Potemkin village, noun: an impressive facade or show designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition.
The promise of downtown redevelopment has a lot to do with advancing political narratives, plus selling overpriced consultation, depressed real estate and tons and tons of rebar and concrete. It has little to do with our prosperity.
The cycle goes like this: 1) Officials realize that although they cannot create prosperity they can campaign on the citizenry’s hopes for it; 2) consultants are hired to present a full-color vision of what that prosperity might look like: 3) city finances are leveraged to build that vision “on the come” regardless of independent market tests or return on investment; 4) the projects fall short; money, energy and public confidence are squandered; 5) repeat.
There is a commercial section of our downtown that has gone through the cycle three times in the last 40 years. A current project is a revolving door of small businesses starting and failing as the pols and boosters exhaust themselves trying to justify its existence.
In short, there is no demand for the bright, shiny new downtown spaces now because there never was a demand in the first place. The vision was the thing, and the only thing. We have been sold sizzle, not steak. Meanwhile, commercial and residential developments keep popping up in the suburbs unattended, without any government help whatsoever (it’s called meeting true demand, and more about that later).
For some of you this is obvious; economists tell us that governments don’t create wealth, they only move it around. That message isn’t getting through to the ruling class in multiple Indiana cities. My assistant Grok counts nine currently planning multi-million dollar redevelopments: Indianapolis, Gary, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Westfield, Columbus, Richmond, Bloomington and Elkhart.
These plans are ongoing despite almost a decade of warnings in this journal from our Jason Arp, a former Fort Wayne councilman and executive with Bank of America. Now, Aaron Renn, an Indianapolis urban consultant, has noticed as well.
That urban vision has run out of steam, Renn writes in this month’s City Magazine. “Commercial real-estate prices have plunged in many places, weakening the urban tax base. While crime has declined from its recent peaks, perceptions of disorder and insecurity persist. Weak civic leadership afflicts many institutions. Most American cities are now viewed, with reason, as failing to address their central challenges, governing themselves ideologically — and often poorly.”
If I again can use my city as an example, a bad one, the city council is filling with socialists and the socialist-adjacent, we have built a government grocery store of all things, and we are haggling over the location of a $3-million homeless “service” center. Our appointed DEI mayor’s approach to a serious crime problem is on the level of midnight basketball. Her idea of economic development is to shift what has failed downtown to the south side. With priorities like that, it is anyone’s guess how the infrastructure is holding up.
But Renn identifies a new vision that he calls “Prime Suburbia.” It emphasizes amenities, importing key features of the traditional urban-value proposition into suburban settings. “These suburbs may be politically red or blue, low-tax or high-tax, but they share a style of high-quality governance: pragmatic, centrist and resistant to ideological extremes, Renn says. “They deliver strong public services and maintain a clear focus on public safety. They welcome diversity but largely avoid the excesses of identity politics.”
Important to us is that they are built on maximal private enterprise and minimal public-private “partnerships.” In addition to Indiana’s Carmel, Renn lists these examples: Newport Beach and Irvine in California: Scottsdale, Arizona; the North Dallas suburbs of Plano and Frisco; Dublin, Ohio; Coral Gables, Florida; Alpharetta, Georgia; and Houston’s The Woodlands.
Look them up. Your grandchildren might have to move to one or the other. — tcl
