Earlier today I attended the Indiana University 2012 Business Outlook Panel in its visit to Richmond.  It’s a group that “has presented national, state, and local economic forecasts for the coming year to business, political, and community leaders of Indiana” for the last 38 years.  I attended the same gathering back in 2005 and I have to say that today’s commentary wasn’t much different from what it was six years ago: “things are not great with the economy, but there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic.”

As I noted in my reflections from the 2005 event, there were a couple of troubling ideas that permeated the remarks, especially from the panelists looking at global and national trends.

The main one that I continue to struggle with is the idea that we just have to wait for the global economy to improve and drive things to get better at the national, state and local level.  In defending the power of globalism, one of the panelists even outright made fun of the idea of building a regionally self-reliant economy.

A more regional approach to economic development – instead of depending on the importation of resources from around the world – is exactly the approach that many others (myself included) are saying is key for communities like Richmond to surviving the increasingly intense effects of rising fuel prices, the falling value of the dollar and the destruction of the natural environment.  While I appreciate that there’s hope in what a thriving global economy might mean for midwestern cities, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to ask the people without jobs or credit or homes or disposable income to keep waiting it out, just another year or two.

Despite the inclusion of this troubling premise, the event was still interesting and perspective-bringing; some other tidbits shared by the panel:

• Political dysfunction at the national level is clearly eroding confidence in the ability of policy-makers (Congress and the President) to have any real effect on the economy
• To make sure we can survive through any kind of economic recovery, we have to address the Eurozone economic situation, stop implementing short-term, ineffective fixes domestically and start solving problems for the long term, open and evolve our financial system (“Federal reserve monetary policy currently penalizes people who save instead of rewarding them”), and pay attention to China’s emerging consumer culture.
• Despite the down economy, corporate earnings are up 11% and are expected to improve
• We have to do better at answering the question “what should investors do with their money?”  The market is too volatile, savings accounts don’t offer a return, and if we don’t have some good options, people will seek dangerous ways to get a higher rate of return (e.g. lending money to home-buyers who can’t actually afford it).
• Indiana has been hit harder than most states, using a quarter of a million jobs from 2007 to 2009.  Those jobs mostly aren’t coming back, in part because they’ve been lost from organizations that are more efficient and don’t need them any more.
• Private education and healthcare services are the two industries that are doing well in Indiana, with 36,000 jobs added in the last year.  The government sector has recently done well too as the result of stimulus fund application (there were 450,000 government jobs in Indiana as of May 2010) but that’s expected to level off or decline as those funds dry up.
• Housing sales in Indiana are down 3% and the average price of homes for sale are up 1% – not a good economic trend, and new housing construction has slowed significantly.

I also learned a new economic term that is very timely for my own hiring attempts at Summersault.  One of the event attendees asked the panel how they reconcile the issue of companies and organizations investing in lots of infrastructure and equipment to expand but then not being able to find qualified workers to fill those jobs.  The term for this is “structural unemployment” where there’s a mismatch between demand in the labor market and the skills and locations of the workers seeking employment.  Richmond is experiencing a form of this now, where we (including my company) have positions that are open but our workforce doesn’t always have the training or skills to fill them.  The panel didn’t offer any particular solution to this phenomenon, but the implication was that it is among our most serious challenges to solve.

Thanks to Indiana University East for sponsoring this event and to Reid Hospital for hosting it.  I hope it generates some useful conversation.

For most people, having a job is a means to other ends – making money to help provide for our families, a place where we go to be productive and feel a sense of accomplishment, a foundation on which to build a quality of life.  Most people don’t want to live so they can work – they work so they can live.  And so it’s disconcerting when politicians casually talk about job creation as the end in itself, without any concern for or follow-up on what that means for the people in a given community taking those jobs.

If jobs are created but workers aren’t paid a living wage or are prevented from standing up for their rights, is our work really done?

If jobs are created but hiring processes are discriminatory or working conditions are oppressive, can we say we’ve done a helpful thing for our fellow citizens?

If jobs are created but toxic chemicals are released into the groundwater or treasured natural areas are destroyed in ways that limit the quality of life for future generations, can we really claim success?

If job creation is our only goal, there are a lot of unsustainable and destructive models we can follow to get a whole bunch of people put to work right away.  Relax a few laws, sweep a few health and environmental issues under the rug, put up a “help wanted” sign, and ta-da – you’ve got your jobs numbers to wave around, at least for this news cycle!

