 First Wednesdays is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and by the Kellogg Hubbard Library with video production supported by Orca Media. In the Unitarian Church of Cornfield. My name is Rachel Sunshaw. I'm the program coordinator at the Kellogg Hubbard Library across the street. And this program was originally scheduled in March. But we were snowed out in March. So we're lucky to have it. And it may come here in June on a beautiful day. I want to recognize that there are several colleagues here from the Vermont Humanities Council, including Peter Gilbert, the executive director. We had a party today because he's retiring. Please give a hand. As you all know, first Wednesdays programs have been exceptional across the state of Vermont. And we're very fortunate that Peter made that happen. I know I'm very grateful for that. And there are a few other people from the Humanities Council here as well. And Peter's wife, Cindy, I don't remember her son. Her name is here. And several board members are in it. So it's really nice to have and retired staff people from the Humanities Council. A lot of people here, which makes it very special. I want to thank the statewide underwriters for the first Wednesdays programs. The Almond Good, Stonchin Foundation, the National Life Group Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Vermont Department of Libraries. The underwriter of this talk is the Marco George Fund. And I want to thank Orca Media for videotaping this program. And I want to introduce Ben Doyle, who is a board member of the Vermont Humanities Council, who will introduce tonight's guest. Help me welcome Ben Doyle. Rachel, thanks everyone for coming tonight. It's really my pleasure to introduce Ed Nakameyan. And before I do so, though, I just want to acknowledge the great work of the Vermont Humanities Council. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the first Wednesdays event like this. But there's a number of other kinds of programming that the Humanities Council does that really has an impact on our state. And the mission of the Vermont Humanities Council is to engage all Vermonters in world of ideas, foster a culture of thoughtfulness, and inspire a lifelong love of reading and learning. And that's something we really need these days. And we do that work through a number of public programs like this, but there are less visible things too. For example, our work with incarcerated Vermonters or fragile readers or the summer humanities camps for at-risk youth. So, you know, I hope that you'll take a moment to find out more about the Humanities Council. And I'm not afraid to ask for your support in making those programs and programs like this one possible. I also just, again, really want to thank the library for helping us put on this event. And also acknowledge Peter's service. Peter has just been a transformational leader for our organization and has made such an impact in the state of mind. We're so blessed, really, to have had him in that role. And I just want to acknowledge his service again. Thank you, Peter. But it's my pleasure now to introduce Ed McMahon. I'm going to just quickly read his bio. Ed McMahon is one of America's most incisive analysts of land use and economic development issues and trends. He holds the Charles Frazier Chair on Sustainable Development and is senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., where he conducts research and educational activities on land development policies and practices. He is nationally known as an inspiring and thought-provoking speaker. He also serves on the board of the Vermont-based Board of Family Foundation and is the chairman of the board of the National Main Street Center. Before joining the Urban Land Institute in 2004, Ed worked for the Conservation Fund, a national land conservation organization. He also served as president of the nonprofit group Scenic America, taught at the Georgetown University School of Law and served as an officer in the U.S. Army. Many of his articles and talks, including a recent TED talk, are available online. You know, and I would just say from a personal standpoint, in my day job, I serve as the director of community and economic development for USDA Rural Development, and when I heard that Ed was coming, I sent an email to a number of my colleagues saying, hey, you guys should come see this, and you would not believe the responses I got back. I saw Ed in college, I was in grad school, I served on a board with him. The man has groupies, but in all seriousness, to really think about what kind of legacy that is for a person who has had an influence on so many practitioners of community and economic development, you know, that has really affected their careers in a positive way, and ultimately those people are helping to affect change in rural communities. It's a fantastic legacy, and we're really honored to have him here tonight. Thank you, Ed. It's great to be here. I think in March, I was snowed out, but you guys were snowed in, so it's great to be back here in Vermont. You know, I'm always nervous about introductions, and I realize how perilous introductions could be. Some years ago, when my wife showed up at one of my talks, and I was, of course, interested in what my wife had to say about what my talk was about, and so she came up to me, I said, so what did you think? And she said, well, that was just fine, but she said, I want to talk about the introduction. And I said, well, so what? What do you mean? And she says, well, that was ridiculous. She said, the only thing they didn't say about you is they didn't say you were a model husband, now did they? And I said, no, no, that's a great idea. Maybe I'll add that to my bio. And she says, go home and look up the definition of model in the dictionary. If you look up the definition, it's a small replica of the real thing. So anyway, so that's, you have to be a little careful about the introduction. But thank you, Ben, once again. We're going to talk tonight about the importance of place. We'll talk a little bit about economic development and how the world is changing and so on. But I like to tell people how I got interested in this in the first place. And it really goes all the way back to the Vietnam War. And I was a young second lieutenant in the United States Army and I had just finished field artillery school and jungle warfare training and I had orders to a small fire base in the Central Highlands of Vietnam where I was going to be a forward observer. And literally about 10 days before I'm supposed to fly off to Saigon, I get a call from the Pentagon and I have a colonel on the other end of the line. He's with the personnel division at the Pentagon. He says to me, Lieutenant McMahon, would you have any interest in being a scientist at Germany? And I'm like, oh, okay. Let me think about that. And he said, yes, Germany sounds extremely exciting. I would love to go to Germany. And I was really one of the very lucky few. And I was sent to Heidelberg, West Germany, which is the headquarters of the US military in Europe and also one of the most beautiful small cities on the planet Earth. And I spent the next two and a half years of my life traveling all over Europe in a helicopter with a general who I was the aide to. And that experience completely and totally changed my life. But I didn't realize how much would change my life until I flew home to Birmingham, Alabama where I grew up and drove home. And for the first time ever, I saw the American landscape with a completely different set of eyes because, ladies and gentlemen, to travel is to learn. And that's what we're going to try to do tonight. And that's what we're going to try to do at the Earth Land Institute where I work and try to learn about what's working, what's not working, what might work better, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I think most of you would agree that you live in a very special place here in Vermont. And one of the things that always impresses me about Vermonters is just their caring for place. But I want to tell you something that I've learned and that is that no place, no place in the world today will stay special by accidents. And of course the reason for that is because the world is changing faster than ever. Now, I understand people don't like change, particularly people in small towns and rural areas often say they don't like change but really there are only two kinds of change in the world that we live in today. There is planned change and there is unplanned change. I mean you can grow by choice or you can grow by chance. I mean you can shape the future you want or you can just accept whatever comes along. You know, Abraham Lincoln used to put it this way to say the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. So, you know, development really is about choices. It's about, you know, should we be developing downtown or out on the highway. And by the way, I don't think that happy face makes the one on the right better but never the less. It's about choices. Should we be developing on green fields or gray fields? Should we be developing for cars or for people? You know, it's about choices. But it's also about this. It's about our children. It's about our grandchildren. It's about the future and it's about preparing for the future. It's also about balance and harmony. It's about that relationship between conservation and economic development, jobs and the environment, old and the new, people and the land. It's also about finding win-win solutions I believe to the problems that face us in America today. I'm one of those people who believe we spend way too much time in America fighting about what we disagree about and not nearly enough time sitting down community by community to talk about what we do agree about. And I can tell you that there's one place in America we can reach consensus that's in the local communities because I want to tell you that I have found that most people care more about the place they live than the political party they belong to and you can reach consensus about place and what kind of place you want to live in. But so you say, well, what's