 Welcome to Coast to Coast. My name is Lily Weinberg, and I'm here joined by my colleague Kyle Kuduchief. How's it going, Kyle? Hey, Lily. Good afternoon. Our audience members may notice that Kyle is not Lily and Corral. Lily has started her maternity leave and we wish her the best. Kyle, you are calling in from Akron, Ohio. How's Akron going? It's great, and we are technically still a coast, the North Coast, the Great Lakes, a half hour south of Lake Erie, so it's great to still work within the name of Coast to Coast. That's right. I love that you said that you're a coast too. You claim to be. Yeah. Exactly. You're doing a ton of great work around public spaces in Akron. Of course, as you know, and as our audience knows, we have been a deep dive with Coast to Coast looking at the future of cities and really looking at the future of cities all over the country and markets from New York City to Akron to everywhere in between. And so today, I am really excited to talk to an expert around urban cores and around place making. And I know that Dan has been doing tremendous work also in Akron. So can you tell us a little bit about what we're going to be learning today? Yes. First, let me introduce our guest. We're thrilled to have Dan Biederman. He's the founder and president of BRV Corporation and National Consultancy, as well as the co-founder of the Grand Central Partnership, the Chelsea Improvement Company, the 34th Street Partnership and Bryant Park Corporation. He currently serves as the president of the 34th Street Partnership and Bryant Park Corporation. He is a busy man. We're glad he's with us. He's a very busy man. Very busy man. Today, we're going to look at how cities... Yeah. Hey, Dan, welcome. Today, we're going to look at how cities can activate public spaces during the pandemic and how urban spaces can think creatively about operations and sustainability during a major financial crisis and major challenges. Lily, is there anything else you're interested in learning today? No, I'm really excited. Dan, thanks for joining us. I am in particular and I think our audience members will be really interested in that sustainability piece. So I know that you guys are going to have a great conversation. I'll see you guys in roughly 15 minutes. Great. Thank you. And just a reminder to our audience members as you have questions during the conversation, please on Twitter use the hashtag Night Live or the comment section on the Facebook page. And with that, Dan, let's dive in. And as a starting point, tell us a little bit about your work in theory around building, operating, and maintaining excellent public spaces. OK, great. Thank you Kyle for the opportunity. And those of you who are put off by the tie and suit I'm wearing, I do it so that my deputies dress in business casual. If I dressed in business casual, they'd be in beachwear. I have to do this even when it's 95 degrees. The difference between our approach to public spaces and many other people's approach became really clear as to me when Brian Park and Millennium Park were both either in renovation or in the case of Millennium Park in Chicago in new construction, new creation. The budgets ended out. Brian Park, which was the first project in my career, $9 million catbacks capital expenditures, Millennium 475. So that's not normally what you hear about New York versus the rest of the world. New York is supposed to be expensive, extravagant place and other places are more sensible. The 475 included $150 million of subsurface stuff, but still their budget for capital expenditures on the surface was 40 times as ours. So I said, gee, we probably have something here. Brian Park, for those of you who haven't been there, is really a success of programming, careful budgeting, horticulture lighting. Horticulture is very cheap compared to recent mortar. And rather than architects and landscape architects, I noticed in the attendance list there aren't too many of those on the call, so I don't risk offending too many. But when you go down the road with an expensive design, with an expensive and talented firm, you very often are going to overrun budget in the case of something like Persian Square in Los Angeles, not have a project that gets off the ground. So our approach has always been very light on capital expenditures. The guy who did Chelsea Market in New York who's a genius said to me once, I start with a capital expenditure budget of zero, and I only grudgingly go up above that. So that's what we do. We are programmers. And we believe by endlessly churning the improvements in the programming area, paying attention to small details, softscape rather than hardscape, we can make a huge impact. And we've been in 32 states now across the country. We're loving working in Akron with Kyle. He's incredible. And you're all going to look at Akron in five to 10 years and say, look at all these creative things the city did. They changed from rubber to polymers. Now in the public space area, they're doing some really creative stuff thanks to the Knight Foundation. So that's a sense of how we work. And then Kyle, I guess the other thing I could mention is, and this may not be politically popular, but broken windows was correct. Most of the people on the call probably understand the derivation of the term. Came from Wilson and