This week, the Clinton Chamber of Commerce held its annual strategic planning meeting and the guest speakers were Dubuque City Manager, Mike Van Milligen and Rick Dickinson, President of the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation. Van Milligen and Dickinson have been working in Dubuque since the mid-1990′s. And they really did start from scratch. Thinking back to the 1980′s Dubuque had some of the worst unemployment in the nation. Dickinson described his start as inauspicious.

“In the course of a few weeks of my starting in 1995, the Riverboat Casino in East Dubuque left, a foundry in East Dubuque burned to the ground and the Dubuque Packing Plant closed its doors. People were calling me, ‘The Angel of Death.’ ”

“But, the hard times put fire in the belly of the people of Dubuque,” said Van Milligen.

When talking about the keys to their success Van Milligen and Dickinson came back again and again to two themes: cooperation and preparation. For years, the GDDC leadership has had a standing meeting with City Hall staff every Wednesday at 11 a.m. where they go over everything that is going on in the city and share responsibilities for preparing for initiatives. Further, the GDDC board, which might seem unwieldy with 37 members is also a vehicle for public and private cooperation, Dickinson explained.

The board requires the City the County and the School District to have a member of the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation board. All members of the board must be executives of their organization. This means CEO’s of member businesses, City Council Members, and the School Board Superintendent. Dickinson explained why this is critical. “We need people there who are decision makers, who can give the unqualified opinion of their organization and who can move the ball when opportunities arise.”

The two used as an example, the recent selection of Dubuque by IBM to locate a facility and 1,300 jobs in Downtown Dubuque. When the IBM committee visited Dubuque to consider the city and evaluate sites, they fell in love with the old Roshek Department Store building downtown. The problem was, neither the City nor the GDDC owned the building. They had thirty days to put together a deal to purchase the building and secure the $42 million in funds to restore and build out the facility.

Within 24 hours Dickinson had convened a meeting of the CEO’s of every financial institution in town. He told them< "We need a $25 million line of credit." Dead silence. City Manager Van Milligen then rose and said, "This line of credit will be backed by the full faith and credit of the City of Dubuque." And so the deal was made.

Preparation is also key. The GDDC talks to over 200 local businesses per year and keeps a powerful database of all the existing businesses, their current conditions, needs and plans. The GDDC sponsors a concierge service and subsidises a Distictively Dubuque (PDF file link) program that hosts classes and tours for newcomers.

During the process during which IBM was weighing Dubuque against other cities, each visit by the IBM staff was highly orchestrated and nothing left to chance. By way of example, Dickinson talked about the final stage of the process. The race was down to Dubuque and a city in South Carolina. The decision was up to three IBM divisions: Operations, Facilities and Human Resources. Operations liked Dubuque. Facilities liked South Carolina because they were offering a new building, ready to move in. Human Resources would have to break the tie.

IBM’s Vice President of Human Resources came to visit and was having lunch with representatives of the three colleges in Dubuque. She had already fallen in love with the city’s historic architecture, river expanses and quirky layout, but she expressed some skepticism about Dubuque’s ability to provide the highly-educated, specialized talent IBM would need. A GDDC staffer walked over with a stack of 600 resumes that she had pulled off the Access Dubuque website — all were qualified technology applicants — and dropped them on the table next to her. Game, set, match to Dubuque.

That incredible level of preparation and organization is a critical element of successful economic development activity. How does a city get there? Dickinson summed it up in four words, “Elect talent. Hire talent.”

Clinton has done a lot in the last couple of years to lay the foundation for a major increase in economic growth through strategic investments. But in order to make those investments pay off the community needs to begin to pull together and work smart as well as hard.

• Van Allen Building
• Armstrong Building
• Howes Building
• Lafayette Building
• Tucker Building
• Park Towers

90 surveys were distributed and 57 (60%) were returned.

The results are as follows:
I. What is most important to you living downtown?

1. Transportation: 32%
2. Proximity to services offered: 51%
3. Cost: 17%
4. Arts & Entertainment: 0%

II. What type of stores do you wish to see more of downtown?

1. Grocery: 42%
2. Coffee House: 11%
3. Restaurant: 8%
4. Retail: 21%
5. Farmer’s Market: 17%

III. What improvement would you like to see us continue?

1. Streetscape or beatufication: 33%
2. Cleanliness & maintenance: 51%
3. Parking: 17%
4. Saftey: 12%

IV. What is it you dislike most about downtown living?

1. Parking: 21%
2. Noise: 68%
3. Cost: 5%
4. Availability of services: 5%

A few observations… There are probably about 800 people who live in the downtown area and although the residents of those six buildings are an easy-to-reach subset, almost none of them are property owners or residents of single family homes. In addition, there are probably at least a couple of thousand people for whom downtown could be their primary shopping hub. It might be a good idea in future years to commission surveys that expand the universe further.