changing? The answer to that is everything is changing. The economy is changing. Technology, demographics, healthcare, transportation options and choices, you know, consumer attitudes, market trends. The weather is changing in case you haven't noticed. But, you know, let's talk about employment for a second. You know, I mean, yes, manufacturing is down in America. But business and professional services are up and healthcare and education is up even more. So when I was growing up in Birmingham, this was our leading employer. In fact, this was the biggest employer in the state of Alabama. But of course, U.S. Steel is gone today. It doesn't exist in Alabama anymore. Today, this is the largest employer in Alabama. It's called the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the 12 hospitals that make up the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham which employs way more people than U.S. Steel ever did in medical research and all the health-related services and so on. So it's kind of typical of what's been going on around the country. But, you know, some of you may have heard of this guy, Richard Florida. He did this famous book called The Creative Class. He did another book. We're recently called The Great Reset. He talks about really about the recession and how the recession has sort of changed the underlying basics of economics and the economy. And he says, you know, how we live, workshop, and move around is going to change. And the communities that embrace the future will prosper and those that do not will decline. And, you know, let's think about this. So, you know, I think we're in a global competition to attract and retain talented people, particularly young people. But, you know, when I got out of college, we had these recruiters would come to your college and interview the recruiter. And then young people would move to wherever they would find a job. In other words, talent followed jobs. But today, jobs are following talent. And as it turns out, talent wants to live in great places. And that's something we'll talk a lot about tonight. So here's a, I picked this up out of an airline magazine as I was flying on frontier airlines out to the West Coast not too long ago. They had an ad from Bend.org and an economic development ad. And it didn't talk about low taxes or regulatory relief. It talked about their 25 breweries and their 80 miles of bike trails and their walkable downtown. And the fact that you could go kayaking in the morning and snowspeeing in the afternoon. It really was all about the quality of life. And they've talked about people moving. There's so many communities like that. Unfortunately, in the United States, two thirds, two thirds of all small towns in the United States are losing population. A third or gaining population. And those thirds, some of them, it's the accident of geography here. The orbit of a large metropolitan area. Or they have a college or a university, et cetera. But then there's some others that don't have any of those things, but they're still growing while others are shrinking. And so we'll talk tonight a little bit about what we've learned about why some towns are growing and some are shrinking. So let's talk about economic development. So when I was growing up once again in Alabama, our model for economic development was all about cheap land and cheap gas and low cost positioning. And we thought all we needed to do was just widen all the highways. That was our rural economic development plan. And then we lined the highways with a bunch of junk and we called that economic development. But today I want to tell you it's not about shotgun recruitment. It's about laser recruitment. It's not about low cost positioning. It's about high value positioning. It's not about cheap labor. It's about highly trained talent. And it's not about what you don't have. It's about what you do have. It's what people in the economic world call asset-based economic development. It's about looking at your assets. And sometimes obviously some of you have more assets than others, but everybody's got assets. And it's really understanding what those assets are and how to grow them that really is important. I want to tell you that quality of life is critically important today in the economic world. And it used to be all about one transaction after another, but today it's not about transactions. It's about vision. And I want to suggest to you that the most important infrastructure best in America is no longer roads. It is education. Education. So let's talk about this a little more. So most communities, particularly small communities, their idea of economic development is to put an industrial park out by the airport and put in some sewer and water out there. And then they try like crazy to get some plant, factory, or distribution center to move there. But of course in the entire country, we only build a couple of hundred plants, factories, and distribution centers every year to do anything anymore. And so thousands of communities were never winning in that competition. But they were always what we called elephant chasing, going after that one big thing. So in big cities it was the same. So first it was an arms race to build the biggest convention center in America. And of course most cities will never win that arms chase. Then it was festival marketplaces, which worked fine in cities like Boston and Baltimore. But did you know there were 19 other cities that opened festival marketplaces that went bankrupt within three years after opening? Places like Toledo, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, and Jacksonville, Florida. And they just thought successful economic development, copying something someone else was doing. And then it was Aquarius. So even a city like Trenton, New Jersey said, if we could just build an aquarium featuring the fish of New Jersey that we could save, excuse me, not Trenton, but Camden, New Jersey. Well they built that aquarium. It's a very nice aquarium, but did it save Camden, New Jersey? No, it did not. Because successful economic development in America today is rarely, rarely about the one big thing. Much more frequently it's about lots of small things. Working synergistically together. All of a plan that makes sense for you and your community. Now I understand that we had 242 communities competing for Amazon. And of course only one community is going to get Amazon. And there are some of the people who don't even want it because they're afraid of what it will do to their housing prices. We have three of the final sites in the Washington, D.C. area, three of the final 20 are in the Washington metropolitan area. We are now in the third highest housing in America after San Francisco in New York. So we were saying like, well maybe it should go to a place like Baltimore that really needs it as opposed to a place like Washington. We've already got lots of jobs in high priced housing. So what about this idea of small, small development? You know, people look at this and say, well, you know, small steps, small businesses, small deals, small developments. But they can add up to big impact if you collectively look at that. And by the way, small developments and small economic development projects have less risk, more flexibility, easier to finance, et cetera. But, you know, in fact, most jobs in America are in small business today. Even if you go down to the Research Triangle in North Carolina, which has the largest single research park in America, the Research Triangle Park, which has 40,000 workers in it, the vast majority of those workers work in small businesses of 50 employees or less. In fact, 42% are working in firms of 20 employees or less. But of course, you probably know that all of the subsidies and tax breaks are going to big business in America. You know, and I want you to think about this for a second. You know, we have two models that we could follow, and I understand that it makes sense sometimes if you want to get that Amazon. I mean, people have promised Amazon as much as $8 billion to attract their second headquarters, $8 billion of taxpayers' money. But what I want to suggest to you is suppose you took that same $8 billion or much less, and you used it to revitalize small-town main streets, for example. You know, one pits one community against another. It subsidizes big business. When the subsidies run out, then communities, the companies either leave or threaten to leave. On the other hand, if you're investing in yourself, you create a diverse, durable local economy. You create lasting assets. It'll be there long after we're all gone. And, you know, you're helping existing local businesses. Now I'm not saying it's all of one or the other, but I think we neglect the small business side of this equation to the exclusion of the big. Let me just give you an example. So New Jersey under Chris Christie had this program called Grow New Jersey. And they did things like this. So Lockheed Martin had a facility in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, employing 250 people. Well, under the Grow New Jersey plan, they gave Lockheed Martin $175 million to move to Campton, New Jersey. They don't have to pay any property taxes for the next 20 years. They didn't hire a single new employee, and they don't employ anybody from Campton. They simply moved their economic activity from Cherry Hill to about 10 miles away into Campton. And, of course, they're one of the most profitable companies in the country. And that's kind of what we're doing in lots of places in the country. So let's talk about asset-based economic development. So I'll tell you a little story. This is a guy whose name is Foster Freeze. Probably most of you haven't heard of him. Something you might. Foster Freeze is a major contributor to Republican candidates for Congress and so forth. He was Rick Santorum's leading contributor when he was running for president in 2012. But Foster Freeze runs a mutual fund company called the Brandywine Investment Group. About 40 years, this company was founded by his father, was head toward in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, that's a busy suburb of