Kelling's work in Newark and Boston. The equivalent of broken windows for Bryant Park was stopping small violations from occurring. And that's how we got at the 500 felonies a year that had made the park a miserable place to be. So those were small things, cursing, spitting, making comments to women, loud radios at the time, smoking, pigeon feeding. All of these things were ruled out. And we just gradually worked down the amount of crime until there was nothing much. So I hope in mentioning those two or three things, I've given you a sense of how we view either turning around parks or creating new public spaces. Yeah, I'd love to follow up on two aspects you mentioned. One being the funding and two being that making the park a place for everybody. Starting with the funding, your ability to get private dollars to support public space is well known. How has that shifted since March, since the pandemic has set in? Well, I was much too boastful about how brilliant our business model was before COVID, because all of a sudden my business model, which relied for not a penny on either government funding or philanthropy, was endangered. So we ended up having quite a bit of trouble putting it back together because our rents from restaurants and the like disappeared. And some of our sponsors said they just could not promote outdoor events. But basically, the Bryant Park, sorry for the construction noise in the back, which is a surprise. It's OK. We'll roll with it. OK. The query you might go find out who that is until I talk about it. So with those disappearing, we're not as boastful as we used to be. But basically, the idea is don't use government money because it can be endangered at the drop of a hat. Don't rely on philanthropic money. Interestingly, Central Park, we're very friendly competitors, only has those two basic methods. I think Jesse Brackenberry is on the call from Rose Kennedy Greenway, and he has a different version. But we try hard to get all of our money from food and beverage rents, from sponsorships, from naming rights arrangements, even some licensing. And we started with very little money. We've increased the budget at Bryant, which is our model as the country from $210,000 a year to $21 million a year. So we've increased by 100 times. And we feel better about that method of earning the revenue side of our operating budget. I know you started doing this work in 1980 at Bryant Park. Was there a point in your career where corporate support shifted from being not really interested in public space to being really interested in public space? And what was the pitch you made to get them to bite? I know many of us across the country trying to get that same level of investment in our public spaces in our cities. You have to have a terrific park for anybody to feel that associating their brand with you is as exciting as associating it with a concert hall or a baseball stadium and the like. So in the early years, we were relatively less successful before we became glamorous. And then people came in from big brands. Obviously, a lot of you listening, not being in New York, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia, or San Francisco, are thinking, gee, I'm not sure that would work in our city that's less than top 10 in population. But we feel a number of other cities have a chance to do this, just to mention two that are a punch above their weight that we've worked in Pittsburgh and Nashville. They're parted by some of the brands as cool places. And therefore, you can find those monies from cities like that. But I once, Kyler, once made a speech about earned income. And a guy came up to me and said, after a very smart guy, said, I think I got the message of your speech. If you want earned income, you will have earned income. If you don't go after it, you will have zero. And we started with $15,000 sponsorship from a German steel company that was doing an IPO in the New York exchange. It came out of nowhere. We didn't even know how to process it. And now that number is $7 million pre-COVID. So you have a lot to learn. You're going to go down some pathways that are false dead ends, I call them. But you keep trying. Is that corporate support staying strong since March? Are they still investing for the remaining of the year? Are people getting cold feet? What's your sense from where you sit? The four traditional big buyers of sponsorships for us, let's see if I remember them all, airlines, tech, food and beverage, and clothing, interestingly. Sponsored our Wi-Fi in the park for a couple of years. And banks, I love banks out. They vary. Bank of America, one of our key sponsors, is very cautious about sponsoring outdoor stuff in the face of COVID. The tech companies are still around. We just got a nibble from one of the FANG companies for $100K. And in the old days, I would have said, that's nice. Today, I was going to dance on that table. Funny that. Yeah, no, I believe you. Wanted to come back to the safety. You had mentioned making Brian Park a safe place again. How do you advise people to make public park safe, but also inclusive in a place for all New Yorkers to feel welcome? How do you and your staff balance that? How do you balance that? COVID specifically, right, Carl? Yeah, I mean, I guess, pre-pandemic and currently. I mean, how do you keep the park