People who have been paying attention to the bottom-up indie revitalization that's been going on in Detroit might have heard of the Green Garage -- or maybe I just read a lot of obscure stuff. Hm. I'm gonna admit that when I first heard about the Green Garage, my reaction was, "nice good, needed, yes, …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: A Garage that does more than Green, it builds ecosystem
As you might have noticed if you've read the book, the Local Economy Revolution doesn't propose any easy answers. The prevailing message of the book is probably that effective community economy revitalization takes hard, interconnected work at a whole range of factors, including both conventional "economic" issues and those that we too often haven't considered …
We've developed a problematic habit over the past couple of years: as we go through this economic sea change, and as many of our old ways of improving local economies lose whatever effectiveness they used to have, we keep grasping at straws, trying to find some new hidden lever on the economy machine that we …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: 4 Hard Earned Lessons about Entrepreneurship (finally)
Economic development incentives got a good deal of attention in the book, in part because they've been in my craw and in part because they turned out to be a good example of a lot of the factors that get in the way of building a Wise Economy, such as not thinking through potential consequences …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: Better data on incentive programs
This recent study reinforces a conclusion that's been emerging among cognitive psychologists and education researchers for many years: Telling people something is, by and large, a really bad way of getting them to remember - or act - upon it: Between sights, sounds, and tactile sensations, what we hear is hardest for us to recall, …
As some of you probably know, one of the hats that I wear when I'm not sharing Good Ideas for the Local Economy Revolution is that I'm the Managing Editor of EngagingCities, an online magazine that focuses on the use of internet technologies to help people connect to and participate in their communities. We cover …
You're gonna have to forgive me a little crowing over this one. Little Piqua was one of the first towns on my radar when I first moved back to Ohio after more than 10 years elsewhere, thanks to its mature and impressive Main Street Program. Between that and the rehabilitation of the Fort Piqua Plaza, …
Continue reading From the Really Good Ideas File: the Awesomeness that is Piqua, Ohio
I'm always glad when Good Ideas come out of Cincinnati, in part because it's the town that I have called home for the last 15 years and in part because there's pretty good stuff going on. Historically, Cincinnati has relied on its over-supply of Fortune 100 businesses, at least as compared to its population size, …
You always have to be a little careful about how much you read into a mainline press story about another city, but I have to say, this one worries me. According to this story from the Denver Post, that city has decided to place an emphasis on recruiting retailers to the city:"Retail activity is extremely …
Continue reading From the (maybe not so) Good Ideas File: Chasing retail because taxes
I have been following the growth of crowdfunding for a long time, and I've been particularly intrigued by the potential for crowdfunded real estate development. But so far truly broad based crowdfunding in real estate has been rare, with the most widely known examples coming from the Prodigy Network based in Bogota, Columbia. Imagine my …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: Crowdsourced Real Estate Deals
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived 