The immortal words of John F. Kennedy are quite relevant these days. But change the word “country” to “community” and you get “Ask not what your community can do for you, ask what you can do for your community.” That how I look at it. I believe strong neighborhoods and community bonds are vital to democracy, and it is up to neighbors to work together to make it so by being involved at the local level and electing sensible officials who will make good decisions at the higher level.

The work of Richard Florida and the “creative class” is interesting and I buy in to it. We as a society have choices in where to live, and cities are aware that they need to provide quality places and not just jobs to attract critical talent. But we need to be careful that we don’t feel an entitlement that cities provide us with everything in a top-down sort of way. My casual observation since the release of Florida’s book is that too often city fathers and mothers of a down and out rust-belt town think they can create a hip district and attract a groundswell of young creative people. That is a bit simplistic, if not misdirected. More than ever, I think strong civic involvement is critical to creating long term sustainable communities.

I was in Tucson last year, and, as I love to do when traveling, I opened the local paper. Inside I found an editorial about the lack of community participation and interest in Tucson. Maybe it is the lack of year-round homeowners in Tucson, or perhaps the nice weather creating a lull of complacency among Tucson citizens, but it got me thinking about how nice it is that my hometown of Minneapolis is very civic-minded, and also why it is so.

Civic-minded as we may be, here in Minneapolis we are faced with a major change in how neighborhood groups work with the city to make improvements to the community. 20 years ago the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) was created to keep Minneapolis a vibrant place in the face of a drug and gang epidemic, suburban flight and declining school enrollment. A TIF district was created in our thriving downtown to disperse millions of dollars across the city - to spread the wealth. Neighborhood groups were formed across the city to work together and choose how to spend that money.

If the creators of the MasterCard “priceless” commercials were advertising for the NRP program, it would go something like this: TIF dollars to finance neighborhood development - $280 million. Neighborhood groups benefiting from NRP - 84. Real estate development resulting from NRP - $1 billion. Tax dollars generated from that investment over a 20-year period - $250 million. Citizen involvement in the decision making process of their neighborhoods - priceless.

A great number of community enhancements have resulted in the intervening 20 years. Minneapolis is a great place to live, in part because of the funding from that TIF district, but also because it allowed residents to have an increased say in the future of their city. You can find all the statistics to measure the success of the NRP, but the citizen involvement part is much more qualitative, and therefore interesting. It is indeed priceless.

Recently, the 20-year TIF district was extended for another decade, no NRP can continue. But there will be changes in its level of funding and how it will be run. As a result, there will be fallout as neighborhood groups realize they may have their main source of funding curtailed.

Put in perspective, the city faces very different challenges than 20 years ago. And although we can no longer count on the same reliable source of income, I doubt interest in community participation will necessarily suffer. Rather, my gut says it will increase when neighbors realize they can no longer count on the city directly. This presents great opportunities to work amongst ourselves to raise money through other means such as grants and private dollars.

In other words, it is time for the residents of Minneapolis to ask not what the city can do for them, but what they can do for the city.

Three recent articles got me thinking about neighborhoods and their importance in society. The first, a column by David Brooks in the New York Times, was a discussion of the rise of conservatism in Britain. It contains references to the importance of neighborhoods, community, and dense social bonds as ways to improve society rather than top-down government policy. I’m no expert on British politics, but it strikes me that the notion of strong neighborhoods and community can be both a liberal and conservative virtue. All politics is local, right? Dare I say it, neighborhoods may be the only places where we indeed have common ground. Is improving the world best achieved with a top-down or bottom-up approach?

The second article, also in the New York Times, was about the importance of getting to know your neighbors. The author, who incidentally is writing a book about neighborhoods, gets to know his neighbors by spending time with them during their everyday routines, and even sleeping over at their houses. I told a neighbor of mine about the article, and she seemed to think we could get to know each other just fine without a sleepover. Still, Peter Lovenheim’s article in the Times is very thought-provoking, and getting to know your neighbors better could have some far-reaching positive effects on our lives.

Bill Bishop just released a book called The Big Sort, which looks at how we Americans prefer to live near like-minded people, and have indeed sorted ourselves accordingly, often living in neighborhoods that are lopsided politically. An article in the Economist about the Big Sort, describes a Ron Paul-ville in west Texas where libertarian supporters can live free together.

Perhaps the Ron Paul neighborhood is a bit extreme, but as an observer and writer of the real estate development world, I can see how like-minded people wind up near each other. Housing and retail developers use complex psychographic analysis to identify target markets and determine design. The result is retirement communities, golf communities, green communities; you name it, you can probably find a place that suits you. We cannot hold developers accountable for the increasing divide among liberals and conservatives, but give them credit for idenifying niche markets in a society with many choices and building developments that resonate.

It does beg the question: what does a neighborhood that pleases both liberals and conservatives look like?

What is interesting about these three articles is they all relate to neighborhoods, how they work and the importance of strong community. I realize the very fact that I reference articles from the New York Times and the Economist probably pegs me as the latte-sipping sort who lives in an elite, blue-voting, urban neighborhood. That isn’t quite the case. My neighborhood in Minneapolis (I call it the Lower East Side) is a blue collar area of the city with mostly small homes. It is changing over from an older, blue collar neighborhood as younger, more white-collar buyers move in for the value and the proximity to parks and light rail.