to be a place for everybody, for all of New York to come in? Well, let me start on the more broken window side. Early on, the park, William H. White, Jr. was my mentor early. He said, if you want to know a place that's safe, count women, count men at the same time. If you're anywhere near 50-50, you've got a safe place. Women are very acutely aware of their personal security. So we got Brian Park up to about 60% females pre-COVID, which is wonderful. That means nobody has fear about safety. With all these techniques I mentioned, post-COVID, we've done a couple of things you see in the stores or airports and the like. We have arrows telling you where you can walk. Brian Park is not nearly as crowded as it was pre-COVID, but it's getting back. And there are hand-washing stations in place of our old water fountains. Crowds above 50 really can't be encouraged. So give you an idea. I hate to give this idea away, but it's a good one. We're trying to do a concert version of a Broadway show and have it live-streamed rather than have it played to a large crowd in Brian Park. We face all kinds of issues with that, including actors' equity, the local theater union. But the aim has been to make things smaller, still entertaining, still looking good, and then outdoors. Our winter village activity, we're trying to make an entirely outdoor operation. In New York's weather in the winter, we're climates on six to seven. So it's 40-ish degrees, most days 35. So it can really be an outdoor event. In the past, it was outdoor and indoor. You put on your skates indoors. So all kinds of adjustments have been made, Kyle, to try to stay safe in both ways. And is the outcome you're seeking with those events to generate revenue, keep the park relevant, incorporate the arts? What are you hoping to achieve with that kind of an event? Well, when all this started, two or three aims. One is keep the park safe, because as Midtown's security has declined post-COVID and close some criminal justice changes that have been very tough on New York order maintenance, we needed a lot of people in the park. So that's purpose number one. But then the counter to that is separated by at least six feet with everybody wearing masks, et cetera. And then the financial model, as I said, we're up to $21 million. This year, we're really going to take a revenue hit. So we've had to ratchet everything down. So have to be creative. Again, I got too cocky that my business model was the right one. And those who relied on government and philanthropy were endangering themselves. It turns out COVID makes it harder on me than some of the others. Yeah. And maybe staying on the revenue thread, but pivoting from New York to national and to your consulting practice, as you look at public spaces across the country and your various clients, do you are they in a similar boat as you? Are they in a worse situation? Being in smaller or mid-sized markets, what's your sense? Just give you some examples. Most of this has been in the paper, so I'm not betraying confidence. Flightworn Park is their revenue model in Dallas. We programmed and budgeted that part, endangered by the restaurant, really not doing well, possibly going out of business. San Francisco Salesforce Park on top of Salesforce Transit Center. The view of the client is that now is not a good time to program in any way. We really could be doing things like yoga on a very big lawn with plenty of separation, but we're not, so that's suspended. So I would say not only did COVID cause me to, this is gonna sound familiar to some of you, renegotiate a lot of my deals. Luckily, the deal with Kyle was done before under no illusions about what COVID was gonna do. So we didn't have to renegotiate with him, but most of our clients, we had to renegotiate the deals because of delays and existing projects, we said, okay, the business model is gonna take a hit. What the hell should we do? And I'm working harder 40 years after I started this career than I was 20 years ago. Maybe as a closing thought before we go to questions, is there any area that you'd recommend a public space from a revenue standpoint to be investing in or to be leaning into in the year ahead or is it all challenging from a earned income standpoint? Well, one of the lessons we haven't gotten to that we often tell clients, too many parks, and I'm not gonna throw them under the bus here, but I can think of a few, rely on too many large festivals and events and they're periodic. So you can wander into the downtown of a city and see a sign that says the jazz festival is Friday the 25th at this time and you're out of luck because you're there on the 18th. So we believe in the amenities as we call them. Those are the things you find every single day in some of the parks I mentioned. Juggling clinics, ping pong going on, putting green, petonc, the French game with steel balls, a lot of you may know, knitting classes. All of these things are pretty steady, a piano. We have a ragtime and jazz pianist and Bryant and a few other places. So all of that stuff is where I recommend you start and create a scene because the crowds never go down to small numbers in normal times. And then that from there, you can go to an occasional big festival and you'll become more glamorous. You'll have a higher female ratio and then you can build