Philadelphia. But Foster Freeze, he likes to fly fish. So every summer, he would fly up to Jackson, Wyoming to go fly fishing in the Yellowstone River and the Madison River and some others. And one day, he's stuck in traffic on the Skookle Expressway and all of a sudden, a light bulb goes on. His mind says, hey, I can run a mutual fund company anywhere in the world. And so what does he do? He picks up his entire company and moves it into downtown Jackson, Wyoming. So now it's the largest private sector employer in Jackson, Wyoming. Why is there access to outdoor recreation? You know, who would have thought that that was an economic development driver? But it is. You know, Montana State University did a study of every business relocation to the three Montana counties that have but the Yellowstone National Park over a five-year period. It said, why did you move here? And you know what the number one reason on the list was? And this was everything from doctors, small businesses, manufacturing, whatever. The number one reason was because of the beauty of the region. Now, isn't that interesting, the beauty of the region? If you had asked the both of your county commissioners 25 years ago to do something to save the beauty of the region, like maybe to pass a sign ordinance, they would have said that was bad for business. Turns out it's just exactly the opposite. It's extraordinarily good for business. So I want to leave you with four thoughts about economic development. Four key drives. One is talent, thinking about how you attract and retain talented workers. Second is innovation. You know, thinking about how you generate new ideas and turn those ideas into profitable businesses like the Silicon Valley is a great example of innovation. But every small town can create a business incubator, which relates to the third thing, which is connectivity. Creating places where people and ideas can get together. So a co-working facility, for example, or a downtown or a college, lots of places like that. But the thing that people forget the most about is the one on this last on the list, distinctiveness place. You know, place is more than a spot on a map. Place is not only what makes your hometown different from my hometown, but I believe it is explicitly that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about. That which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about. You know, I believe that successful communities today are distinctive communities and so are sustainable, sustainable communities. And by the way, what does sustainable mean anyway? If you look it up in the dictionary, it means enduring. Enduring a sustainable community like that is a place of enduring value. So some of you probably heard this slogan that Austin uses, keep Austin weird. Well, they don't think it's just a funny slogan. They think of it as an economic development imperative. They think it means keep them on the cutting edge, keep them distinctive, unique, different. And where would you rather than anyone in a place that's unusual and unique and different or somebody that's just like every place else? So, you know, distinctiveness has incredible value. In fact, here's a new book put out by the World Bank that for about 250 pages talks about all the various studies that make the point that if you can't differentiate your community from any other community in a world where capital is footloose, you will have no competitive advantage. Or put another way, sameness is not a plus in the world we live in today. It is a minus. So, you know, Joe Fortright used to run the CDOs for Cities Put It This Way. He says that unique characteristics of a place may be the only truly defensible source of competitive advantage for cities and towns in America today. The only truly defensible is the thing you can't replicate in another community. And so, you know, just look up the meaning of distinctive or think about authenticity, this idea of being yourself, being genuine, being real. Community character really does matter, as Mark Twain said, we take stock of a community or city or town like we take stock of a man that clothes or appearance are the externals by which we judge. Let's talk about a community's front door. It's gateway and just like with meaning at person, a good first impression is important and a bad first impression is hard to change. Do you think you'd rather visit the town of Franklin, Tennessee or would you rather go to the town of Midfield, Alabama? Which one looks more like a community with a sense of pride and a sense of place? Which one looks more like a community that you would rather invest time or money in? If you remember anything else I say tonight, remember this, the image of a community is fundamentally important to its economic well-being. I mean by that, I mean that every single day in America people make decisions about where to live, where to invest, where to vacation, where to retire based on what our communities look like, what they look like. Let's talk about tourism for example. Tourism is kind of important because it is the biggest industry in the world. It's the first, second or third largest industry in every American state. So this is the official travel guide for the state of Oregon. Check out their slogan that says, Oregon, things look different here. Can you imagine a state travel brochure that says something like, Vermont, things look the same here? Well of course not, because we want to go there. Tourism, at its very essence, is about visiting places that are different, unusual and unique. The more any town in America comes to look exactly like every place else, the less reason there is to go there. On the other hand, the more a community does things as distinct as whether that's architectural or cultural or natural or artistic, whatever, the more people want to go there because that's exactly what tourism is. So you know in the old economy it was all about markets. I want to suggest to you today it's really much more about places, markets versus places. You know the National Association of Realtors puts it this way, it says that place is becoming more important than the product. And what do they mean by that? What they mean is that what's going on outside of a house has much more impact on the value of a home than what's going on inside of a house. It's not a surprise that you could buy a beautiful Victorian house in Detroit for $18,000 up until just a few years ago. It wasn't about the house, it was all about the neighborhoods. You know the home builders used to do this study and they've asked people, what would you rather have? Would you rather have a big lot or a small lot? And what do you think people would say to that? They would go, we have a big lot of course. So we decided to rephrase the question in a national public opinion poll that we did at the Urban Land Institute and we asked this question. We said if you were buying a house, what would be more important? Having a big lot or living in a nice neighborhood. What do you think people said to that? They said nice neighborhood by huge majorities. So really it's much more about the place than it is even with, you know, granite countertops aren't everything in the world today. You know it's interesting, so mid-court editors, the head of the Republican Mayor's Association, you like to say that economic development is really the result of creating places where people want to be. So there's this foundation called the Knight Foundation. They got their money from the sale of the Knight Ritter newspapers and they fund in 26 cities that used to have Knight Ritter newspapers. And they did this study called the Soul of this Community Study. It's one of the largest public opinion polls ever done in the United States. They consider it almost 40,000 people around the country and they found a very interesting thing. They found that the places with the strongest attachment to place also had the strongest economies. And then they said, well what is it that attaches people to place? They found it was three things. Social offerings. You know, things like places where you can get together and meet your neighbors, like a coffee house or a bookstore or a farmer for market, for example. They also talked about this idea of being welcoming to people who are different. You know, I was in a small town in the south some years ago and somebody said to me, you know, we're very welcoming to people who aren't different. Well, I'm going to suggest to you that the communities that are going to be successful in the future are going to be the communities that are welcoming to everyone, not just people who are just like them. And then the last thing on the list was the character of a community, the aesthetics of a community, what it looked like. You know, I have a friend that used to be the dean at the Michigan School of Law at the Michigan School of Architecture and then somebody used to say, well, building a landscape for a city is not beautiful. It will not be loved. If it is not loved, it won't be maintained and improved. In short, it won't be sustained. You know, everybody's always talking to me about sustainable development, all about the new technologies and energy efficiency and all that. Yes, it's a lot of that. But once again, it's about creating places that people love and want to take care of which is becoming more important than where we live in today. We're trying to do with the Orton Family Foundation. We're trying to help small communities get everybody involved because none of us are as smart as all of us. And when you ask everybody about what really matters, you know, you can reach consensus, as I said before, and that's what Heart and Soul Planning is about. It's trying to find out what really matters to people in a community. Oftentimes it's not, you know, what you would think when you first start asking that question. So let's talk about a lot of the dimensions of uniqueness. We're really trying to think about this here in Vermont. What are some things you could think about or what are some communities think about? There's a list that I've sort of put together on this idea. Let's start off with anchor