But if our primary goal is not just job creation, but helping people make a meaningful and fulfilling living for themselves and their families, then maybe we approach it a different way.  Maybe we can start to think about job creation at a more human scale.

What does job creation at a human scale look like?  I wrote some about this back in 2005, when I described what a driving vision for job creation might prompt us to prioritize. A few more examples:

• Supporting employers that are rooted in their communities and that have a tangible stake in the health and well-being of the people who live and work around them
• Investing in employment opportunities that will pay a living wage, and that value the health and well-being of their employees over the long-term, even when it’s not immediately profitable in the short-term to do so
• Not being afraid to see value in creating one, two, three jobs at a time, instead of always waiting for the “big win” of hundreds or thousands of jobs at once – most “growth” is happening in smaller companies now, not larger ones, and the cumulative effect is just as powerful and important
• Regional economic development efforts that focus on the question “how can we do well with what we already have here?” instead of “how can we import resources and build brand new infrastructure so that we can look and feel exactly like some other place?”

I’m sure there are many other ways to think about job creation at a human scale, and I welcome your contributions.

As you can imagine, this isn’t an idle academic exercise; traditional methods of economic development are failing, local and state governments are on the ropes, and at least in my state of Indiana, personal bankruptcies and debt levels are soaring.  We must talk about job creation, yes, but we must talk about it in a way that fully engages the human scale of what it means for a particular person in a particular community to have a job, and what sacrifices and compromises are made by that community to get there.

“Advocates [of the fee] say it’s crucial for a city that’s expected to add another million people in the next 20 years.”

The reactions include frustration at the economic implications, outrage at the imposition on personal liberties, concerns about the logistical implementation details, and an overall sense of “well, somebody better do something or we’re going to grind to a halt.”

But no one seems to question the idea that adding a million people to the city is what must and will happen, and everything else must work to accommodate that.

All over the country and indeed the world, when we talk about growth and development and success, very few decision-makers seem to question the premise that the continued growth of our population is the desired trend that we want to accommodate. All of our cultural processes that work to meet our future needs assume that we will need more housing, more buildings, more streets, more neighborhoods, more jails, more healthcare facilities, more agribusiness, more imports, more oil, more cars, more energy, more EVERYTHING. After all, how can more humans be a bad thing?

For any given geographical area, if you take the problems that it faces with its current population numbers (poverty, crime, famine, unemployment, inequality, traffic congestion), and then add more people, it’s fairly proven that those problems will only get worse. And sometimes, it’s not a matter of a linear worsening – the effects of population growth are often exponential.

But few people say, “what if we didn’t keep adding millions of people to our global population every year? What if we came to understand that unchecked population growth is at the core of so much of our economic and social strife these days, and decided to do something about it? What if we made it so that NYC got less congested because there were less people there?”

Our solution isn’t to ease off on the baby making or city building or to otherwise explore alternative models of a sustainable future – we just charge you a few extra bucks as you head down the road. Who cares if it costs $8 more to be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth, and subdue it?

Our very approach to solving the “problem” of unsustainability is grounded in a mindset that prevents sustainability from emerging. Always anchored to the past, the future is envisioned as being bigger or better. But such an approach will always keep us rooted in the past. To escape from the past, one must think in an entirely different way.

The current ideal of sustainability, as sustainable development, is not a vision for the future. It is merely a modification of the current process of economic development that its proponents claim, in theory, need not cause the terribly destructive consequences of the past. Sustainable development is fundamentally instrumental. It suggests new means, but still old ends. Sustainable appears as an adjective; the noun is still development.

As I look at sustainability efforts in my own life and at sustainability as a local progressive value, it’s important to me that someone out there has the right words to say what so many people are afraid to say: there are ways in which the survival of life on Earth is in conflict with traditional economic development, a.k.a. the continued growth of our civilization. Many sustainability efforts are purely or primarily anthropocentric, and therefore fail by definition.

This essay doesn’t have all the answers, but it’s got a good grip on that particular problem.

As a resident of Richmond for eleven years and a business owner here for
nine years, I’m very much invested in the growth of our community. But growth means different things to different people. Shortly after the newspaper coverage of my pledge, I received a message from a prominent Richmond businessperson and political figure indicating his frustration with my actions. I thought the conversation we had that proceeded would be useful to post here, more than a year later. (I’ve removed any identifying information from the exchange; he can identify himself if he so desires.)

As…a fellow small businessman I was very disappointed in your anti-business position in the newspaper. Evidently you don’t understand how our system here in America works or you don’t care. Richmond has been, is and I’m afraid always will be anti-growth and anti-opportunity because of citizen attitudes like yours. If we are ever to give our people a chance to live a better life we must become COMPLETELY pro-growth, pro-opportunity and pro-business. When business people attack business people there is no hope for our economic future.

