Transcript
Narrator 0:00
In response to the urban crisis that hit cities during the 1960s city leaders were forced to adapt to the shifting terrain by generating strategies for reform and community renewal in order to market their cities, improve their workforce and foster economic growth. Meeting these needs often required balancing revitalization goals between urban investment and suburb development. Referring to Indianapolis leaders focus on downtown regeneration in their efforts to achieve this balance, Mayor William Hudnut pointedly wrote, “You can’t be a suburb of nothing.”
Narrator 0:38
Strategies employed by civic leaders to build thriving cities have ranged from providing corporate incentives to stimulate job creation to strategic cultural planning and leveraging amenities. At the Richard M. Fairbanks Symposium held in downtown Indianapolis on April 1, 2015, city leaders posited that truly successful cities are built by investing in quality of life, which ultimately creates an urban environment that attracts and keeps citizens, thereby stoking the economy and laying the foundation for a sustainable future. Mayor Greg Ballard starts the conversation by explaining how this strategy has been important in building Indianapolis economy and reputation.
Greg Ballard 1:20
But we in Indianapolis have tried to build a city that people want to live in, and some people, believe it or not, still don’t get that. You have to build the city, because the talent out there today is completely mobile, and they they’re not going to they’re not moving to a job, they’re moving to where they want to live. And you have to create that kind of city where people want to live. Particularly in this time, probably the last 10 or 15 years, there was, there’s no question. There’s a trend across the country that people want to move into what I call authentic urban experiences. They’re moving back in. They want to live in the city. There are people who still are looking for the suburbs, and they’re looking for this and this, but there’s a huge movement to the city and millennials. They don’t want to own them. They don’t care about owning a car. They don’t care about owning a home. They want to live in the city and the city experience, and so you have to build it for them. They want to walk out the door and go to the museum and the game and the grocery store all right there, and if you can. So the urban core is important, and we’re building toward the urban core, clearly. But in neighborhoods like Fountain Square, Irvington, Broad Ripple and other places, you have to build kind of like a little village in there to have that place-making quality. And if you don’t have that place-making quality in the in the neighborhoods throughout the city, people aren’t going to move through those neighborhoods.
Narrator 2:57
Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett agrees that strategies focused on improving the quality of life in a city are far more effective and long lasting than investing in incentives. He describes how his city directly benefited by learning from Indy’s economic model, which enabled Oklahoma City to turn its deteriorating economy around.
Mick Cornett 3:17
Like Indianapolis, we’ve had a string of effective mayors, and one of them learned some economic development lessons through a highly publicized loss to Indianapolis and and decided to invest in the quality of life and improve the community. And in a visit to Indianapolis that he made in like 1991, ’92 he describes it as he as he saw a city with a downtown that had some vitality. There were hotels, there were there were restaurants, there were sports arenas, there were people walking the streets. And he says, in Oklahoma City, at five o’clock you could shoot a cannon off in downtown, you weren’t going to hit anybody. We had one downtown hotel then, and it was struggling. And he came back and passed an initiative called MAPS: metropolitan area projects. And amongst the sporting requirements of that, he built a new triple A baseball stadium downtown, and he built the sports arena that would be built to the standards of the NBA and the NHL. Looking back, I’m not sure if Indianapolis had not built an arena without a team, if our civic leadership would have had the courage to build an arena without a team. And the reason that’s important is because two mayors later, I’m in the NBA and NHL offices trying to get us a team, not having any luck at all. Commissioner Stern called me the mayor who wouldn’t go away. [audience laughter]And all of a sudden, Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, and the Hornets don’t have a place to play, and because of the relationship I’d established in seeking the team, he allowed us. You know what it seemed like a one year trial to host an NBA team turned into. To that it turned into a relocated franchise. But you know, all of that, you know, kind of stems from having an arena that was open and a viable NBA arena with no tenant. And if we hadn’t had that, we wouldn’t have gotten, you know, the trial to see if we could host a team. So Indianapolis was a direct role model in the in the idea that you create a city where people want to live, we had been acting under the economic development model that if you put enough incentives on the table, we could buy corporate America’s affection, and that if we created jobs, people would move to our city because there were jobs there. But we didn’t realize and we saw that Indianapolis had seen the paradigm shift was that people were living where they wanted to live, and the jobs were going to where the people were,and that changed everything for Oklahoma City.
Ted Frantz 5:53
This podcast was produced by the Institute for Civic Leadership and Mayoral Archives and the Department of Communication at the University of Indianapolis. It is made possible by the support of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, Indiana humanities and the Lily Endowment. For more information, please see our website, uindy.edu/mayoral.