institutions. I mentioned, you know, so in 65 of the 100 biggest cities in America today, the largest employer is a college or a university or a hospital. Birmingham, Alabama is just an example of that or if you went to Philadelphia, now it's the University of Pennsylvania, is the biggest employer, et cetera. Some anchor institutions engage with communities and some do not. It's called that town-gown relationship. So let me tell you about the two biggest recipients of federal research dollars. Number one, John Hopkins University in Baltimore, $2 billion a year in federal research money. Number two, Stanford University, $1.8 billion a year in federal research dollars. Stanford kind of figured out how to commercialize that research and turned it into one of the greatest economic forces in the history of the world, the Silicon Valley. On the other hand, John Hopkins didn't really care what was going on in Baltimore, but did you know they started having an incredibly hard time attracting the best and the brightest to work at the Hopkins Medical Center. If you've ever been to the Hopkins Hospital, it was surrounded by basically a war zone there for many years and finally they figured out that the health of the city was tied to the health of the university and vice versa and now they're investing billions of dollars in the surrounding neighborhood the same way the University of Pennsylvania did in Philadelphia. So, you know, I think one of the biggest mistakes we ever made in America is putting all our community colleges out in the middle of cornfields instead of in our downtowns. So let me tell you what happened to the town of Hagerstown, Maryland. So the University of Maryland is a, there are flagship campuses right outside of Washington in a place called College Park, Maryland. For years they've been talking about building a new campus in Western Maryland. They had this guy who was on the board of trustees of the university and he's, he owns some land off of Interstate 70 nine miles outside of the town of Hagerstown, Maryland. He offered to give that land to the university and then he was going to build a light industrial park next to it and the university was thrilled about that. Great, yeah, we'll put the university out there, you know, off of Interstate. Meanwhile, they have this beautiful town that's dying as all these empty buildings and the mayor of Hagerstown goes to the then Governor of Paris, London and says, why don't you put the university downtown? He goes, oh, that's a great idea, never thought of that. He came to the old department store in another block of buildings and about five years ago 3,000 students started going to the school in downtown Hagerstown, Maryland. And, you know, there's nothing that brings a community back to life like young people in a downtown. And it's completed, by the way, if you built the university out on the highway, more stuff would have gone out of the town. Now these things are moving back into the town and that's the kind of way we need to think about cooperation. Let's talk about healthy downtowns. You know, why are downtowns important because they're the heart and soul of any community? You know, it's interesting, there's this magazine in the south called Southern Business and Development, basically for industrial park developers and the headline article recently was said, when sites searching the south, make sure you inspect communities downtown first. So why would an industrial park developer even care about a downtown? Because they realize that if you don't have a healthy downtown, you simply don't have a healthy city or town. The apple rocks from the inside out. It's hard to be a suburb of nothing in America. I kind of figured that out. And by the way, now we've also learned that companies are all moving back downtown and Crispin Wakefield did this study found that in the last five years almost 500 major American companies that have moved back into downtown from suburban office parks, people like General Electric and Motorola and McDonald's and Marriott and I could go on and on and on moving back into downtown. You say well why did they move there and the number one reason was to attract and retain talented workers. They want to be in the middle of everything and want to be where the action is. So this is the Amazon headquarters in downtown Seattle, but it used to be spread out all over the suburbs. It used to be only one way to get to the Amazon headquarters called drive your car. Well of course you can drive your car to the Amazon headquarters in Seattle now but you can also take a bus. You can take a boat. You can take a train. You can ride your bike or you could walk. And when you're at the end of the day you're in the middle of everything and you know it's interesting that almost 50% of the employees of Amazon don't even own a car because now they can get there that many of them live in the South Union Lake Union neighborhood etc. This is Frederick Maryland where my daughter lives. This was a dying small town in the 1970s and early 80s there was a huge flood and they decided that then mayor decided when we build back we want to build back better and so he decided to build a river walk through downtown a small town version of the San Antonio river walk and thought he was crazy. Spent $11 million on this thing called the Carroll Creek project and what was interesting within five years it was $400 million in new investment along that creek and today this is the fastest growing town in all of Maryland. Today this small town in their downtown has 5,000 residents 800 businesses 200 retailers and restaurants and 25 small high tech companies that all started with an investment in themselves. What about historic resources? Why are historic buildings and neighborhoods and landscapes important? Well there's lots of reasons and I'm sure that I'm meeting tomorrow with the Mott Preservation Trust and I think you've got more than you're fair share of great historic buildings in this state and I know most of you treasure these buildings but sometimes we forget why they're so important. So let me show you a couple of slides and I'll illustrate what I'm going to talk about. So some of you probably read some of the books by Thomas Wolff he wrote, look home where an angel and you pin the immortal line you can't go home again. Well sadly Tom Wolff he can't go home again but here it is in this parking lot down in Asheville, North Carolina. Why are historic buildings important? I would suggest it first and foremost because these are the places that physically connect us to the past. These are the places that tell us who we are and where we came from. Ladies and gentlemen, a city without a past is like a man without a memory. You know as Daniel Webster once wrote he said, quote, the man who feels no sentiment or veneration for the memory of his forefathers is himself unworthy of kindred guard and remembrance. At its essence, saving the historic buildings of Vermont or any state is about saving the heart and soul of that place. But it's also incredibly important to its economic well-being as well. So Ben mentioned that I chaired the National Main Street Center Board. We worked with about 2,000 small towns using the grassroots bottom-up development approach called the Main Street Approach. This was one of the first towns in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. That used to be the fire station in Sheboygan Falls and it, you know, had been turned into a pizza parlor and it's kind of like a lot of small towns with the town going downhill. And one of the four points of the Main Street Program is design, restoring the facades of all buildings. So they did that. You know, tells a story about the history of the building but guess what else happened? The building was doubled. It sustained that over a multi-year period. So let me show you a couple of nationally famous examples. So welcome to New Orleans. So, of course, this is the French Quarter and I've spent a lot of time in New Orleans both because I have a sister that lives there but also I was one of the consultants brought in by the city of New Orleans and stayed with me again after her name Katrina and asked to put together a redevelopment plan for the city and of course they didn't want just a physical redevelopment plan, they wanted just a physical redevelopment plan. So all the consultants, we said well, what's your biggest industry? Is it the oil industry, the secret industry, the chemical industry? No, no, the biggest industry in the entire state of Louisiana, number one is the tourism industry and what is the what is the engine of that industry? Well, you're looking at it and it's called the French Quarter. But did you know that for about 40 years the state of Louisiana wanted to put a freeway through the French Quarter? Well, in any plant, factory distributions in the entire state of Louisiana but they didn't really think about that they do now and they recognize it for the economic engine that it is in that city. Let's go over to Texas and visit the San Antonio Riverwalk, the number one destination in all of Texas. The basis of that city's multi-billion dollar year annual tourism industry and the single defining characteristic of the city but what most people don't know is at one point in the past the city thought so little of that small river they actually wanted to put it underground into a culprit. Today it's the most visited place in Texas. Let's fly out to Seattle and go to the Pike Place Farmers Market, the number one destination in Washington state. But once again there were people in the city council about 30 years ago that wanted to tear down the Pike Place Market and why? They said, oh well we need more parking for what? And you know parking is important but you know like parking for what? All the parking in the world if there's nothing to do no one's ever going to want to go there. So if you have a parking problem it usually means you're successful if you have something that people want to see and do so they saved that place and now as I said the most visited place in all of Washington state or how about let's go to Miami Beach and visit