My response:

“If you read the text of the pledge I put forth, I think you’ll find that it is in no way anti-business. The Palladium-Item has sort of spun it as a petition to keep businesses out and prevent growth, but that’s largely their attempt to sell papers, and I think they ignored the subtleties and spirit of the pledge itself in their reporting and editorial.

So, I wasn’t attacking anyone, and I don’t think being pro-growth, pro-opportunity, and pro-business are mutually exclusive with being able to preserve and protect the other aspects of Richmond that make it such a great place to live, and that help to attract businesses here in the first place.“

His response came back shortly:

I’ve lived here [for many decades] and I’ve heard arguments like yours a million times. Richmond was 38000 people in 1938 and it still is. What you say simply does not work! Real investors don’t care about what you say they care about! They only want two things – a high return on their investment and high security for it. Richmond provides neither because of a no-growth attitude. History proves that people with your attitude dominate what happens here – No Growth! No Opportunity! Your attitude has always won and that keeps Richmond just like it is. It really is sad that you can live a lifetime in a community that never even begins to reach its potential because of its attitude!!

My response:

“I respect that perspective, I really do – and I can’t even begin to understand how frustrating it must be to see that kind of stagnation over [so many] years. I definitely don’t claim to have all the answers or solutions – I certainly don’t have all of the context that you do when it comes to how our community operates.

What can we do differently that we’re not doing now?“

From there, we decided that we should get together in person to continue the discussion. We haven’t been able to do that yet, but I hope to some day.

I’m SO grateful to this man for taking the time to communicate with me directly and openly about his thoughts, as much in conflict as we started out being. So many others have responded by talking about me behind my back, using their (sometimes considerable) influence to harm me or the businesses/organizations which which I’m affiliated, and other nasty things that don’t belong in respectful discourse about the issues and choices that matter to us so much.

I’ll have more thoughts on this soon. But if you were having it today, where would you like to see the conversation go from here?

When it was time for the commission to deliberate, Bruce Wissel, president of the plan commission, pointed out that the commission members hadn’t yet had a chance to get a full printed copy of the plan, and that they shouldn’t be expected to recommend something they couldn’t read in full. As the resident web geeks Mark and I could barely keep from crying out that the whole thing is online and could be read pretty much anywhere the, um, telecommunications infrastructure is built out, but I also sympathized with Bruce’s sentiment that if you’re going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on urban planning, the least you can do is give the approving civic bodies a copy of the darn thing. I’ll volunteer use of the Summersault laser printer if it would help.

And so the whole ball of wax was tabled for a future meeting, where I suspect even fewer members of the public will make a showing unless some controversy pops up. And no doubt in some future conversation about what direction our community should take, perhaps even as a part of some controversy or other tough decision, this plan or some version of it will be held up – either as a “road map” that can be tossed gently aside when other agendas take precedence, or as a firm set of guiding policies that you can’t whine about now if you didn’t help write them then. This is, at least in part, how the social, economic and environmental priorities of our community are decided.

Less encouraging was the actual business outlook. In fact, it was pretty bleak all around: the panelists were in consensus that they were “apprehensively optimistic” about our economic future in 2006 and beyond. Okay…but for me it was scary to hear the reasons for their optimism…things like “as long as the price per barrel of oil doesn’t go above $70 for very long, we’ll be okay” and “as long as there’s no real collapse in the real estate market” aren’t really factors I want to set store by. In the end, despite some sound logic related to ways that things could get better, they were mostly diagnosing an only mildly candy-coated case of necrosis for the area’s traditional economic health.

Even worse: by the format and tone of the event, you’d think we’d been told that help is on the way and everything will be just fine. A charming lunch at the Forest Hills Country Club. Laughter as the panelists made light of their adventures in economic forecasting. Warmth and camaraderie as we swallowed the black pill together and got up to go back to our jobs and lives. There wasn’t any sense that “we can do anything about this” or even “we *should* do something about this,” just another business networking event. Okay, I know *some* people there were furrowing their brow and sharing some pain with those around them, but in general that’s just not the professional thing to do.