It is pretty clear that a modest grocery store that sells locally grown produce is a no-brainer for a downtown location.

Transportation and cost being jointly a priority for 50% of residents, one would think that a few modest improvements in public transportation would make not only downtown living but MTA ridership as a whole more useful. For example, bus stop signs with route maps and a few decent shelters. The only two shelters in town I am aware of is the downtown transfer point and the 3rd Street & 30th Avenue ones. I’m sure there are more but I’ve not noticed them. Surely installing them by HyVee and the retail complex on Lincoln Way would be a marked improvement. But that’s a whole other post.

It will be pretty important to see how the responses to question #3 change next year after all the road work done this fall. The copy of the survey shows that the surveys were conducted before October 15 this year while much of the street work was still ongoing.

I would also suggest allowing responses and additional descriptons to be encouraged and included in results. For example on question #4, the most disliked thing was noise by a large margin. What sort of noise? Sirens? General traffic? People in the street at bar closing? Some more detail here would be useful. Ditto for the services offered answer in question #1.

Thanks to the Downtown Partnership for conducting this survey.

My neighborhood scores 57 out of 100, Somewhat Walkable. There are some questions regarding the quality of the mapping data they are relying upon. For example: the closest grocery store is listed as Circle K, which for non-natives is a gas station/convenience store. A proper grocery store, Jewel is less than half a mile away though. I confess I’ve rarely walked there although the wife often bikes there in summer. And the closest movie theater is listed on WalkScore as, The Showboat Theater, a summer stock theater that doesn’t show movies. Although… not a bad idea.

The nearest restaurant is listed as the KFC, which has been shuttered for over a year. Besides, I think fast-food places should get a lower score than a proper restaurant. Just glom McDonalds, Taco Bell, BK, etc. together and whenever the map indicates one give it say 60% of the score of any other listed restaurant. Although that probably wouldn’t account for say, a local hot-dog place.

I also don’t think it is able to take into account the quality of the sidewalks which in Clinton can be pretty bad and sometimes nonexistent on one or both sides of the street; or the crosswalks some of which have crossing lights that are very pedestrian unfriendly.

So, take these listings with a grain of salt. But it is certainly a step in the right direction. And my neighborhood is certainly better off than say, someone who lives up on Meadoview Drive, Score 26, Car Dependent, or Highview Drive by 13th Avenue North, Score 37, Car Dependent and the many developments further afield in Clinton.

Be that as it may, a new study (PDF link) by CEO’s for Cities shows that walkability has a direct impact on property values.

Remember, the researchers who did this analysis controlled for all sorts of variables that affect housing prices: the size and age of the home, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, neighborhood incomes, the distance from major job centers, and so forth. So their results don’t stem from some spurious correlation — e.g., that walkable neighborhoods tend to be worth more because they’re closer to downtown. Nope, this is the real deal: in just about every metro area they looked at, walkability adds value to property. (Las Vegas, NV and Bakersfield, CA were the two exceptions. What’s up there?)

In part, there’s a straightforward economic rationale for spending more for a walkable neighborhood: reducing your car dependence can cut your transportation costs. This Reconnecting America study, for example, also found that housing is cheaper in distant suburbs and exurbs — the sorts of places where most trips require a car — but that every dollar saved on housing means an extra 77 cents spent for transportation. That’s the average, and there are probably some families who are able to drop a car (or more) by living in a walkable neighborhood; for them, paying more for walkability may be a money-saving proposition in the long run.

Regardless, what the CEOs for Cities study shows is that there is a real and measurable pent up demand for homes in walkable neighborhoods. For decades, sprawl apologists have argued that low-density suburban development was somehow “natural,” because it’s what homebuyers “prefer.” By now, though, it’s clear that many homebuyers are wiling to pay a premium for walkability. The real problem is that the demand for walkable homes exceeds the supply — which pushes up the price.

All of which just adds impetus to my belief that Clinton should stop allowing developments further afield than any existing or under-construction ones, and begin to look at giving more incentive and resources to infill in the city proper.

Check it out WalkScore. How does your neighborhood score? Share in the comments.

We were discussing in a meeting last week the fact that Clinton (like many small towns) after encouraging so much non-downtown development along the highway now has much, much more commercially zoned space than it can support. But it also lacks in reasonably priced housing, especially rental properties.

This is a model of one possible solution.