howeenterprise.com
Page #14
Monday, November 26, 2018
Keep Howe Beautiful Yard of the Month
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228 in Pradera Mobile Home Park
Future Howe of poor investments. Our challenge is fundamentally different. We’ve been obsessed with “how do we grow?” What we must start talking about is, “how do we experience productive growth?” We could make transactions for transactions sake. Or we could make transactions that make us wealthy.
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“Build it and they will come” is a fantastic movie plot, but a disastrous economic development strategy. The government shouldn’t be the risk-taker and dealmaker just to experience growth. It’s not how any city has ever built wealth. They’ve built growth, but not wealth. Every city that was built in America started with small shack business There are numerous studies done as to how to buildings in a small area together. Thousands grow fast. But there are not a lot of case of these cities were built the same and some studies done today that indicate how a grew into major metropolis areas while others community grows productively. But let’s look failed. The ones that failed did not cause a back at history and see what people did before major stock market crash or an emergency to create wealthy communities and try and congressional session to bail out banks. They apply it to today. There is wisdom far back simply went away for a variety of complex beyond 2018 and 1968. reasons that defy our reasons to predict or project or even fully understand after the fact. Howe’s downtown was originally built in the A lot of times, we’re expected to be able to 1870s. Only three front doors still exist from predict the future and know what is going to the original buildings. The street was laid out happen. It’s a scary world when we perfectly. I doubt zoning ordinances were acknowledge that we cannot do that. But when much of discussion and I doubt there were any you can’t predict the future, you must come up tax subsidies or grants received to build any of with a radical alternative. What we can look at the buildings. And I doubt that there were is the successful little downtowns that did grow countless board meetings to discuss the brick and prosper. And when you study the veneer. The original designers of Howe successes, you come to one conclusion for each included a man named Jabez Haning who of the successes. They grew incrementally up couldn’t’ read or write. Look at what they and incrementally out and incrementally more built. How did they do it? Simply, they just intense. After 30 years of incrementally copied what they knew worked with the growing, the small shack businesses of the materials they had in-hand and patterned a style 1870s became the downtown family-owned and approach that they had seen work for pedestrian-haven malt shops and shoe stores of thousands of years. the 1940s and 50s. And 40 to 50 more years of incremental growth, the old downtown districts After a hundred years of investments, new would stretch into blocks of brick and granite strategies, after advice from engineers, and buildings. Fort Worth is a great example of regulations, the downtowns across America are this. This is an example of modest investments having to be revived with economic incentives over a long period of time. and façade grants. For the most part across America, downtowns are a wasteland of We can look at our own downtown and see parking lots and unoccupied buildings. what happens when you don’t’ grow Fortunately for Howe, our buildings that incrementally. There have been different remain are all occupied after a resurgence in reasons for that including a highway that the last five to 10 years. We could even make a moved businesses west a half a mile. But we great case to rebuild the ones that either were can also point to prior to that. Our Howe torn down because of mismanagement or fell downtown buildings after incremental growth down because of mismanagement. We'll make from the 1920s on would have become more that case soon. intense and more ornate. However, the country experienced the Great Depression and World The future thought process should transform to War II and then a completely different a new form of development. One that is development pattern toward the expressway. marked less by how quickly we can develop Foxworth Galbraith moved off Davis Street as and grow, to by how productive our a possible incremental growth section of page 16 investments are.