the Art Deco Historic District. The largest place of Art Deco buildings in America they were all going to be torn down and there were people saying well we got to have more high-rise condos in South Florida. Any of you guys have been to South Florida and you think they got a lack of high-rise condos down there? In fact they have many, many high-rise condos that are all sold out and no one lives in them because they're all owned by someone from South America or Mexico or Russia. You've got the box in the sky you just put your money into this building but now you go to South Beach and it's one of the greatest urban places in North America. I never forget taking my 20-something children to Miami. I wanted to get them out to the Everglades and they were in South Beach and they said dad you don't want to go to Everglades you want to stay here. Come on kids go into the Everglades you know. How about the Camden Yards baseball stadium in Baltimore? Probably the most influential sports stadium ever built in North America. Not just because it was a new stadium but because it was the first of the so-called retro stadiums did the best job of integrating new construction with historic buildings that surrounded that site. You know the field is 12 feet below the street level so it didn't tower over the row houses that surround the stadium. It was a good neighbor. That's a thought having new fit in with old being a good neighbor and as you know Arthur Fromer probably the leading travel writer like to say among cities and towns with no particular recreational appeal those preserve their past, continue to enjoy tourism those that haven't received almost no tourism at all tourists simply won't go to a senior town that has lost its soul but it's about a lot more things than tourism. It's about jobs and it's about affordable housing it's about environmental impacts it's about lots of things and I mentioned the mainstream program and this is what incremental economic development can do for you billions of dollars of investment hundreds of thousands of jobs and businesses and instead of giving us 8 billion dollars we've generated 32 dollars in private investment for every one dollar in public money that the public has given us over the last 20 years so I would call that effective economic development. Now let's talk about how preservation is changing so at the Urban Land Institute we do a report every year called Emerging Trends in Real Estate and we interview people all over the country developers, banners finance people and we say well what's working in real estate, what are the best investments now etc. and in 2016 we found a very interesting thing we found that office space and restored industrial buildings like old mills were commanding higher rents than new class A office space in the United States commanding new higher rents than new class A office space I thought I was going to show you a couple of examples so this used to be a derelict wharf in Boston now it's of course the world headquarters for the converse shoe company or how about the Sears distribution center in Seattle now it's the Starbucks world headquarters or how about this abandoned power plant in Toledo, Ohio and now it's the headquarters for this international medical supply company called ProMedica but it's also happening in small towns all over America too so this is an abandoned mill in western Maryland place called Cumberland Maryland well now it's a group hub, it's apartments restaurant etc and this really makes sense and by the way all the creative class headquarters say they want to live and be in spaces with character character and they like these old buildings it's easy to move things around you know and they like the flexibility of this kind of space what about hotels you know I was on a I was brought out to Indiana last year to speak at the Indiana Preservation Trust and the meeting was in a place called Richmond, Indiana it's kind of a nice little small city but there was no downtown hotel and they put me up at the Hampton Inn, was down on the highway outside of town the only thing I could walk through from the Hampton Inn was a Jiffy Lube and that's kind of what we did for years we didn't build any hotels in or downtown and we you know they were all out on the highway somewhere but you know it's interesting so Mary I did a study that basically has been replicated by virtually all the big hotel chains and found that for young people in particular authenticity and interesting were more important than comfortable and predictable in lodging facilities they also said they wanted to stay in places that they could walk something like in a downtown so all the hotel chains have started to change their operation because the consumer attitudes have changed so we're seeing things like this a large store being turned into a hotel or an old factory being turned into a hotel or an old brewery to be turned into a hotel or even a mental hospital in Buffalo being turned into a hotel how about this one they took an abandoned grain mill and turned it into a Hilton hotel this is part of the Quaker Oats redevelopment in downtown Akron which is the beginning of the turnaround in downtown Akron you know I just want to end on this point I mean these we have historic buildings have great economic value and we just need to look at the potential there and you know we have so many more opportunities to reuse the places that we already have alright so let's talk about parks and green space for a second there are hundreds of studies that show that green space increases the value of adjacent property so where's the most valuable land in New York there it is it's the land next to Central Park so what about golf courses here in Vermont for example so for years all the hell these bucks want to build golf course developments and why do they want to build golf course developments because they found out you can charge a lot premium from 10 to 25 percent more for a house next to a golf course over in a bunker you can charge for the exact same house not next to a golf course but they found out something very interesting did you know that the vast majority of buyers in golf course developments always didn't play golf so he asked them well why did you buy the house there they said oh well we like a view across the fairway we like to live next to a kept open space well duh what's it cost to build a golf course for millions of dollars what's it cost to maintain a golf course for millions of dollars what's it cost to leave the open space along in the first place like almost nothing so all of a sudden development started to figure out they could build a golf course develop a golf course so what we used to call conservation communities if you heard the term agro goods now we're building new housing developments around working farms all over the United States CBS Sunday morning had a big special on this recently exactly all of us because we have a foodie generation people like low level everything green and sustainable et cetera et cetera et cetera and parks can create incredible vitality in a community you know you've all heard of the highlight in New York City where we look at Mary Giuliani that was way too expensive and it was expensive $148 million but did you know that it has leveraged $4 billion of new investment directly adjacent to it it's generating 12,000 new jobs and it is now the number two tourist attraction in all of the New York state you know but this is where we're creating new parks where do you find parkland already developed cities well this is like parking lots so those two parking lots are now the park of Fort Worth Texas called Sundance Square we're redoing highway ramps and bridges and all kinds of abandoned rail lines abandoned railroad yards all over the country let me tell you about a small town example I fly around the country every year take pictures and lots of small towns a couple years ago I went to southwest Texas and photographed 13 courthouse squares one of them was in this town and I had this beautiful courthouse they had great courthouses in Texas by the way they had 264 counties in Texas they're little counties so it's easy to get around they all have little squares around them they only had one event a year one event a year it's called the 4th of July so the rating of the park is not just about the hard infrastructure it's about the soft infrastructure it's about activities and programs that little courthouse square they put a splash pad there then they started to have birthday parties there and then now they had festivals and health fairs and classes and concerts and you know now this was one of the most improved town in Texas now they have 300 events a year on that square and best guess what the town of square has come back to life because people are actually going downtown again because this place that they had the green space they just weren't doing anything with the green space so anyway those are some of the things that they're doing there to put an outdoor chess set I mean it's just kind of fun nothing really expensive so basically I'm not going to say I could just give you a whole talk on cycling if I said this is the fastest growing form of transportation in America by far well why? well because first of all what's it cost to own an operated car in America $9,000 a year for a compact car young people are now telling us that mobility is more important than ownership and you know when I was a teenager 92% of all 18 year olds had driver's license today 67% lots of young people, lots of people don't even care if they own a car anymore Uber and Whift and car to go and on and on and on but they're not about arts and culture so I think the state and I commend the humanities council and the arts council for doing lots of great things here in Vermont but I want to just talk a little bit about public art that I have personal interest in and public art, I like public art particularly placemaking public art by that I mean public art that tells you where you are doesn't have to relate to any particular style or medium but it somehow relates to the history or the geography of culture or the terrain of