We've had a lot of success in preservation, a lot to be proud of, I think a lot of us feel like many of the good things happening in cities wouldn't have happened if we hadn't done our work. So we should be grateful for that and take pride in it. But I think we know too we need to do more and look at new tools, new approaches and the things that you're looking at around zoning, around how to mix uses and use buildings 24-7, very exciting, so thank you. And I'm delighted we've got such a wonderful, diverse panel here to engage in this issue, many of whom probably don't call themselves preservationists, but they are in their work using older buildings, seeing them as assets to benefit community, both from the government side, working here in Washington DC, working in Washington DC, Maremba with a community-based nonprofit effort in Pittsburgh, and then Lorenzo doing real estate development in Phoenix, Arizona, good stuff there, way out west to bring back community around older buildings. So I thought I might just start and ask each of you if you could just say a few words about what you see as the role of older buildings in achieving the success that you're looking for in your work. How are older buildings important to your work? And contributing to your success? Maybe I could start with Anna here in DC as our local host. Yes, thank you, and welcome to Washington DC. I think you find it lovely and exciting, and at the same time, we're a little worried about it. You see the whole influx of new people coming in, and I was just thinking about, as I was listening to you, one of my favorite places was to go to the fish market, and the fish market is just being swallowed by new development, and I was just asking the developer, are we gonna save the fish market? And we're all for development, and it's just fantastic, but that was such a hub of energy for older residents, and also new residents, we all came to buy our fish there. So it is something that is very, is worrying, but also the new people are being aware of that. So they are going to preserve that. I'm not that sure if the integrity, the heart of the fish market is going to be preserved because everything around it is gonna change, but at least we're keeping it. So the importance of those all buildings and all institutions, because they're more than buildings. They're really institutions that keep the community together is very, very important, and what I do in Washington DC is actually support small businesses. We are very, very focused on preserving and keeping our older historically owned businesses as well as welcoming the new ones. So definitely there's a mix of emotions, because the city is so small, we really need to keep them here. So that is, for us, the building is more than a building. It is the institution that is gonna anchor, not only keeping the old residents here, but bringing the new ones to be part of what it was, and we're excited to see what it's gonna turn into. Great, great. Lorenzo, maybe I'll turn to you and we'll go out west for a moment and tell us a little bit about the work you're doing in Phoenix and how older buildings help achieve the success you're looking for. Sure, for us in Phoenix, especially, we're known for commodity development, soulless sprawl, and for us it's an opportunity to sort of celebrate our assets and look at them in a new way. We had a demolition culture for a long time, we've got a strong local business movement, it's a successful place, so they fill a variety of roles. There are opportunities to build, you know, connection to place and civic pride and engagement, and that's sort of the space we're playing at, at that fine grain level. We'll hear more, okay. And Marimba, in Pittsburgh, you're working with a community-based organization around revitalization. How are your goals supported and enhanced by the fact you're also working with a wonderful older neighborhood? Well, I think, as it relates to your question around older buildings, I think that older buildings play an important role because they connect us to place psychologically and emotionally, and I also think that they create an opportunity for small businesses, as Mary said, to stay in the neighborhood. Affordable space is absolutely critical for neighborhoods like the Hill District, which is where I'm from, and so I really say that retaining older structures is important to preventing negative gentrification and to empowering the local business community. So I think that's critical. As it relates to the Hill District more generally, we are in Pittsburgh really struggling with the culture of demolition as well, and I'd say that, you know, I call them missing teeth because you have these blocks of structures and then you have maybe three structures and then two vacant lots and one structure, four vacant lots, and it really makes it very difficult to attract developers, right, because developers like contiguous sites, and so there's a tension in trying to retain what's there, but also attract new development. We don't wanna lose the fabric that we have, but we also want development that does not displace existing residents or in some way weaken the opportunity for the existing residents or small businesses that may want to come. So this challenge of sort of balancing the interest in our cities and our neighborhoods and attracting new investment, but also holding onto the things that we think are valuable and that's not just the buildings, but it's also, as you are saying, the businesses, the local connections. I'd like to just sort of explore this challenge of small-scale development and how to encourage small-scale enterprise in an era when there's a lot of pressure for a very tall, very big, very fast. And