Cities 2001 Conference ; Seattle

CITICHAT 33/2001 - 24 August 2001


Cities 2001 Conference - Seattle

Our Cities 2001 Conference has come and gone and the general evaluation received from the participants has been very good. The conference focused on four critical aspects – urban management, marketing, planning and development and then ended with a brief overview on social issues. The four overseas participants, Rich Bradley (Downtown Business Improvement District Washington DC), Kate Joncas (Downtown Seattle Association), Ellen McCarthy (Deputy Director, Development Review and Historic Preservation, Office of Planning, Government of the District of Columbia) and Bill Best (New Jersey Redevelopment Association) provided fascinating overviews of work being done in their cities and organisations. From a wealth of many years of hands-on urban management experience, and in Richard’s case regular visits to Johannesburg over the past fourteen years, they were able to interpret and comment on the local scene quite pragmatically. One aspect of using overseas speakers that always amuses me is that when one makes comments and gives advice locally, one is always treated with skepticism, “What makes him think he knows the answers?” is a question imvariably posed. Yet when the identical input is provided by international speakers, it is absorbed and accepted without question! Human nature, I guess! I actually had a situation recently in relation to some work with which we are involved in a town north of here when I was asked to give permission that our documentation be re-circulated under a local name as people there “distrusted ‘consultants’ from Johannesburg”! Paraphrasing the Good Book: “A prophet is only without honour in his own country”! Well, back to the conference.

Seattle is a city that I haven’t covered previously in Citichat. I have had the good fortune to visit the city on a couple of occasions so it was particularly interesting to hear Kate Joncas provide an overview of her city and her work. A city of 580 000 (3.2 million in the metro area), it is of course home to Microsoft and Boeing employing 35 000 and 85 000 respectively. The Head Office section of Boeing recently relocated to Chicago but its massive manufacturing facility is still in Seattle. Seattle’s Pike Place Market must be one of the great markets of the world, not in size but certainly in character. It is a beautiful city with a magnificent setting that reminds one of Cape Town – all the beauty but lousy weather!

The Downtown Seattle Association, apart from managing a large Improvement District, is currently involved in over 30 projects of which the following are five priorities for 2001/2002:

• Advocating a sound transit plan that maximises the use of the downtown transit tunnel and does not increase downtown congestion or worsen bus commutes.

• Lobbying to increase density and affordable housing in Downtown

• Developing new funding for a Downtown wide marketing plan

• Developing strategies to increase organisational effectiveness

• Providing excellent management of the Metropolitan Improvement District on behalf of the ratepayers.

One always conjures up pictures of American cities as first-world havens free from the many problems that beset our cities. Not so – they all share the same problems to varying degrees with our own cities and nearly all have major problems with homelessness and substance abuse. Seattle is no exception. Seattle, the home to Boeing and Microsoft, suffers with a large homeless community. There are 1000 to 1500 people in their downtown who are chronically mentally ill and/or chronic substance abusers. Current city resources can serve only 100 mentally ill people that results in a 9-month wait for drug/alcohol treatment and only 1 in 5 can be served. In addition, most housing and shelters do not admit people with mental illness and/or alcohol problems. Living on the streets becomes the only option. The Downtown Seattle Association’s research showed that although there are over 100 different services related to the homeless in their downtown, there is no co-ordination. People therefore can and do bounce from shelters to services for years, avoiding any treatment and generally exacerbating the situation. The Association is therefore researching the possibility of developing a co-ordinated intake assessment and referral system for homeless services, identifying gaps in the system and providing accurate reporting of the situation. Interesting because we started trying to get a similar project off the ground in Rosebank a year or so ago and, whilst we received financial support for localised research were not able to raise funding to sustain the programme – listening to Kate brings fresh motivation to revisit the problem.

Rich Bradley’s Washington DC Downtown Association has similar problems and has also established a Downtown Service Centre to co-ordinate homeless issues. Not only have they hired trained outreach assistants but they have established a Homeless Services Co-ordination Council and train their CID Ambassadors (called SAMs – Sanitation and Maintenance personnel) in homeless interaction processes.

What both city Associations are doing is to accept that homelessness and all its associated ills exists (not wish them away or say it’s someone elses problem which means nothing gets done); to entice the affected people into Service Centres to determine the cause of individual homelessness and then to direct them in-house to specialists to deal with the particular problem. Hard challenging work that offers no quick-fixes but that is so essential in dealing with one of the visible issues that all towns and cities in this country are also struggling with.

One of Kate’s new problems incidentally is that gangs of youths are coming into certain parts of their city bringing with them their pit-bulls in order to take on rival gangs using dog fights as the medium! Man’s inhumanity to other humans and animals has no bounds!

Another aspect from Kate’s Seattle work from which we can really learn is in the R & D arena. Amongst other things they do office space studies, construction project tracking, pedestrian and traffic counts, market research, public perception surveys, produce a downtown development guide and a downtown economic profile. Every employee on the streets keeps an accurate log of incidents which are downloaded each night onto a GIS system from where one can pinpoint trends and movements in various incidents. From this they can also produce trend maps and benchmark performance.

I get irritated when South Africans criticise us for looking at the American city model for solutions to our problems. South Africans have a naïve perspective of American cities because they classify them as ‘first world’ and us as ‘third world’. As one of my American friends says ‘the dirt on the streets is the same’ in cities in both countries, so are many of our other problems. Isn’t it somewhat arrogant to think we have a copyright on city problems? Sure we need to adapt, but there is an awful lot we can learn from them as I believe many who attended the conference will have realised.