the place and so the dollar department grew up in Samirville Tennessee so they had her on the main square and that's kind of appropriate I guess or Thurman Marshall who grew up in Maryland we have him on down in Annapolis etc and you know you can celebrate famous people like Ben Holler or Babe Ruth or William Faulkner etc or famous events like you know by the way this is at the Franklin Memorial Roosevelt Memorial in D.C. and every time you go there you'll see people lining up with the red line having a picture taken with the people, one of the favorite sculptures in D.C. or the sit-ins etc but you know some of you would say well it might be famous people in our town well so what you got ordinary people the people who built your town maybe it was the lumberman or maybe it was the waterman or maybe it was the coal miners or maybe it was the settlers or the ranchers so there's lots of people you could celebrate and you know all this is really about telling your story this is the chiseled trail mural in Fort Worth celebrates the cattle drives that were the reason for the founding of the Fort Worth that's our family album and every one of those pictures is important in the history of our town so the picture on the right there on the bill says Wiley's Wiley's was the ice cream parlor that was the inspiration for the TV show Hankie Days just as one example and so it's our family album or how about this, this is National Enhancer that's the Yankee Fire Diner mural the Yankee Fire Diner used to be an institution National burned down on the fire they decided to bring it back to life and they painted the mural all the people in the mural are real people they all paint and have their kitchens put in the mural so where there's a will there's no way or how about these baseball bats in America well it's appropriate that this is downtown Louisville because that's where they make all of the Louisville slugger baseball bats that are used in the major leagues for baseball or how about the the big postcard in Orlando do you want to see what old Florida looks like well now I'll show you what old Florida looks like or maybe integrating art into infrastructure some of you may have seen the Frog Bridge goes from Norwich to Hanover you know we used to always integrate art and infrastructure in the 30s and 40s and then we just kind of forgot about that and everything was about utilitarianism we could do it again how about using our water towers so Lulee, Texas is the watermelon capital of Texas or Plant in Alabama and I could go on and on I was just out in dreams Idaho which is building a new water tower with a potato on the top just as an example or how about this this is the Yankee flyer diner excuse me the Yankee flyer wagon radio flyer wagon in Spokane, Washington when you used to manufacture radio flyer wagons so now you have a piece of public art something tells you about the history of the place and the piece of playground equipment all wrapped into one that's the venue where all the street lights are her sheet of kisses you know and I understand that you don't always have to tell a story sometimes a public art could just have fun and whimsy and interested excitement in the streets every small town in Vermont has got something blank wall like this and what can you do with a blank wall like this well maybe you can do this if I had put a sign on it would people kind of drive into this thing this is down in Columbia South Carolina Tunnel Vision retail let's talk about retail so strip mall coming soon I want to suggest to you this is the old model for development and the strip malls are retail for the last century and that the future ladies and gentlemen belongs to downtowns and the main streets and town centers and mixed use development and there's lots of reasons for that first of all because we completely over built on suburban retail for 40 years and then of course we have something now called the internet and internet shopping and you know did you know that we have twice as much retail space in America per person as any other country in the world and we completely over built you can shut that off I wasn't even like one of my grandchildren calling me no doubt sorry if I turned that off it's in the front so let's talk about this so we built for right before the recession we were building retail space in America five times faster than retail sales which of course is why we built the one strip center we cannibalize another strip center but one mall we cannibalize another mall etc and of course now in the last since the recession we've closed 350 enclosed malls in the United States we've opened one in Las Vegas we're going to close another 300 in the next five years and the rest are being turned inside out and repurposed so let me give you an example in the 1970s this is the county seat of where I live Montgomery County, Maryland and then in their infant wisdom in the 1970s they decided to tear down almost their entire downtown replacing this lovely mall you see in the background called Rockville malls but guess what now they're calling the mall to put the downtown back there's kind of a metaphor for America we're going to be looking back on these things and what were we thinking when we did those kind of things and you know when I moved to Washington to go to law school many years ago we had 11 enclosed malls 8 of them are now gone in place with mixed use walkable development and that's going on all over the world and this ladies and gentlemen is the new promise lander you know Joni Mehta used to say tear up paradise and put in a parking lot well now we can tear those parking lots up and put paradise back and here we already have our sewer and water this is where we already have our infrastructure these are what we call gray fields and these are what are our greatest redevelopment opportunities so yeah you can keep doing this you know drive along by itself single use etcetera or maybe you could try something like this where people are actually sleeping upstairs and shopping downstairs and who might want to do that well some of the 75% of American households who do not have school-aged children and people who might be able to walk to a few things might want to do that well you say I couldn't do that in my small town maybe I could do something like this here's a brand new dairy queen in the south town of small town of Herb in Virginia with a dentist's office upstairs how appropriate and you know let's talk about even in Walmart you know for years they just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger now they're getting smaller and smaller and smaller and by the way there's only one place left in America where we're spending power than stores are using in our downtowns so this is the new model for the Walmart of America that's the first of three Walmart's in Washington DC that's in a five-story building with 200 apartments above the Walmart there's a swimming pool on the roof where's the parking it's under the building and by the way there are real windows in that Walmart that let in real sunlight onto the floor of the store and that's the model for the future of the new development they're even doing that down in Bentonville, Arkansas because they couldn't get people to want to move to Bentonville so they're actually investing hundreds of billions of dollars to turn it into a walk-up that's being friendly to me kind of like Montpelier and you know it's so interesting that the icon of American suburbia is now helping to rebuild many of our cities in town so let me give you another chance and we took a tour at Bentonville that went down to Fayetteville and I'm driving down the interstate and I see this waffle house out on the highway you guys have all seen waffle houses on highways before but then I get into downtown Fayetteville there's another waffle house a brand new building with three spores of apartments upstairs and I said well that's interesting I've never seen a new waffle house with apartments there's no parking in front of the building except on-street parking so I thought that's kind of interesting so I went over to the family city hall and they said oh yeah we did a study on that waffle house turns out the downtown waffle house is out performing the waffle house out on the highway but more importantly it's producing more taxes per acre more jobs per acre more residents there are 42 people upstairs above the waffle house in downtown Fayetteville and no one lives above the waffle house out on the highway and by the way this is why the future belongs to mixed-use development outperforming single-use drive-only development everywhere in America and there's this thing in the real estate where we call the place making dividend and what it means is people stay longer come back more often and spend more money in places that attract our affection so I want to end uh oh they just ran out here do I get one back? I want to just end by sharing with you what I call my secrets of successful communities I've been in this business for a very long time I've come to some conclusions about why some cities and towns are succeeding and many others are failing it all starts with a vision for the future now some people might call that a plan for the future and I grew up in a part of the world where planning was a dirty word and people would say I'm against planning and I'd say okay well then you tell me the name of any successful organization institution, corporation or community that doesn't plan for the future failing to plan simply means planning to fail as the book of prophets says about vision the people will perish and successful visions always begin by inventory your assets and then successful communities build their plans around their existing assets whether it's a tourism plan a land use plan, an economic development plan what have you and successful communities use education incentives, partnerships and volunteer initiatives and not just regulation now I didn't say I'm against regulation but it's bad things from happening sets a minimum standard of conduct but you got to use carrots not just sticks you need to make it easy to do the right thing and you know today