Mary, maybe you, I don't know if you wanna add a little bit from your experience in New York, some of the challenges you're seeing there in that marketplace and maybe some of the ideas that are coming out. It's just, it's such a huge challenge. If we think about diversity as being the great underpinning of urban life, diversity of every kind, that that's what a city does is it attracts and then holds onto and the way it self-corrects is because it has so much diversity to draw on. So diverse forms of work, diverse people, diverse spaces, diverse forms of labor. It's all so absolutely pivotal in how a city functions. And I think that the difficulty is that global capital, sort of the merging of global capital and as I suggested, this interesting technology challenge that's sort of, and the fact that things are moving more so more quickly. I think it means that government regulation may not be able to keep up. In fact, I'm sure it is not keeping up with the pace of the market or trends or technology. So this is a bit of a, like this is not for the faint of heart to think through. We may have to think about other ways to do this because it takes so long to get public legislation changed and thought out and invariably you create a zoning regime and then you find out with a not a very long period of time that it was actually wrong because things changed. So I think there are smarter people out there than me who are doing really interesting experimental thinking about are there other ways to introduce some kind of limiting factor into neighborhood planning that allows competing uses to coexist. But isn't so bureaucratically onerous that it dullens the market or discourages things? And in a city like New York, we're never gonna get approved some draconian elaborate thing. We're just never gonna get it through the legislative hoops to have it approved in the first place. So we've gotta be thinking really imaginatively, are there other ways to structure deals, create incentives, support different kinds of mixed use? Because I don't think there's probably anything more important for those of us that are urbanists than maintaining diversity of use. And so isn't that, I'm not remotely helpful to you because we do not have the magic bullet in New York City. It's a constant, constant thing. And that's why I'm appealing motivate people because what's happening in New York is that you're hearing people suggest, I don't wanna just see one kind of development in certain neighborhoods in New York. I don't wanna just see high end residential for billionaires that are only there a short period of time. It's not that we're against height. It's not that we're against billionaires, but it's just, you don't want a monoculture of billionaires either. You wanna mix. And I think it's a... So how to maintain diversity of place and of use? I mean, look at, if I just respond, I mean, you heard enough of me, so I won't say much more, but you know, if you look at entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs find a way to get to, they will not be banished from much of anything. They find their way in, right? And so I think, same with artists. Artists and entrepreneurs are the really resourceful improvisers in our culture. So I think to my way of thinking, let's just find ways to encourage those actors, those agents of change to get into neighborhoods. And then I think we're gonna find a way that's gonna manage to eke out new solutions and that they won't let a monoculture take over. So let's hear from DC or Pittsburgh or Phoenix about how to attract and encourage entrepreneurs and bring them to older neighborhoods and older buildings. Have you all seen that work? Successful examples? What's encouraging that or discouraging it? So for Washington DC, I think it's just a magnetic pole of being in the district of Columbia in Washington DC that tracks very much so. So it's a little bit of a two-edged sword because it's just the fact that Washington DC but it's only a small city. So we have a case in one neighborhood in which now we have a saturation of restaurants. They started, they are being successful and then another one came and now it is a saturation of restaurants. They're still well attended but there's nothing else to do there but eat and go home. So what are we missing there? So can we walk around? Can we find a movie theater? Can we find a improv? Can we get some artists working? This is something that is a very good example of a very successful neighborhood but now it's very monocultural. So that is an important lesson. I think the other neighbors have taken a look at that. One thing that we have going for the district of Columbia is the high restriction. So we're not gonna go high. Nothing can be higher than the capital. So I'm not entirely sure what the high restriction is but it's not gonna go up. So there's certain preservation issues but the nature of keeping it low that will preserve the landscape, the way it is. Nothing is going to overwhelm what it is Washington DC is known for but that is very, very particular to Washington DC. Everywhere else, I am from Mexico City and I don't recognize my neighborhood. It's just completely changed. This is something that we have going over here. So there's some lessons to be learned from what is happening but also there is a particular quality of Washington DC that protects us just a little bit. It's interesting. I think we're all kind of rediscovering as investment in people and development come back to cities. We don't necessarily have the rules in place to manage it if we weren't expecting the 200 story tower in New York or the push against the height limit here in DC. So that is something I think we wanna all be paying attention to in seeing whether those are tools that work for us or whether they need to be reformed in some way. And I also think that that's a great point about the challenge of maintaining diversity. 