A few things to know this week: August 21, 2020
Happy Friday, friends! Every week we collect some of the best things that members of our Verdunity team read, watched, or listened to over the course of the week—plus anything new from us.
This week on the Go Cultivate! podcast:
Are We Doing This Right? – Budgeting Edition
We turn the attention of our 'Are We Doing This Right?' series to local budgets, how they’re made, and the outcomes they produce.
New on the blog this week:
Three key ingredients for growing your local restaurant scene
Want to make life easier for people to start, grow, and sustain local restaurants in your community? Tim Wright shares three lessons from his home community of Shreveport.
This week’s (other) things to know:
Why Schools Should Care about Housing Voucher Discrimination (Housing Matters)
The housing issues we so often focus on in discussions are availability and affordability. But what about discrimination? Housing voucher discrimination contributes to a whole host of very real issues for cities and their residents, feeding segregation in schools and preventing the kind of choice and mobility vouchers were meant to help provide. Areas with high-performing schools and lower concentrations of poverty, as one might suspect, are also the areas with the highest number of voucher denials. What doesn't help matters is that federal law is silent on the matter of housing voucher discrimination. Fortunately, some states have enacted regulations to prevent such discrimination, but enforcement of those regulations is far from uniform. In states like Texas and Indiana, where cities are banned from passing their own laws against source-of-income discrimination, the aforementioned effects are even more prevalent. Additional discussions at the federal and state levels is necessary if diversity is to become more than a buzzword. – AJ
Defining “Communities of Concern” in Transportation Planning (Urban Institute)
There’s a new paper published by the Urban Institute that reviews the ways that transportation planners identify underserved communities. “Although Title VI [...] provides some guidance, the myriad approaches across metropolitan planning organizations, state departments of transportation, and public transit agencies make finding a standard definition of a ‘community of concern’ challenging.” The review concludes with a series of recommendations for state and regional transportation agencies and departments. Its closing statement stresses the importance of genuinely involving members of the community in the decision making process—something you’ve heard us spend a lot of time talking about. – Jordan
Study Predicts Millions of Unsellable Homes Could Upend Market (University of Arizona)
Are you a Boomer or Gen X-er who is thinking about selling your large, suburban home as part of your retirement nest egg? If so, you might want to do so sooner than later. A new study from the University of Arizona predicts that younger generations may not have the interest or means to purchase the large, expensive homes in suburban communities that older generations are counting on being able to sell in the coming decades, and it could result in millions of unsellable homes. – Kevin
Do you enjoy these weekly roundups? (Why wouldn’t you?) You can get them sent straight to your email inbox every Friday, if you’re into that.
In this piece, Ben Crowther explains why there is traction for a "highways to boulevards" program, and outlines a series of reasons why Congress should support this shift. It is encouraging to see that the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has unanimously advanced a bill that includes the Community Connectivity Pilot Program, which would fund the study and removal of outdated highways; and, on the House side, the Connect Communities Program has been co-sponsored. If you've been hearing about the movement to reverse the trend of eradicating neighborhoods and displacing people at great personal and monetary cost, but aren't sure what is fueling it, this is an excellent read full of examples that drive the point home. – AJ
Crisis leadership: An agenda for troubled times (McKinsey)
Leading an organization or team through these times is hard, stressful, and emotionally draining. Personally, this is the toughest situation I've ever had to manage in my 26-year career in municipal consulting. I'm always looking for resources with tips and others I can talk with to ask questions, share lessons learned, and just get support in general. I found this article helpful and hope other leaders will as well. – Kevin
Post-COVID, should countries rethink their obsession with economic growth? (Grist)
A few years ago I read a book called Prosperity without Growth by ecological economist Tim Jackson. In the book, he explains why unlimited material growth cannot continue because critical natural resources of the planet have finite limits, and how providing prosperity for 9 billion people cannot simply be about consuming more and more stuff. This article is a good overview of the concept and some of the different theories on how we can provide prosperity for more people without relying on exponential economic growth. – Kevin
Here's the standard disclaimer: We always encourage our team members to freely share their thoughts and opinions, both in these newsletters and elsewhere. Given that, opinions expressed by any one member do not necessarily represent the views of the company as a whole.
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