your revenue side. That's great. Thank you for those comments. If you'd like to come in, let's see what type of questions we have from our audience. Yeah, sure. Thanks. This is a great conversation and we are getting a lot of questions from the audience. So I'll just dive right in. So Dan, there's a cluster of questions around your work around the earned revenue model and sponsorships. And there are questions that does this work for non-downtown public spaces or public spaces that aren't in the urban core? Can you tell us, does it work? And if it does, then if you could give us some examples. Harder, but I've often said to such places, particularly if it's in a neighborhood that's let's say a poverty census track, or what those are called today, but some, you know, where the income is quite low. There are a couple of sources that are open to those places that are not open to us. We got laughed out of the Ford Foundation when we went to them to ask for money for Brian Park because they looked at me, they looked at my chairman, it was the chairman of Timing at the time and said, you guys don't need us. The places that need us are exactly the kind of parks that Lily is characterizing. Neighborhood parks, great impact on a lot of people, but far from the glamorous places in downtown. So that's the first thing I say. And then the other advice I give is don't give up on building small numbers upward in areas like food and beverage. You never know if the government agency that regulates will cooperate, whether it's possible to build on food and beverage and eventually turn it into a real income murder. And the other thing about such places is the expense side is less. There was a HBS Harvard Business School who talks a lot, I'm forgetting his name, Porter, I think, Michael Porter, talks about how the economy of places like that is entirely different. The product can be provided at a lower price. It's not inexpensive to do anything in downtown San Francisco or New York. Everything's expensive. That makes us sweat on the revenue side. That's a great point. Okay, so I wanna dig a little bit further, Dan. And there are some questions around this, around Kyle's question around crime and inclusivity. And so a couple of audience members wanted to go a little bit further. And so you talked a bit about safety around COVID, but I think that there's a general sense that if we're focused on crime, then that can make a public space not welcoming for all community members, especially as we think about people of color and public spaces. And so I'm wondering how your firm is thinking about that and making sure that public spaces are welcoming for all, especially during the racial reckoning that we're having in our country. You know, I've had a different view of the term inclusive when applied to parks. I say something that may not be that popular to say, but parks are inherently, urban parks are inherently inclusive. Why? Because the people who need them do not have some of the alternatives that high income people have. Country clubs, vacations, big backyards, luxury restaurants. The average income in most of the parks we've done in urban areas has been in the $50,000 range. In New York, that's not a high income. So that's answer number one on the inclusive point. On the kind of broken windows point, you know, it'd be interesting. I think the proof's gonna be in the pudding. New York and several other cities have gone away from it. I think much to the disadvantage of people of color because they're much more open to the depredations of people who would violate any of those rules originally. Our standard for Bryant Park broken windows enforcement is that nothing that would scare a female is permitted, even if it's permitted by the rules of the park. So if a guy comes in, we have a lot of emotionally disturbed people wandering around Midtown Manhattan. If a guy comes in and looks like he's gonna take his clothes off or start screaming at people, even though there's no penal code provision that stops that. If it would scare a female, we don't let it happen. We just, we're too exposed to problems. We've argued that we have a safe space. So we've gotta make sure that we provide that to especially the females who come there. And that's how we get an above 50% female rate. And there were some questions around that and the kind of the percentage that you said, the like 50, 50 male female. And so tell me a bit about how you are capturing that data. Like how do you go about doing that? And is that important for our public space leaders to be monitoring the data? They should do it. I'll try to give a quick answer. So we can get questions. Those clickers, they used to sell an historical Tamiko Schlemmer, one in your left hand, males, one in your right hand, females, send people around the park. I used to do it myself. We train them. Don't be crazy about it. If somebody moves, guy in the green shirt moved 20 yards and now I made one twice, don't worry about it. And give those counts to the bosses, take them twice a day, one o'clock and six o'clock. And it's that simple. And if you've got 50% or more females, you've got a great place. Got it. Okay. And anything around leveraging technology around tracking movement and data? Yeah, good question. Some are doing it. There are some products that'll go