100 bars is not a neighborhood make. Or 100 sushi restaurants. We've all got versions of this. I love this DC, they've got the height limit because of the capital. We're just asking in New York for city council to pass a moratorium and then require a public review for any building over 600 feet. Oh my God, you'd think we'd pull the coast back. Somebody said to me, but this is America. All right, well speaking of different political environments, let's go out to Phoenix for a second here and talk about policies there. And also Lorenzo, a little bit about your work in creating places that are diverse and mixed use. Sure. I've done some innovative things. I think just playing on what we were just talking about what's attractive entrepreneurship in the Phoenix area is a few things. One is public policy. We've got a really comprehensive adaptive reuse program that's had tremendous impact. I think 80 businesses opened alone in the city center in the first five years, saving the average business owner $16,000 in four and a half months to get into their CBOs. So tremendous impact. I think everyone knows Phoenix got hammered in the recession and a lot of people were out of work and so a lot of entrepreneurial activity happened out of necessity. That combined with the unveiling of a major transportation investment in the light rail system has been incredibly successful in stimulating redevelopment along the TOD, the Transit Oriented Development Line. And I think a variety of sources or influences are stimulating things with people being out of work in such dark times. We saw a total increase in the need to connect with others on a social and emotional level. And as I keep telling my peers in Phoenix, that's probably the best thing that ever happened to us because it allowed us to take a breath, step back and evaluate what we were doing there. And what we were doing there wasn't sustainable or very appealing. And so now people are really valuing this sense of place in older, smaller buildings. And we're doing really creative stuff with the pretty basic buildings that we have. We have a strong indoor-outdoor climate. Allows us to do really interesting things with buildings that are transformative and open up to the outdoors and really celebrate our mid-century heritage, which luckily has been able to avoid the demolition. We lost a lot of our early 1900s buildings, but we're valuing those. And I think it's kind of fun to play. And that was the opportunity we saw and launched our business in 2008 to go play in the smaller, to sort of challenge old paradigms and test convention. And it's been really fun out there. And a lot of entrepreneurs are following suit. Let me ask you a little bit more about the adaptive use ordinance in Phoenix and what that is and how it's helped your projects. So for us, it's changed a few times, but it's been so successful. Now it's for buildings 25,000 square feet and smaller. And I think they've raised the age limit. It used to be older, but now it's as much as 2000. They have to be older than the year 2000. And we're a young city, but we had so many buildings that were vacated, especially big box retail and stuff like that that a lot of the chains pulled out. So what do we do with this stuff? So that's what prompted this expansive. And it's also city wide for the most part, concentrating in some infill areas. But we save about $7,000 right off the top. You get incentives to use towards plan review, permitting. And if you're opening a small pizza shop or a hair salon in an old house, it's pretty significant, especially in the smaller projects. So that's been excellent. The city of Phoenix has complimented that with an office for customer advocacy, which helps you navigate that bureaucracy. And my first project I did in 2009 was brutal. We redeveloped an old 1940s strip center with restaurant boutique retail in a budding historic neighborhood. And the old model was just unload on the developer all the reasons why we couldn't do what we wanted to do that was creative and stretching. That has changed. Today you have a customer advocate who walks your project through the minutia of city departments. I was telling Jim earlier that we have such a good relationship with them that we can call when we're looking at sites or other developers. It's also been good that other developers are helping each other out. As we've navigated these projects, we're coming to support each other. And we find that it helps on many levels getting through city council or village planning committees and stuff we try to help each other out. But I think that's such a great example of a city that's looking to try to make sure that its policies are supporting the things that they say they want small business and entrepreneurial activity and they're trying to make it easier for that to happen and supporting it. I think that's so important. Rimbol, let's talk about what you're doing in Pittsburgh because it's an interesting example where you're working in a neighborhood, correct me if I get my geography wrong, the middle hill in the upper hill district with a great historic fabric but some challenges and a legacy of loss that is in the neighborhood where there was a large scale demolition and so you're trying to really understand from the past and some experience there and make some decisions in the future that would support more incremental, locally driven development of an urban neighborhood. It's very exciting. I'd say one, it's very fascinating the model you just talked about how someone