Meeting the Mayors
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
On lessons learned by the those leading the charge
Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution in his book “Metropolitan Revolution,” talks about Mayors as people who get stuff done. They have to, he says, because they are the front line. If they don’t get the trash picked up, keep the streets safe, and plow the snow, they’re done. That last one led to the first (and only) female mayor in Chicago’s history, Jane Byrne. Really.
During my time at Livability I had the opportunity to meet and/or interview many mayors of cities of all sizes. They were all thoughtful and pragmatic. They came from cities in red states and blue states. Their focus, however was on making their cities great places to live. The building blocks of livability are a thing that there is largely bipartisan agreement on. I should know, I’ve been surveying about that for 10+ years now. Sure, they have to deal with politics, but the conversations were never political. They really did just focus on what needed to be done and how to do it.
Oddly the only one I remember turning me down was Oak Park’s! Looking back through those interviews I thought I’d pull out some favorite quotes and lesson and share a few stories of how I met a few of them.
The mayor I had the most contact with over the years is Madison mayor, Paul Soglin. He has a unique perspective on an unusual city. In 2011 he was elected for his third (and final?) stint as mayor, having served in the 1970s and then again in from 1989 to 1997. “It’s called recidivism,” he told me.
I first met him when he reached out to see why Madison hadn’t scored higher on our first Top 100 Best Places to Live ranking. He had convened a task force to make specific recommendations about how the city could do better in next year’s rankings. They had tried to reverse-engineer our algorithm and had some questions. In answering them, I found an error in our data – someone doing data entry had transposed Madison with Madison Heights, MI. Fixing that landed Soglin’s city in the number five slot that first year. He wanted number one, however, because he could see that we’d done the work and he agreed with what we prioritized in our list. He didn’t want to be number one just on the list, he wanted to be number one because his city honestly was best at all the things we measured. By the next year, he made it.
Madison itself keeps things challenging because the population is always shifting. It's rare to have a city with a large minority population that's nearly equal parts African-American, Asian and Hispanic -- and each of these segments are growing. Soglin's drive to improve isn't surprising for a mayor who’s only regret from his time(s) in office is this: “In my previous tenures I had a 20-year view, which is far longer than most elected politicians. I should have had a 40 year view.”
When asked how to make a great city, he told me, “You don’t go out there chasing and recruiting companies to leave another city and come to yours. What you do is exactly the notion of what [Livability.com is] trying to evaluate. You build a great place and they will come.”
I did get to go visit and have a press conference with him when Madison took the top slot. Since then we’ve kept in touch. He’ll call me out of the blue with Census data questions or to debate various topics. Last time I was in Madison (for a Neil Gaiman reading) we had dinner and talked about cities and about his other great love, baseball. He grew up a Sox fan, which I forgive him for. But has a great and learned perspective on our nation’s pastime as well.
He was never afraid to dig into the data. He noticed something weird in the Census data for his city and got the Census Bureau … not to retract it, they never do that, but to write him a letter saying, essentially “maybe just don’t look at that particular stat too closely, ok?” I can’t imagine a lot of politicians debating which versions of the American Community Survey are best for which applications. He’s wonky, in all the good ways. Much respect.
Pittsburgh’s mayor, Bill Peduto and I had a quick walk-and-talk interview through Chicago. He had to run to his hotel to pick up his bags and head home for a big city council vote he was quarterbacking via text as we walked. He drew a lot of comparisons between his city and my former city, Detroit. Like Soglin, he seemed to see the need to take the long view, and like Madison, Pittsburgh was seeing its old bets pay off.
“During the 1980s [non-profit foundations] kept our heads above the water. What they were doing was investing in long-term approaches and basically at the same time our “eds and meds” were just beginning their process of coming to the forefront,” he said. For Detroit, another flailing Midwestern metropolis coping with its somewhat-post-industrial present, the work is still getting started.
He also talked about immigration as a key to growth. And he talked about developing bike lanes and the importance of strong neighborhood businesses. I suggested he was of the new-school of mayors. “You mean the old school?” he countered. “How do we get back to 1950 with urban neighborhood functions. It’s unique businesses, family owned businesses, a walkable accessible business district where everything is right outside your door… Access to public transit so if you won’t want to own a car you don’t have… Affordable housing and access to jobs. It’s all those components are 1950 urban America.”
1950s urban America was quashed by a lot of things, not the least of which was a concerted effort by General Motors, Firestone and others to kill the trolley system that existed in most cities because it wanted trolleys replaced with busses that would then use Firestone tires. This was a thing that happened, and led to a landmark court case.
At a CEO for Cities conference, I wound up sitting next to longtime Greenville, S.C., mayor Knox White at dinner one night. We had a great chat and I wound up giving him a lift back to his hotel afterwards so we could continue the conversation. When I got to interview him formally he talked about a bit project his city undertook in the 1970s to remove a well-traveled roadway and revitalize a river-front area and waterfall it had essentially paved over. It was very controversial at the time. He told me in 2015, “I had someone come up to me yesterday and say ‘I used to have a store on Main Street back in the ‘70s and I was against everything you guys wanted to do and boy was I wrong.’ About once a month someone says that to me.”
He continued, “Having an urban core that really surprises people is a major economic development tool. We didn’t plan it that way, but oh my goodness in terms of recruiting people and companies it’s become the biggest thing.”
