Keep Howe Beautiful Yard of the Month

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

There are numerous studies done as to how to grow fast But there are not a lot of case studies done today that indicate how a community grows productively But let’s look back at history and see what people did before to create wealthy communities and try and apply it to today There is wisdom far back beyond 2018 and 1968

Howe’s downtown was originally built in the 1870s Only three front doors still exist from the original buildings The street was laid out perfectly I doubt zoning ordinances were much of discussion and I doubt there were any tax subsidies or grants received to build any of the buildings And I doubt that there were countless board meetings to discuss the brick veneer The original designers of Howe included a man named Jabez Haning who couldn’t’ read or write. Look at what they built How did they do it? Simply, they just copied what they knew worked with the materials they had in-hand and patterned a style and approach that they had seen work for thousands of years.

After a hundred years of investments, new strategies, after advice from engineers, and regulations, the downtowns across America are having to be revived with economic incentives and façade grants For the most part across America, downtowns are a wasteland of parking lots and unoccupied buildings

Fortunately for Howe, our buildings that remain are all occupied after a resurgence in the last five to 10 years We could even make a great case to rebuild the ones that either were torn down because of mismanagement or fell down because of mismanagement We'll make that case soon

The future thought process should transform to a new form of development One that is marked less by how quickly we can develop and grow, to by how productive our investments are

Continued from page 9

“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 buildings in a small area together Thousands of these cities were built the same and some grew into major metropolis areas while others failed The ones that failed did not cause a major stock market crash or an emergency congressional session to bail out banks They simply went away for a variety of complex reasons that defy our reasons to predict or project or even fully understand after the fact A lot of times, we’re expected to be able to predict the future and know what is going to happen It’s a scary world when we acknowledge that we cannot do that But when you can’t predict the future, you must come up with a radical alternative What we can look at is the successful little downtowns that did grow and prosper And when you study the successes, you come to one conclusion for each of the successes They grew incrementally up and incrementally out and incrementally more intense After 30 years of incrementally growing, the small shack businesses of the 1870s became the downtown family-owned pedestrian-haven malt shops and shoe stores of the 1940s and 50s. And 40 to 50 more years of incremental growth, the old downtown districts would stretch into blocks of brick and granite buildings Fort Worth is a great example of this This is an example of modest investments over a long period of time.

We can look at our own downtown and see what happens when you don’t’ grow incrementally There have been different reasons for that including a highway that moved businesses west a half a mile But we can also point to prior to that Our Howe downtown buildings after incremental growth from the 1920s on would have become more intense and more ornate However, the country experienced the Great Depression and World War II and then a completely different development pattern toward the expressway Foxworth Galbraith moved off Davis Street as a possible incremental growth section of page 16