will help you on the government side walking a project through, right? That's oftentimes tough for the community side, right? We kind of come up with these plans and these visions at times and sometimes they're adopted and sometimes they're just kind of seen as the community's aspiration but not something that's implementable. Although we have worked very hard to make sure that our plans are implementable in the hill district, a lot of communities don't necessarily have that same technical acumen or technical support. So I was just kind of imagining the day where someone will walk our plans through, right? But at any rate, digress a little. So the hill district is a 600 plus acre neighborhood that is very rich in history, best known for its very rich jazz heritage. The lower hill district which is a site that was the site that was the site of awful urban renewal planning where highway was built and an arena was built in the late 50s. And that's a 28 acre site. Again, the hill district is 600 plus acres. That 28 acre site, however, is adjacent to downtown. So it's the site between and apart the foot of our neighborhood that borders downtown. So when the arena was built and highways were built, we were cut off from the commerce district and of course the neighborhood experienced great rapid decline, 8,000 businesses, residents, families displaced and moved into Barrett style public housing and then others were moved outside of the neighborhood because there just was not sufficient housing. And so that specific site has recently been the focus of a community benefits agreement. We call it a community collaboration and implementation plan in which the community negotiated over a period of two years, really 10, but we say 10 too just because you can get your head around it. To with the National Hockey League's Pittsburgh Penguins, the city government, the community and the county to come up with a vision and an outline, I'd say a framework for what would be and would not be acceptable on the redevelopment of that site. The Pittsburgh Penguins were given the development rights for that site. So the community felt really strongly that it was important for us to be represented in the redevelopment and that there be ownership opportunities and height restrictions and things like that to preserve not just I guess the historic sense of that site, but more importantly for us, I think was so that we do not destroy the middle and upper hill district as we are developing what will be a destination part of the neighborhood. So I think that the interplay, right, of these height restrictions and so forth within a specific, I should say within a specific place are not the only kinds of regulations that matter, but those adjacent districts that then define and cast on to the surrounding area what they will be in the future. So that's just a little bit about the hill district, I'll pause here. Excellent, thank you, thank you. We'll hear more, I hope. Want to pick up on another, I think, really important theme that Mary brought to us, which is this notion of the role of older neighborhoods and buildings in creating a civic commons, which I think is such a great concept because it goes beyond the idea of public space, but the sort of shared space that we, I think increasingly are talking about. We're sharing so much more of our public and private investments now than we ever did before. But I think the challenge remains how we make sure that, again, the whole community is thinking that way and feels a part of that. And I'd just be interested if anyone wanted to jump in with ideas about how we can take steps to involve greater percentages of our community and benefiting from this new interest and investment in our cities. Yes, please. I'd love to tackle that one. So we recently came up with a center avenue a redevelopment and design plan, which is our business district. And it was a planning process that fully involved the community. There was a steering committee that was established with community partners. It also included government. And we hired a design consultant to do the plan on our behalf. This is critically important. I was at the equity summit last week in LA with PolicyLink. And one of the comments was there is no development that is for us, that is not led by us, right? And so being on the ground and working with developers and working with government and so forth, I know that sometimes you can't always be the absolute leader of a development. However, the sentiment there is that there is no development that's for us that is not completely and totally informed by us and that does not benefit us. And that can't happen if you do not thoroughly engage and actually don't wanna use the word engage. But put a principle of equity at the center of the table and make that a high value, value because everyone talks about engaging community. But oftentimes what's left out of the conversation is how this development will create equity in our communities. And that is of critical importance given the income disparities, the wealth gaps that we see and just the access to capital. So if that's not a central value, it's something that we'll miss every time. So well put. Yes, this idea of neighborhoods, communities, places, being sources of equity as well as wealth for the community. What are some ways that you're seeing that work in community development successfully achieve those kinds of goals of enhancing community wealth and ownership? Are you seeing? Well, I can tell you that we need, so the Hill District 100 program is a program that we created to pipeline 100 home buyers for our neighborhood because we have so many vacant lots and because we have vacant buildings. And so the thinking