As I often am, I was again disappointed by the ever-present premise that everything related to the local economy is largely a factor of external variables and forces well beyond our control, and that it has to stay that way. It’s a global economy, let’s just huddle in our own corners and wait out the storm. Here we had a collection of some of Wayne County’s most invested and “powerful” business leaders, decision makers, millionaires and more…and they were all facing forward, not there to discuss or be inventive, just to get more bad news. Of the 1.5 hours spent, only about 10 minutes were devoted to questions from the audience, which did start to bring up some good topics for further discussion, but then it was over. So it wasn’t much of a forum in that sense. I would have given up lunch and taken the day off work if they’d had some break-out sessions or follow-up debriefing or…anything where we could roll up our sleeves. But I guess that on some days we only have time and energy to see the iceberg; reacting is put off for another time or place.

Other random factoids and quotes from the panel:

• “The rest of the country is passing [Indiana] by.”
• The manufacturing sector in Indiana is flat and will never again be a vital part of our economy
• Indiana is ranked 44th in the nation for state economic growth
• The average income in the state is 91% of the national average.
• We’re more dependent on manufacturing than any other state.
• Our best areas of growth in the state for 2006 will be in health and education, leisure activities, and the hospitality industry
• Locally, the panelists pointed to things like the exciting new strip mall and the activities of the EDC as the bright spots in our growth for 2006. They noted that the Stanley W. Hayes Memorial Strip Mall (a.k.a. Richmond Square Village) will bring an estimated 200 jobs to the area.
• 63,120 of the 67,780 employable workers are actually working, or about 93.1%
• Housing is doing reasonably well, sales are up and it’s a buyers market, but the local median price of a home is $93,000, compared to the $205,000 median nationally
• The banking sector is picking up

• Those who do have a public voice tend to influence the process heavily
• When decisions are made that are contrary to our own wishes, we have a harder time accepting and adapting to those decisions if we weren’t involved in the process
• When we don’t know our neighbors and their desires, interests, and needs, we can’t serve each other as community members
• When we don’t talk to each other, other forces fill in the gaps, and they often don’t have the best for our community in mind
• Our private lives tend to be less fulfilling when we are isolated from those around us

I could go on – Parker J. Palmer explores these kinds of issues well in his book Company of Strangers: Christians & the Renewal of America’s Public Life. But it seems that no matter how you look at it, any hard choice to make or difficult situation to face – whether it about zoning or preservation or poverty or racism or cultural values or the future – is going to be a lot harder when people can’t exchange ideas about those choices and situations.

So, I’d like to review the venues for dialogue that I know of, and seek comment from anyone else out there who can add to or comment on this list.

• The Palladium-Item Op-Ed Page
  The local paper has a fairly active op-ed page, but it is by no means what I would call an engaging public forum. Because it is the only such page in town and is subject to the interests and idiosyncrasies of its limited readership (and the smaller number of whom bother to write in), the quality and quantity of relevant thoughts on a given subject are not very stable. The Pal-Item also has a limit of 300 words for a letter to the editor, which tends to restrict any serious commentary or in-depth exploration of an issue unless they invite you to be a guest columnist, which just adds to the already significant discretion they have in shaping the quality of the conversation. They also seem to have a severe problem with the same small group of readers writing in regularly (thus, I assume, their requirement that you wait 30 days between submissions), and responses and “threads” of discussion are cumbersome in general, which further limits the quality.
   
• Public Common Spaces
  Richmond has little in the way of traditional public spaces where people come together to engage in conversation with whomever else might be there to do so. The layout of our main street / uptown is perhaps most suited for this, with its wide sidewalks, public benches, and variety of attractions that could bring an equally diverse slice of the population together. Unfortunately, it’s largely quiet on evenings and weekends, and isn’t perceived by most as a place to come meet others for conversation. The parks are similarly well suited and wonderfully maintained common spaces, but rarely attract a critical mass for meaningful dialogue. Malls of all sorts tend not to encourage spontaneous conversation, though the Richmond Square Mall is certainly well-used as a gathering place for all ages and backgrounds. Some neighborhoods have active neighborhood associations and perhaps even street parties and the like, but they tend to be limited to very localized areas in their benefit. My sense is that the use of public common spaces for striking up conversations with “strangers” is a practice fading in most of America these days, so Richmond isn’t uniquely constrained in this way.
   
