New Feature! PSRC Perspectives: Interpreting the 2010 Census Results

It’s been a few months since I’ve had this little video camera, and I’ve been promising y’all more video clips integrated into the Prosperity Blog rotation. Not just the clips from events happening at PSRC or people speaking in the community on Prosperity-related topics, but actual interviews with PSRC experts, board members and the sundry important/interesting people that walk through our halls.

Well, it’s never too late to start your new year’s resolution. And so here is the first installation of our new feature: PSRC Perspectives. Starting out? Insight into the latest census data release!

Why Get the Milk For Free When You Can Buy the Cow?

Or maybe it’s “Why get the milk for free when you can buy the milk?” That’s sort of what this article made me think about.

The idea goes by one of two names: pay for success bonds or social impact bonds. Either way, nonprofit groups like foundations pay the initial money for a new program and also oversee it, with government approval. The government will reimburse them several years later, possibly with a bonus — but only if agreed-upon benchmarks show that the program is working. If it falls short, taxpayers owe nothing.

The New York Times goes on to describe all the pros – incentivizing performance measurement (and the concurrent ending of ineffective programs – and the cons (bad performance measurement and refusing services to the hardest to help in order to pad statistics), but I kept coming back to one fundamental question.  Isn’t this what the nonprofit sector already does for free?

Weekly REDEW: Putting Art at IKEA

It’s that time again for the regular feature we like to call REDEW: the Random Economic Development Email of the Week. Which is exactly what it sounds like…me talking about random emails that I receive that have something to do with economic development. Now, usually these REDEWs center around emails that I receive from various listservs and mailing lists that I somehow get added to. But this week I’m pleased to present an actual email sent from a real person to me. How could that be random, you ask? Well, just wait to read it. And by it, I mean the “Weekly REDEW: Putting Art at IKEA.”

Pictures of Horses Sure Generate a Lot of Revenue!

A couple weeks ago, the Jack Donaghy character on the show “30 Rock” responded to someone saying “What is Art?” with the phrase “We know what art is! It’s paintings of horses!” Which is funny to me – as a former theater major – for a number of reasons (not the least of which being a story involving Neil Hellegers and Cary Mazer and Alfred Hitchcock’s definition of theater, which none of you would find interesting). But I was surprised to see the same quote in a very entertaining profile of some huckster painter in Saudi Arabia in the NYT Magazine (“The galleries here are still rejecting me,” Gharem said. “They think art is still pictures of horses, you know.”).

What does all of this have to do with regional economic development? Well, we’ve actually got a lot of horse-painting art organizations in this region, and it turns out that they have quite the economic impact.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time Of the Year (in Ideas): Big Ideas of 2010

I can’t wait for this Sunday. It’s literally my favorite day of the year. Why? Because the New York Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas issue is going to arrive at my doorstep! (I know, that’s a very nerdy reason for a day to be one’s favorite, but what can I say…I love ideas!) The NYT issue is apparently the 10th annual, but it also serves another important annual role: inspiring the creation of the Prosperity Blog’s 2nd annual “Big Ideas” post!

To quote from last year’s, we here at the Prosperity Blog have also had a good year of ideas, generating all sorts of practical proposals for improving our region’s business climate and competitiveness. But, of course, we have also had lots of impractical, sky’s-the-limit ideas that we hope someone is going to take and run with and make all our dreams come true. So, for all you good-idea-awaiting folks out there, here’s a summary…presented in Top Ten format:

Weekly B-MOW: Surveys and More Surveys

Giving the people what they want, it’s time for the second installment of our second feature: Best Meeting of the Week. It’s the chronicles of our adventures in the world of economic development, sharing the most interesting, exciting or unique things that the Prosperity crew is doing. This week’s B-MOW? Two meetings on surveys!

Party Our Way to Regional Prosperity?

Lots of news recently about the potential for the City of Seattle to allow bars to serve alcohol past 2 am. I have no particular expertise on the effects of this decision, other than the fact that I enjoy drinking late at night, but the thing that caught my eye about the story was the framing of it in the consultant report. I’ve always understood this to be a public safety issue, trying to stagger the times that people are leaving bars so that the police don’t have to deal with a huge rush all at once.  But apparently, it’s also a global talent attraction and retention issue:

Philanthropy in Economic Development

You may have seen the article in today’s Seattle Times about how the Iacocca Family Foundation (yes, that Iacocca) is investing in a local biotech company. The human interest hook is that Lee Iacocca’s first wife, Mary, died from diabetes, and so the former Chrysler chairman is investing in potential therapies that can cure the disease. But the economic development hook is much more intriguing.