was if we can pipeline and demonstrate interest, prepare folks to purchase by getting them through the banking system, then we can convince private developers and government to make greater investments in the housing stock that's there to prevent demolition and to bring a critical mass of housing to the area. So that's one way because home ownership is directly tied to wealth. So we know that, but a lot of times we miss the mark of where people start. So you've got to find out where people start and move them to that next level. They may not get there in one year, but maybe they can get there in five. So having that plan. And then I think in terms of the business environment, what's really important is to make sure that you have business incubators and for neighborhoods like mine, retail incubators because the retailers aren't there now. So if you're going to redevelop and do infill in a neighborhood where there's a great lack of retail at this stage, then we all know retail is really tough. So you have to move people along with the development before they actually sign a five-year lease. And so we've been doing retail incubation and some really creative mobile retail models like Tiny Retail is something that we came up with. So that's something I think is really important. Tiny Retail, I like that. But if I may add a little bit about this. I want to talk about the part of Washington that you probably won't see, which is the poorest part of TANIS east of the Anacostia River. So we have an opportunity to encourage economic development over there. We still have almost intact communities. So my job as the director of small businesses is to really encourage small businesses to go everywhere, especially on that side of the river. But what we have seen is that the businesses that might want to come over there, for example, in that community, nobody is going to buy an $8 bottle of olive oil. They're not gonna buy it. So there is no reason to, a valid reason to attack them because what we want to do is for the community itself to grow kind of the businesses that they need. And it was as simple as this lady coming to me saying, Anna, I want to have my nails done in my neighborhood. I don't need to ride the bus to have my nails done. And you know what? I have five of my friends that could come with me. So what is it that the community needs that we can create right there? We don't need to import olive oil. Olive oil is fantastic and I would love for them to build the wealth so they can buy it. But how do we start? And it's with the needs of the community. Another thing that another lady told me is like, I have two small children, toddlers, and a baby. And to go and buy fresh produce, I need to take a bus and I either carry the groceries or hold my babies. So those things are what we need to see what's happening right there and foster those businesses that could actually be, maybe the youth in that neighborhood could actually start business. That's what we're trying to do, see what they need. And then after, there's a little bit of wealth generation attract more sophisticated products but as simple as I want to have my nails done here in my neighborhood is very important. So I just want to fill in on this and just say, you guys have been on to this for years with the whole notion of preservation. The only thing you're hearing from us is we're just begging you. And I want to be invited back to this, just don't get me wrong. But I'm just begging you to leave your inner snob at home. Because this is, and I realize I'm gonna say something else that will make it even less popular but I think that city building is less and less about expertise, it's democratizing. You and I, we instinctively know what works in our neighborhood and we rely on people with expertise planning and design and zoning experience and legal experience to inform that and help us shape our neighborhoods but we know instinctively your gals know what they want in their neighborhood. And we for a long time sort of thought, well no, no, we'll just relegate that to the experts who are gonna decide. And I think that what I was gonna say in response to your question about the Civic Commons is technology has democratized all of this. So that people with cell phones now, and I wanna just be careful to be clear to say that, regardless of income, most people have a cell phone. And in fact, we're looking at ubiquitous broadband so it's gonna become more and more accessible. If there's a piece of infrastructure we should all be championing it's ubiquitous broadband. And then that's gonna enable us to have much more agency to say this is what our neighborhood needs to look like. And we have to kind of dial back all that, all that critic voice that we've got going that wants to aesthetically weigh in and say, that's not worth keeping. We should check ourselves just to never say that. Because in fact, if we wanna win the hearts and minds of people that we have to talk about what matters to them and how they define preservation and then we can inform that with the expertise we bring. But this has to be about empowering citizens to take back their communities and say what they want. That's great. Sure, sure. Can I have a go back? I just wanna add to that, we had that experience with one of our projects. I was a property vacant for six years and the owner lived in San Francisco and was directed to us through the city and asked if we would help facilitate community outreach. And that's what we did. And we learned, it was a big lesson learned for us as developer operators was to go ask the community. We hosted a charrette onsite and just listen, what's missing from this neighborhood? What do you wanna see? Exactly. And they really