• Online Forums and Blogs
  I’m an advocate of using the technologies of the Internet to build community, and there are some good resources out there. The WayNet.org Talk of the Town forum isn’t very high-traffic but hosts conversations about everything from history to education to genealogy to restaurants. As the number of bloggers in the area increases, some interesting conversations are going on in the comments and cross-posts happening there – I think the G101.3 blog became the most popular one almost overnight (but maybe that’s the power of radio, eh). Some coffee bars and other hangout spots in town are creating online discussion areas to complement their physical spaces. And, hey parents, did you know that your teenager is posting his or her innermost thoughts on LiveJournal for their friends (and the rest of the world) to see? But of course there’s the constant problem of lack of regular access to the Internet for much of the county, and online discussion formats tend to be very limiting in their own right, removing a certain human element from exchanges. So these virtual discussions are certainly contributing to public dialogue, but for now remain a very small slice of it.
   
• Public Events
  Being a fairly small city with a full roster of clubs, organizations, and special events, there are certainly a number of times throughout the year when you can go to meet your fellow citizens. The county fair, music festivals, the Rooftop Rendezvous, Chamber of Commerce events, Young Adult Professionals, various cultural happenings at the local educational institutions, etc. Even events like a Civic Theatre production or a Symphony performance can be great opportunities for discussion. I guess the “down side” to these is again that because they aren’t really dedicated to raising the quality of public dialogue in the community, any progress made in that area through them tends to be accidental. They don’t serve as a vehicle for that discussion unless the people attending are very proactive about it.
   
• Religious Organizations
  Richmond certainly has an active community of churches, and I know that the various congregations have a lot of opportunities for dialogue between regular services, community service events, common meals, and similar gatherings. I might suggest that these gatherings are some of the most active venues for public dialogue, but while there are certainly some inter-denominational events too, I think it tends to be the case that discussions had within a given church community don’t often expand beyond their walls on a regular basis, and often don’t have the goal of engaging the community as a whole.
   
• Private Gathering Places
  The bars. More bars. Book stores. Coffee shops. Restaurants. All of these places are locations where people go to socialize, but most of the ones we have in Richmond are not laid out to be open public discussion spaces. The average restaurant experience is fairly isolating. The average bar sports loud music and other distractions. I do see people making spontaneous connections and striking up conversations at places like Charlie’s Coffee Bar & Gallery or Readmore Bookstore and Coffee Shop, but they are sadly under-used and under-appreciated as such.
   
• Intentional Public Discussions
  These are the events that are specifically organized to facilitate public discussion about a given topic or topics. Perhaps the most widely attended are City Council meetings (and related commission meetings), especially when a hot topic is on the agenda. Those particular meetings tend to be more about presenting viewpoints in front of the meeting body and public television cameras, instead of exchanging ideas freely with fellow citizens, so they are fairly restrictive. But other kinds include the Study Circles and Community Builders groups that have been organized around issues like racism and ethnic violence, community forums organized by places like the Townsend Center and Earlham College, and other one-off events put together by various civic and non-profit institutions.

This last category of venue is the one I would *love* to see more of: spaces created intentionally to bring people together to have respectful and in-depth conversation about the things that matter to us. It’s not that I think all social exchanges need to be so cerebral, but I think there are good middle grounds where people can have fun while also engaging each other authentically. Something like the Conversation Cafe Initiative provides a cookie-cutter format for such experiences, and is easy to do if you can just get the people there.

So – those are my note on where we do and don’t have quality public dialogue in Richmond today. What am I missing? How do you like to engage your fellow neighbors? What are the other opportunities out there?

Another good that comes from this is that we couldn’t have asked for a more starkly painted contrast of the whole “commercial interests” versus “preservation and green space” theme. Even the Pal-Item’s editorial cartoon today shows the simple image of a tree (labeled “nature”) cut down by a chain-saw (labeled “commerce”).

At some level, we all know that it isn’t the big bad businesses that have come in and cut down our trees because they felt like it – instead, it’s the profit motive driving them, and that profit motive is based solely on the pretty safe bet that we as a community of consumers will pay them for their efforts. In the end, it’s our culture, our purchasing choices, and our relative complacency in these matters that brought those trees down and that will retroactively justify and support the choices of the “decision makers” involved. And so while we have purchased it at a great cost, we now have before us a very visceral manifestation of the impact and importance of our choices as consumers and members of an interdependent community – locally, regionally, globally. The good we can take away from this is to weigh those choices more carefully the next time around, with the forthcoming Richmond Village as an ever-present reminder to do so.

The bitterness will no doubt continue, and the strong opinions will no doubt lead to more tension and narrow-mindedness on all sides of the issue. But making Richmond a better place to live depends on our ability to learn from the experience, use that knowledge intentionally and wisely as we move forward, and ceasing to take for granted the reality that, above all else, it is our choices as individuals and as a community that shape the landscape – physical and metaphorical – of Richmond’s future.