- The renewal of town and city centres across the US is accelerating now, says Patrice Frey of Main Street America, a programme which helps to breathe life into commercial areas. It says it has generated $75bn in public and private investment since 1980.
How cities are rolling up their sleeves and getting things done is the subject of New Localism, a book co-authored by Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution.
"For the past 40 years, we have seen an evolution of urban problem-solving that's becoming more sophisticated and more impactful with every passing year," he says.
Not buyin' it. To live with their parents, because it's tough to make rent driving for Uber. Ahh, yes. Hope. General Mills sold off the business in 2015.. Which didn't matter much because they sold the cannery off to Seneca Foods years earlier. So they built the statue in '79 to get tourists, and now things are going to be better because they hope a visitor's center for their 40-year-old statue will get the commerce the statue hasn't gotten them for 40 years. I've been to Blue Earth. I've got a picture somewhere with that big damn statue. I didn't know it was Blue Earth because I was 11 but even at the ripe old age of 11 that town was an obvious yearning for tourist business in the middle of nowhere. It's the place on I-90 with the tilt-a-whirl where my sister ralphed Chinese food. Why is there a tilt-a-whirl in the middle of rural Minnesota? Because there's nothing else. A new $323m convention centre with 800 hotel rooms is due to open in 2020. Six years later, this sports-mad city could be hosting World Cup soccer matches. More and more outside money is pouring in, and the city's success is finally getting attention nationwide. So Kansas City has spent a half billion dollars to attract people. It is interesting how the BBC thinks population 3,300 Blue Earth MN and population 500k Kansas City have something in common.College graduates are coming home again in their 20s and 30s, rather than heading to the big cities, reversing the years-long talent exodus.
A few yards from the giant's size 78 shoes is a construction site where a welcome centre is being built to showcase the town. The hope is that in future people will do more than stop for a selfie.
The most visible presence of Green Giant in southern Minnesota is about an hour away in Blue Earth, where civic leaders in 1979 built a 55-foot-tall fiberglass statue of the Jolly Green Giant to greet visitors driving into town from Interstate 90.
First Fridays began as a monthly attraction to showcase the city's growing arts scene, and that now brings 10,000 people to the city. The $100m KC Streetcar opened in 2016 and that gave the city a sense of pride and helped to attract millennials.
The author is a labor lawyer from Minnesota and should know better. He writes as someone who has never left the coasts or large cities. As someone who lives squarely out in Banjostan, it pisses me off when a writer like this tells an audience how my part of the world is doing. That jumped out at me as well. KSC is growing and becoming a tech hub for one and only one reason: Google Fibre. They got lucky and were the first to get the service before Alphabet realized how hard it is being an ISP and got bored with it. Nashville is pissed that they gave Google a ton of money and cash kickbacks to get Google Fiber and are getting less than shit for the return on that investment. This reminds me of the articles from a while back on call centers moving back to Minnesota and the Midwest a grand wonderful thing. Because $9/hr jobs with no benefits are the lowered expectations that have been beaten into us over the last 40 years.It is interesting how the BBC thinks population 3,300 Blue Earth MN and population 500k Kansas City have something in common.
In the thirty minutes I've known Blue Earth existed, it seems similar to the town I grew up in. As a town, it isn't dead or dying, but nobody spends money there unless they need to. It isn't a destination, just a stop off the highway. Maybe some stop off the highway and drive into town for ice cream. Some might even go further to go to the diner. If they can be enticed to make one more stop or if a few more can be coaxed off the highway (e.g. "let's go one more exit to Blue Earth because they have (blank)" that will help, but it's hardly something that will make a town prosperous. They're still just getting scraps from highest travelers whose entire reason for being there is to leave and keep going to their destination.