set the foundational concept and it made a lot of sense. It was missing and that's what got the wheels rolling. Got the city behind it and it became extremely popular and supported. And to this day has acted as a community gathering space with food and retail and educational events and it's just had a transformative effect and it's now starting to branch out. But it all started with a community coming together and feeling they had a say in it. It's a great example, yes. Quick comment about the inner snob and also the relationship between communities and the broader preservation community. I'm not sure I can technically define myself as a preservationist with this audience but I would say that the Lower Hill District in particular was interesting because the Civic Arena site which some of you may have read about which was what was developed that destroyed the Lower Hill District was also an architecturally significant building and a historic building. And so what you saw was a schism between the neighborhood that really believes in preserving history and the traditional preservation community because they wanted to preserve the architectural building while we were trying to reconnect to our culture and our history. So I think that's just something to think about in this work. Good one. Well, and I think too as you know so many good things are happening, they're happening fast, we may need to let go of necessarily being able to manage everything to the nth degree and rely on the fact that most people are doing the right thing, they're doing good things, especially if we encourage that kind of small scale incremental locally driven work. And I think it's been really exciting to get to know the network that Lorenzo, you're part of the small scale developers group and which is a national network of folks who are just doing small projects and trying to sort of work their way into this business. And it's not necessarily people who have a lot of background in real estate or development or design, but just care about their communities want to take on a project one at a time. That kind of thing that I think is really powerful across the country. Absolutely. Yeah, this group is through the Urban Land Institute and started about five years ago. It was sort of an invite thing in the beginning but it's been a wonderful platform to network with small scale developers and practitioners all over the country and now outside of the country and shared practices, lessons learned, we're working through challenges that we all face from getting through communities, municipal headaches, but really one of the big things we're trying to figure out is the financing. I think with the older, smaller building and where our financial systems are, they're really catered to the big, you know, the soulless. And so we're seeing a lot of innovation and we're working with a lot of local community banks with local decision making, they're more vested. Alternative lenders like CDFIs, there's great organization, LISC is one of our lenders that are based out of New York, doing work in housing and community and economic development. And I think you're seeing a lot of disruption too with great organizations like Fundrise out of DC here in crowdsourcing, you know, crowdfunding projects where people are voting with their dollar on what they wanna see in their neighborhoods and it's pretty exciting times. We just have time for maybe one more closing thought from each of you if I could and if I could just ask each of you to share with us something that you think is particularly exciting and hopeful about the future of our cities from your experience. Anybody wanna start? That they're thriving, I think they're thriving. I see everywhere and there's definitely this urban renewal and we have to be careful, we have to be careful that it is, we don't lose it. Sometimes it's very easy to get excited and lose our soul, right? So I'm very happy to see the city thriving. I'm really happy to see what is happening in Washington DC and I'm happy to see that there's a movement to preserve it the way it is. So I'm happy about that. I'd say that I agree with that, that our cities are thriving. I think it's really just about how we manage this moment. I think that over the past six months in particular, I've seen a great spike in conversations around inclusion and diversity. I've seen conversations and heard conversations rather about race, which is really odd for us, right? We don't like to talk about those kinds of issues because they make us feel uncomfortable and so I'm really encouraged at our efforts to broaden the conversation and to aspire to, I guess, a collective agenda. I'm extremely excited about where we're at in just the world with innovation and technology and all the disruption that's going on in every single industry. And I was just chatting with some of my partners about it. Like where are we gonna be in the next five years? And if you look at all the advancements that are going on and the demographic shifts, the ethnographic shifts that are taking place, it's exciting because old linear business models are starting to dwindle off and they're being replaced with very forward-thinking business models. And as a result of that, new space needs, new neighborhood needs, we're seeing a whole bunch of different values coming to play and I think it's gonna be exciting to see where we land. Great, thank you. I think we'll close with those positive thoughts. Thank you, Mary and all of our panelists. That was terrific. We'll continue the conversation in the learning labs that you'll hopefully be attending tomorrow and beyond. So thank you all very much and I look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you.