you make it easy and many places do the wrong thing time is money in the development business make it easy to put the development where you want it successful communities pick and choose among development proposals you know what the biggest impediment to small town development better development in America is today the fear of saying no to anything but if you're afraid to say no to anything you'll get the worst of everything communities that aren't willing to say no to bad development will compete to the bottom communities that say no to bad development will compete to the top because they know if you say no to bad development you're always going to get better development in its place successful communities cooperate with their neighbors for mutual benefits successful communities consider what they look like successful communities have strong leaders of citizens so when I was growing up in Birmingham there was only one city we made fun of Chattanooga, Tennessee it was called the most polluted city in America routinely referred to as a patch of rust in the Sun Belt but nobody makes fun of Chattanooga anymore now it's known as an international model for community revitalization it all began with a vision for the future they did some remarkable things like this this is the Walnut Street Bridge in downtown it's an off street highway it's a pedestrian and Chattanooga said no we have a better idea give us the same amount of money and let us turn it into the nation's longest pedestrian bridge now connects one side of the Tennessee River with the other side or how about public buildings this used to be the city hall in the small town in northern California in the city California public buildings are kind of it's a two double wide trailer this was the only city hall in California but public buildings are kind of important and they were always our most beautiful buildings before World War II whether it was the public school or the library or the courthouse or the post office and they were always in the middle of downtown and then starting in the middle of the 60s we decided cheaper was better you know what we've learned we've learned that cheaper is simply cheaper and you know what they said in Susan City why would anybody invest in a community that wouldn't invest in itself and so they built a new city hall a decade later this was one of the best places to live in northern California but all began with investment in themselves successful communities inventory of their assets sometimes the assets are really easy to see like in Jackson Hole, Wyoming world-class ceiling unparalleled wildlife resources or how about inapolis, Maryland unbelievable architectural legacy and they built their plans both of these views around preserving what they already have sometimes the assets here are not very obvious welcome to Lowell, Massachusetts it was a dying industrial city had an unabomber rate of 27% thought it had no assets but what it had was abandoned textiles had a vision for the future and now it's worth it restored all of those bills turned them into housing and retail and parts of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell this has become the Charles in South Carolina of New England all began with a vision for the future or how about this abandoned torpedo factory in Alexandria now the largest working art center in the United States with over 100 working artists in this building getting millions of visitors a year how about Columbus, Ohio excuse me, Columbus, Georgia had a character flood on the Chattahoochee River and they didn't see that as anything but an opportunity so they built one of the great river walks in America and now of course they're downtown it's come back to life or how about just picking the flood walls and the work out which they've done now in Paducah or in Rapid City where they used to debate how much parking they had where they took the parking lot out and put the park in and by the way it's an ice skating rink in the winter brought people back into the town I already showed you this one the Akron Grange elevators it's now where the Hilton Hotel or how about this one you've all heard of the High Line in New York City how about the small town version of the High Line Hudson River the highest ridge above the Hudson River is now a state park attracted 800,000 visitors a year to this small town in upstate New York Cecil Peters used education sends his partnerships and voluntary initiative why do we educate in order to reduce the need to regulate why do we educate because people won't embrace what they don't understand why do we educate because people have a right to choose the future choices are and yes we do need to use incentives there's all kinds of incentives more than free coats we can get it out things like a stroke reservation tax credits are expedited permanent review I could go on and on here as an example this is the abandoned Lone Star Brewery for 25 years it was abandoned until they used a stroke reservation tax credit turned into a great museum of art or how about the conservation easements of voluntary initiatives save your view and get a tax break too you know that's a volunteer how about you guys in city Mississippi where all they did was pass out free paint and they painted it their way back to vitality by a voluntary initiative successful communities pick and choose successful communities have hometown heroes and I understand it's not always easy getting things done in small towns in America and no matter what people would propose to do in my career or any other community always being the people who would tell you no can't do it won't work Friday already it costs too much and every community has the naysayers and yet you know I want to tell you no is a powerful word in small town America I want to tell you a more powerful word yes yes we can make this a better place to live in to look at to work in to visit and you know it's interesting if you don't care who gets the credit you can get an awful lot done in America I love this quote from Monty Python I'm talking about the Romans said apart from sanitation medicine education wine public or gross irrigation public health and fresh water system what have the Romans ever done for us ladies and gentlemen a vision counts but implementation is priceless thank you so much for having me with some questions or comments from the audience yes sir we have a good question probably during my career in my 4th career we have full school I'm sort of left the city and we have huge portions in our riverfront in town they're all taken out by parking lots where people need to sort of park and work in the state office etc is there any way you can't reclaim the river because of these parking lots so I've got to do what you're talking about we can't go out of the town development are you not aware that it's been successful and how we replace those and still keep people working for a thousand examples of that I want to go back to something I mentioned just touched on earlier which is basically so you can park 12 bicycles in the space of one car what does a parking lot cost anyway well a service car can cost $3,000 to $5,000 a structure car can cost $15,000 to $25,000 a space underground parking costs $50,000 a space I was at a public hearing in Denver about five years ago and the developer would propose a new project and Jason took a look at their light rail stations called Fast Track and also next to what's called the Platte River Greenway which is a bike trail and the city had not changed their parking standards even if it was next to a transit station and a bike trail and the developer said something very interesting he said to the planning commission he said you know I could buy every tenant in this building a brand new bicycle for less cost than the cost of two I think about that so we're building projects all over the country that don't need as much parking because brand new brand new apartment building I just did a case study on in Albuquerque, New Mexico 123 apartments only has 25 parking spaces well how's that work well most people live in a building or young people they don't own a car anyway and it's on a bike trail and they have a car to go stop right there and it's on a transit line you know the best solution to travel is called being there okay and so what we're doing in many places in the country is understanding that the world has changed in terms of transportation so we just did a study in partnership with a firm out in Los Angeles that looked at the future of parking in America particularly given all the things I talked about and something I haven't mentioned at all which is autonomous vehicles we already have the technology for it it's coming back to the most people to realize what they found was that every person who has studied this from MIT to UCLA says that in the future we're going to need anywhere from 40 to 90% less parking spaces than we have right now we have over 2 million parking spaces in America okay which takes 1,000 millions of acres of land so parking is one of our it's our greatest redevelopment opportunity particularly in our data every town has these empty lots parking lots and the only way you can make structured parking work we're actually building parking lots now that can be deconstructed or converted into something else later on and so if you're thinking about the future you need to think about those parking lots as a redevelopment opportunity and it's not going to happen overnight in every place it's going to happen in all the big hot market cities but it's going to eventually come to the smaller towns as well and you know I was talking to two people the night when I was coming here both of them walked here because they lived downtown not everybody is going to do that but you know it's all about choices so when you're rather living in a neighborhood you have to drive your children to school or if you're not living in a neighborhood you drive the school you want it to drive the school you know I just came back from a month of touring bicycle infrastructure in Europe in Holland and Belgium and France Spain I mean the reason there's the big reason