I know many of my neighbors, albeit not too well until a few of us started having kids. But I value the neighborhood in general, and believe that neighbors need to work together to have a strong community.

Design of places is important, however. I have seen a great number of new developments that offer a range of housing and market to a broad cross section of the market, and, critically, they are designed so as to encourage a strong sense of community. Simple things like sidewalks, porches, and public gathering places like playgrounds, bandshells, and town squares, allow neighbors to meet and get to know each other. They aren’t forcing something on society, but they sure do make it easier to be neighborly.

My neighborhood is that way. Like I said, we are kind of diverse, we have small lots, sidewalks, playgrounds and other amenities for a healthy community. I wish we had a formal neighborhood square at our core, but at least we have some good neighborhood bars, bakeries and coffee shops that act as third places.

Yes, design is important, which informs how we interact with our world. It is hard to dislike a neighbor when you are sitting on their patio sharing a drink; it is easy to do so in an anonymous online forum. It is much easier to be civil when walking down a sidewalk or sharing a train than when you are behind the wheel of a car, enclosed in the safety of two tons of steel and glass. People become artificially empowered in their cars, and thus we have road rage. If you bump in to someone when you walk down the street, you can say sorry, or if you find each other attractive, exchange phone numbers. If you bump in to a friend on the sidewalk, you stop to chat and maybe head to the nearest pub or coffee shop. If you bump in to someone with your car, whether or not you know them or find them attractive, you have to call your insurance agent. If someone cuts you off, you honk, maybe make a gesture, and possibly become aggressive and race ahead and cut them off yourself. Now which urban reality is more neighborly? There is the potential for human interaction at an urban scale that cannot happen in automobile society. Which do you prefer?

Alas, design isn’t everything. To take up David Brooks’s discussion, good community only happens when members of the community get together to make it so. All the great design only goes so far when nobody is there to use it. My neighborhood is a great place because of design, but also because we neighbors want to make it so. We have a lot of civic involvement in Minneapolis because enough of my neighbors care to do something about it.

So I say spend more time in public. Get to know your neighbors, liberal and conservative. Make some positive change in your little corner of the world. Make your neighborhood more pleasant through design, or mere civility. Or just sit and watch the world go by, together.

Kids are easy to entertain in a city. Ellis and I made a visit to Chicago a couple months ago, and all I had to do was ride the train, or just see a train. He could stand under the “L” and watch all day. To see for yourself, watch the video of Ellis on You Tube here. It starts with him going crazy yelling “train, train,” then pivoting his head to watch the cars go by. Then he says, “Bye, bye, train.” At the very end he says “another one?”

We had a nice couple of days, walking the streets, riding the “L,” visiting the Children’s Museum, eating smoothies and Dunkin’ Donuts, and then capping it off with another train ride to Milwaukee to see grandma and grandpa. A great urban weekend for a little urban kid.

Check out my latest article in the May 2008 issue of Urban Land entitled Suburban Snapshots. Why write about suburbs? I’m an urbanist, after all. Well, suburbs are fascinating places and represent a huge amount of overall development. Plus, I was intrugued after visiting Dutch suburbs last year to see Columbia, Maryland and The Woodlands in Texas.

I greatly enjoyed Columbia and The Woodlands. In my opinion, they are superior places than their immediate neighbors, or many other suburbs for that matter. But Almere in the Netherlands, is quite mind-blowing. Besides the wicked-cool architecture (some would call it experimental), the fact that Almere has managed to get similar bicycling and transit usage as the urban core cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht is testament to not just good planning but an entirely different set of values. And that is a lesson from which we can learn.

I have seen the future, and it is collective.

I speak of the Collective, a development in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that was mentioned in a recent Economist article called The New Oases. The article was part of a larger special section about Nomads, or “knowledge workers” who aren’t tied to a location-specific office.

The Collective provides an answer to this segment. Developed by Bob Dykstra,
the Collective is part executive office, part health club, with guitar lessons, a climbing wall and coffee shop thrown in for good measure. I visited last month as part of an assignment for an upcoming case study for ULI.

The existing building is a former health club, and Mr. Dykstra has created a prototype of approximately 40,000 square feet. Members pay an annual and monthly membership. WiFi access is additional, as are lockable desks or private offices, which can be rented by the hour, day or month. Guitar lessons, fitness classes and computer courses are pay as you go. One of the real advantages of the Collective is the networking opportunities.

The target market is young “knowledge workers” and baby boomers who have flexible hours or are recently or semi-retired. That encompasses anyone who does or can work from home, either with a home office or a central office that they do not need to commute to daily. Thus, large companies need not lease vast amounts of regional office space - rather, their employees can use a Collective.

Collectives can be in suburban or urban locations - they can be amenities in a mixed-use town center or a transit-oriented development. As long as they are near population centers who use them, they can reduce vehicle miles traveled and provide a place to work and work out.

Maybe places like the Collective will change the way we live and work, or maybe they are simply a real estate market reaction to the change that has already occurred.