to each of your entrances counts. So that's a raw count. They won't do male-female for you. We also try to do some ethnic counts to make sure we're racially diverse, do them rarely, partly because we don't make a big deal of it. We just, and somebody says this is not a diverse park. We want to have data showing not. Interestingly for Bryant, for example, Friday and Saturday nights are the most diverse times there. People as workers go back generally to the suburbs or other neighborhoods. People in other boroughs of Manhattan come to the central area to have what's essentially a free experience. And that's another piece of making Bryant Park inclusive. Everything in Bryant Park is free, except for two things, a carousel ride or buying food. But you can have an entertaining day there without spending a penny. So that's- Got it. That was one of the questions Dan actually was, are you monetizing those activities? So it sounds like no. Generally not, except if you say all the people coming in for all the free stuff, eventually say, hey, let's get a meal at that cafe. Got it. Got it. So one more question from the audience and all, and then we'll be wrapping it up, the time flies. I wanna, there's a question around arts and how arts plays a role in placemaking. And we've seen it also very interesting during this time, during the pandemic, playing a functional role too. Can you talk a bit about how arts plays a role in placemaking and your work? It's funny, much more partial to performing arts and music that are included than I am to visual arts. And it's odd because my wife is a fine arts lawyer, so I should be more on the visual arts side, but I haven't been, partly because the art that I regard as good, and I've kind of had my eye trained by her, is beyond our price range. So people can have a wonderful time with a bluegrass group or a jazz group that may not cost us more than about four or $500, and everybody gets to see it for free. So we've been more on the performing arts side. We did have a project with the Public Art Fund, which does a lot of emerging artists in New York for several years, especially in the years when Bryant Park was so dangerous that no one in their right mind would go do a program there. And we did get some artists to go in and do some emerging art, and it was helpful, but we've gotten away from that. I'm not as much on the percent for arts side as others are, I'd say. Got it, but the performance art is amazing and creates a great environment too. So with that, I would love to invite you, we're in the final minute, to, on any final comments, in particular, I am very, very curious about your thoughts around kind of the future of public spaces and what you may see. I know that there's a lot of doom and gloom right now, but what you might see as some of the opportunities in our communities as we think about the future of public spaces. A couple of comments that I think of as you say that. First, outdoors is generally better in COVID. So that opens up a huge opportunity for us to steal audiences from concert halls, the movie theaters or Broadway, or off-Broadway theaters or regional theaters in your towns. An interesting phenomenon is developers being forced to put in their projects anywhere from two to 10 acres of public space, which they generally don't know what to do with. So our clients are very often mixed-use development companies and interesting sidelight professional sports teams, which have now learned not to have empty arena areas when their team isn't there. We've worked for the Packers, the Falcons, San Francisco Giants, now the Detroit Pistons. On that kind of work, all the sports, the Jets and Giants also. So I think it's a new area of activity and outdoor spaces that aren't called parks in any sense, that plazas are connected to entitlement battles between developers and authorities and a whole raft of public spaces that become pretty neat that have a hard escape, but programming brings them alive. And that's a great incoming opportunity in the era of COVID, because those are elements for people. And so you see, so if I understand you correctly, you see a trend to accelerate having these outdoor spaces and outdoor plazas within the private sector. Yes, the entitlements process works along. They're stuck with, as they see it, an acre or two of space. They don't know what to do with. So we have one in Nashville like that now. Client is very helpful and they know that they shouldn't just leave an open green lawn. It shouldn't track people at off-peak times. And that's where programming comes in. So it fits in with BRV's method of doing things. Fantastic. Well, I'm excited to see what that looks like across the country. And thank you, Dan, for joining us and chatting with Knight Foundation. Kyle, thanks for being the co-host today. I had a lot of fun with you. Thank you for the invitation. It was great to be with you, Lily. And thank you, Dan. Thank you, Kyle. And next week on Coast to Coast, we're gonna do a deep dive in Philadelphia. And we're gonna be looking at how engagement works during a pandemic. And some of the interesting ways that communities are leveraging technology around engagement. So same time, same place, Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern. Kyle, I'll see you soon. See you, Lily. Bye, stay well.