people don't ride more bikes in this country is not the weather it's not topography it's not culture it's a fear of getting hit by a car and in Europe they have a whole system that you can't get hit by a car it's safer than safe so that's just one answer to that by the way bicycle infrastructure costs a tiny fraction of what car infrastructure costs so we were looking at there's a new in San Francisco there's a new protected bike lane along Market Street and that cost about four million dollars a mile to build this protected bike lane on the main street but they're also building a highway called Doyle Drive that's $720 million a mile we're building a new bay bridge that's $2 billion a mile so we're talking about a relative difference if you don't want your taxes to go up for transportation start investing in alternatives to driving you know this is one of the things I learned in Germany maybe it's like you can go to any small town ten times a day I would probably have a strain it's like whoa duh you know here we have we only have a decent train service one place in America from D.C. to New York and did you know that Amtrak carries more people than all the airlines combined why? not because it's fast it's not because it's frequent every half hour all day long you don't have to think about it you just go down there and get the train and would you drive to Philadelphia or fly to Philadelphia if you could take a train every half hour you don't have to go through security etc etc etc so you know part of this is transportation part of it is changing the way we think but it's part of understanding the market dynamics and you know small stores are getting small because people are ordering things online they're certain they're going to pick up things you know we have Wal-Mart now they're as small as 4,000 square feet 4,000 square feet they just built one of that size at the National Georgia Tech University this was a company that had all the buildings were 150,000 square feet and so everything is getting smaller so you're going to need less parking and there's a lot of ways to do that yes other thoughts yes sir yeah so last I'm not sure I heard the correct but last year I gave a talk similar to this in Manchester and I went over to the bookstore there what's the name of the store Georgetown bookstore and the owner of that bookstore was the head of the National Council of Independent Bookstores and they had just done a study and it was interesting so they were telling us that in the first 10 years after Amazon and invention tickles we lost 1,000 bookstores in the United States closed but in the last 5 years we've opened 300 new locally owned bookstores because people are you know first of all the chains you know like you used to have borders and Barnes and all these big box stores well they're all closed orders are completely gone Barnes and Noble is on its way but local is doing better than ever and partly because local has figured out also the Shire Bookstores have to sell books to Manchester they also can sell online so everything in retail now is called multi channel which is selling online, selling in bricks and mortar and bricks and mortar even though it's changing it's not dead Amazon wouldn't have bought whole foods Amazon is now opening physical bookstores not the best thing for locally owned bookstores obviously but yes there's a lot of ways and you've got a new model right here in Vermont Paul Broone the guy I was going to meet with tomorrow he had this idea that if you bought every small town in Vermont he said he needs like a general store or a nice restaurant a few things and what they would do is buy a building and then they'd find a restaurant tour to come in and run the building we run the restaurant and then they would sell shares to the community and so let's say a share was $500 two shares are a thousand you can earn the value of your share back by eating in the restaurant right that's invested in yourself and it turns out if you spend a dollar in a locally owned store it will recirculate through that community three times more than a dollar spent in a national chain store so because the local store has a local accountant, a local PR person a local attorney, whatever you've got a dollar in Walmart most of that's one in Bentonville, Arkansas so part of it is just trying to figure out ways that we can help local small businesses and help that not only just be a better bricks and mortar store help them use new technologies to expand their reach beyond just where they are in a business standpoint yes sir but he does nothing I'm all in favor of cleaning up pollution but yes ma'am scale yep yep so I've written extensively on this topic about how you can have density and issues without height some of the densest neighborhoods in America are actually not high rise neighborhoods at all for example what's the density of Georgetown in Washington DC it's 25 units an acre what's the density of the French Quarter 33 units an acre what's the density of four high rise condos in Las Vegas well that's on the 20 units an acre because they have all the space between the buildings so there's a lot of ways you can achieve high rises in fact I don't think people in New York built these pencil buildings that are 100 stories tall that their tower are 100 stories tall are 6 of them and by the way what's the price of those buildings that vary from 4 million to 70 million for the units and they're almost never occupied most of any of those buildings ever occupied is 10% so it's basically as I said before it's like an investment in the sky who owns it, like a Russian oligarch or a South American millionaire so there's a lot of different ways to achieve density without height I don't know about the specifics of the project in Burlington I do know that they're carrying them all down and putting the street grid back I think it's generally a good thing and because malls as I said before are not doing well all the malls are being redone and the density in order to pay for the units that they have in order to do all the things that they need to do so part of it is understanding how to read a performance and there's a there used to be a little publication here in Vermont called Planning Commissioners Journal and you can go online and get their article they have a whole great article about how to read reformals and if you Google my name you can get an article about height and density and why we don't always need heights so we could a lot of ways to process that who's on that one? well the answer to that is no one has done a great job of that I mean with all the hot market cities the biggest problem now is affordability issue and I think the problem with affordable housing most of the cities that are really growing very rapidly is not we've never built our way out and we don't air down more affordable units every year than we build new and so what we need to do is figure out ways to save and preserve existing units so I'll just give you an example I live in this little town it's the oldest suburb of Washington called Tacoma Park Rail and there's another suburb called Silver Spring and Silver Spring used to be very run down and now it's like exploded and so we have what we need to do is so the apartments keep getting smaller and smaller and the rents keep getting higher and higher so we've got a project with about 400 old garden apartments and Maryland has an inclusionary housing office so if you build a new unit if you build a new over 50 units you have to have 20% of housing affordable but let's say you're building a new development with this so 20% of that would be what, 100 units but in order to do that they're tearing down 400 existing units so what we're doing is we're training off 400 existing affordable apartments for only 100 new ones and that's going on everywhere but we can't win the battle like that so we've got to change our strategies and I think preservation is part one of the things I love about Vermont is the Vermont affordable housing preservation trust fund where most of your affordable housing projects in this state have been done in restored buildings like old high schools, old elementary schools and also in town because one of the things we've also learned is that people of my age want to age in place most people, you talk to people at AARP most people don't want to live just a bunch of other old people they like to live with everybody and then you're delivered to older people so aging in place is kind of important and also building housing in places where people don't need a car for everything because once you are too old or too young or too disabled, you're out of luck in America unless you're in some place that you can get around without a car for every single thing I live in a, we have this thing in Comfort right above the village of Tacoma and when I became disabled a few years ago I signed up with my driveway after a snow and they're shoving my driveway out but in return I met some young people and my wife is a part of the walking school bus system and she gets, picks up prescriptions for people, it's all young people helping older people older people helping younger people so we need to do things like that there's also things like if you were to do a survey of like everybody in this room I would guarantee you that there are a lot of people of my age in this room who have extra bedrooms in their house and there are people like me all over the country and there are young people who are looking for apartments or a room to rent and there's got to be some way we can put those two things together somehow to help both people at the entrance there's a lot of different approaches to that one of my favorite groups is a group called the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Minneapolis and they have a lot of ideas on this kind of stuff but great question, time for one more then I'll let you guys get out of here yes sir yes, this presentation is available online a really short 15 minute version I did a TED Talk on so yes it is available you talk, YouTube you go just Google headman, TED Talk or headman, TED Talk so thank you very much for having me