Get Your Game On

It’s winter, it’s raining, it’s dark. Playing outside is still a feasible option, but if you prefer to stay warm and dry, then why not choose entertainment that supports one of the region’s fastest growing niche industries: electronic games. If you want to sound more professional, say you’re supporting the “interactive media” industry, which is the same, but refers more inclusively to aerospace and medical applications also being developed in this region, referred to as “serious games” (not that your own Xbox efforts aren’t serious).

More Like “Kill The Sack”

I realize that land use and transportation policy isn’t often the topic on this blog. But I’ve been studying up on my planning to fit in better here at the old PSRC, and this article caught my eye:

But this fall, Virginia, under the leadership of Gov. Tim Kaine, became the first state to severely limit cul-de-sacs from future developments. New rules require that all new subdivisions attain a certain level of “connectivity,” with ample through streets connecting them to other neighborhoods and nearby commercial areas. If subdivisions fail to comply, Virginia won’t provide maintenance and snowplow services, a big disincentive in a state where the government provides 83 percent of road services.

Virginia expects the new rules to relieve its strained infrastructure budget: through streets are more efficient and cheaper to maintain, and they take pressure off arterial roads that otherwise need to be widened. “It’s about connecting land-use and transportation planning and restricting wasteful and unplanned development,” Kaine said in March. [emphasis added]

Seattle = Detroit + Southern California

I have two friends getting married to each other next summer. One is from Michigan, the other from Southern California. And I suggested that they get married in the venue that is a combination of those two places: the Tesla Motors showroom in South Lake Union!

Isn’t This Why We Need the Cultural Access Fund?

Prosperity Partnership has been arguing that local jurisdictions need a new tool to help them increase access to arts and culture for all residents. Especially in tough economic times like these, it’s harder and harder to fun these activities out of general funds.  But the need for these funds is actually just as big: tourism, the economic impact of these institutions, and the whole “creative economy” thing.

So, on Monday, a bunch of folks protested Bainbridge Island City Hall because of big cuts to the public budget for culture. And there are so many great quotes in here that prove the above point.  I like two:

1) “The city funds are game-changing. It will cost jobs and household incomes.” The cuts will also reduce tourism and the city’s own revenues, she said.

2) Residents were not drawn to Bainbridge by “nice roads,” she said, but because of the “culture and creativity” they found. “(Bainbridge) is not just any other town,” she said. “But if we don’t put money into this, we redefine ourselves as just any other ordinary town.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Speaking of the Creative Economy…

A few weeks ago, Bill liveblogged from the second meeting of the International Regions Benchmarking Consortium that took place in Barcelona. Again, this is a group that was started two years ago by us and the TDA of Greater Seattle as a way to measure our economic performance against that of some of our peers around the world: specifically Barcelona, Stockholm, Helsinki, Munich, Dublin, Vancouver BC, Fukuoka (Japan), Daejon (S Korea), Cape Town and Glasgow.

As part of the conference – which had the theme of “Creativity and Talent in an Urban Environment” – we commissioned a report on talent attraction, the Creative Class approach being one of the most recent and highly touted. And let me just say, the report is awesome.

Remember That Whole Thing About the Creative Economy?

In the go-go days of the mid-2000′s, Richard Florida was king, and the creative economy was going to lead us to cafe-cultured prosperity. Here in the central Puget Sound, not only did we take credit for all our smart people, we actually hired Richard Florida to come and help us develop strategies to capitalize on these resources. But you don’t really hear too much about that these days. What happened to the creative economy?

In Defense of SAM

I feel bad for the downtown Seattle Art Museum. How were they supposed to know that the oldest bank in town was going to crumble under the weight of subprime mortgages that everyone thought would never lose value? But that’s exactly what happened. When Washington Mutual collapsed, the museum lost $5.8 million in annual rent that was supposed to go toward the $65 million debt it incurred when it build its new space.

Here’s the thing: I’m sure that a lot of real estate projects, bankers and many others have learned some lessons over the past few years, but one of them that I don’t want them to learn is that museums don’t belong in the urban core.  Which is sort of the sense you get from this article.