The lesson there is that sometimes things are hard. Sometimes people don’t have the vision you do but you have to follow your vision anyway. If you’re right, and right for the right reasons — you’ve done the research, you’ve thought through the scenarios and you’ve talked to the right people for ideas – you just have to find a way to get it done. People will come around, and they’ll thank you for it later.
That was also the philosophy of Asheville, N.C., mayor, Esther Manheimer. She said, “You can be an auto-pilot city and just provide the basic services or you can innovated, forward-thinking and you can plan it.”
I met two different Grand Rapids mayors. The first was longtime mayor George Heartwell. He told me about the importance of having people invest in your city if you want it to thrive. Billionaires can be especially helpful, especially if they roll up their sleeves and pitch in, not just write checks. Though checks are helpful, too. “We are very conscious of the fact that Grand Rapids would not be the vibrant city that it is today if it weren't for the fact that a number of people have made their fortunes here and have elected to stay here and raise their families here. They're investing in the city both for economic gain and for philanthropic purposes,” said George Heartwell, Grand Rapids.
One such family in the Grand Rapids area is the Meijer family. My mom’s cousin Harvey Lemmen was their right-hand man as they built out the Super Store chain that bears their name. That might sound like a big claim, but it’s quite true. The Meijer’s donated the funds for a cancer center in his name, and the name of one other longtime Meijer leader. He’s also buried in the Meijer family plot at Meijer gardens, which is about as high on an honor as I can imagine. Harvey himself was also very philanthropic and, until it closed, there was a Planned Parenthood named in his honor, too.
I was invited to put together and moderate a panel of mayors for a conference in northern California and I reached out to Mayor Soglin and thought I’d invite the Grand Rapids mayor, too. It turned out Mayor Heartwell had retired. His successor, the youngest and first female mayor in Grand Rapids history, Rosalynn Bliss, was happy to join. I got to see her do the the most Michigan thing ever. Someone asked her where Grand Rapids was, and she held up her hand and pointed to its location using her built-in mitten map.
We stayed in touch and several years later when we traveled as a family to Grand Rapids for my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary (they were married there) she issued a proclamation in their honor. She was a big beer fan, so I brought her a gift package from Oak Park’s first brewery, Kinslahger and suggested Oak Park and Grand Rapids should become sister beer cities. Which isn’t a thing, but she was open to how it could become a thing. Maybe I should pick that idea back up…
I interviewed Tampa mayor Bob Buckhorn after reading about a project he was doing using data Foursquare (a platform now called Swarm that I think I’m alone in still using) to learn how people were using and moving around his city. He told me, “From 30,000 feet I was able to look at the heat maps and say ‘this is where people are congregating or this is where they’re tweeting from’ and that gives me a better feel for where the demand might occur down the road. You look at development patterns – what would be an appropriate use in that vicinity? Is it commercial? Is it retail? Is it residential?” I loved how he was using data to help plan.
There’s a funny thing with cities. Even in red states, the cities themselves are often blue. And sometime the red state governors work agains the interests of their own citizens out of … I don’t know. Spite?
Buckhorn told me, “The Obama administration was going to fund $3 billion for high-speed rail – the first in the country – from Orlando to Tampa. The right of way had already been acquired. It would have created 6,000 temporary construction jobs. The governor was elected in 2010, about 6 months later in essence said he wasn’t interested and gave the money back to the federal government. I’ve had the mayor of Detroit thank me because as he said, “We’re taking the money that your governor gave back and we’re building our light rail system with it.” There’s a little frustration here in Florida about that decision.”
That was funny because I’d just been in Detroit reading about how the city had done just that with its Q line, starting to rebuild what was lost in the ‘50s with the whole Firestone/GM thing. Many of those old trolleys are in the Chicago suburbs now at the Illinois Railway Museum, with warehouses full of cars from midwestern cities, a tragic reminder of all that was lost.
Finally I met Chicago’s mayors. Mayor Daley we met by accident while walking through Grant Park with a very tiny Meredith. Mayor Rahm Emanuel I met a few times, often with my friend Sean who worked for him. I also flew on planes with both of them (separately and in a different class of seats) at various points.
Rahm was wicked smart, and sometimes just wicked. At that event with Bruce Katz I mentioned at the beginning he also spoke. He was asked about Chicago losing businesses to places like Houston, Texas. He said, water is important. Chicago sits next to one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world. Climate change is real and Texas won’t fare well. So yeah, move to Houston or Dallas. “Then try to take a shower in 10 years, and see how that turns out.” [Narrator: It didn’t even take 10 years.] They’ll be back, he said.
Rahm did a thing that seemed funny at the time, but was prescient. He carried wipes in his suit pocket. His job required him to shake a lot of hands and as soon as he was done, he’d disinfect.
That was a long post, but covered a lot of ground in time and across America. There are a lot of great ideas and lessons here about building cities. Those lessons apply in just about anything you’d ever want to do for a living. Network, stay focused, use data, think about and plan for the future, and having friends who can support your efforts really helps. Also, love where you live.
Mayors get things done because they have to. Sadly our federal government seems hell bent currently on not getting things done. It’s easy to imagine an alternate universe where that’s not the case.
Speaking of alternate universes, I was telling a story to the kids I often drive to softball in what has come to be known as “the party van.” I realized it would be a perfect fit for this series. It’s time to meet not Mayor Emanuel, but @mayoremanuel. Confused? Stay tuned!