We Have to be Careful About Bread
At the front lines of marketing our places, we most often hear something phrases this: “We’ve got great restaurants, retail, and events!”
But what does your city offer people for?free?
Restaurants, retail, and events are all critical to building great cities. What goes unsaid, however, is that outside of small-scale free community events, all three require a not-insignificant amount of disposable income to enjoy. This means that while we proudly proclaim everything people can buy, we exclude the people who can’t buy much of anything.
I haven’t always thought this way, and what woke me up was a conversation about bread.
What’s in a loaf
“We have to be careful about bread,” said Jaime Izurieta of?Storefront Mastery, who also publishes over on?The Vertical Sidewalk. “I love good, artisanal bread. But what about the people in our communities that can’t afford a $10 loaf of bread? What’s in it for them?”
A $7 locally-roasted coffee, a $30 event ticket, or a $100 dinner at a restaurant are all assets…hidden behind paywall.
When the prevailing narrative of our places is?look at all the things you can buy here,?it also tells an unspoken story:?this place is only for people who can afford to enjoy it.
Is that what we mean to say? Hopefully not! But that IS part of what we communicate when the story we tell about our places is focused on buying rather than living.
(Before we go on, a point of clarity: I LOVE small businesses. I understand why things need to cost what they do. I know that we can’t expect world-class everything, either from local government or private businesses, to be given to us at a low-cost or free.)
Splitting the Bill
In predominantly affluent communities, this focus on cost-based assets will largely go unnoticed: people there have money to spend and they want to spend it. But what about people in economically disadvantaged populations??In a city where 45% of people are Asset Limited Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE)? Where the median income is $18,000 a year?
While that loaf of bread might be fantastic, these people hear, “There is nothing for you here.”
Understandably, this causes a profound disconnection from the greater community, an economic 'Us vs. Them’ that often expresses itself in “I love this place!” vs. “I hate this place!” found everywhere from the podium at a City Council meeting to the comment section on Facebook.
This doesn’t explain every conflict in every place of course. But whether we’re tasked with marketing our community or leading it, thinking about the differing experiences lends a critical amount of empathy to answering the question?who are we, really?
At the very least, it might keep us from defaulting to the self-protective and ego-induced reflex of “People that don’t like it here are lazy, grumpy trolls who don’t know any better.”?
A stroll through the park
How do we answer this idea that we might be hiding the best we have to offer behind a paywall?
To our disadvantage, this question about the availability of low-cost or free assets is not commonly confronted within our communities, so we may not know.
But a more frequently asked question can give us a clue: “What do we have for teenagers to do?” While teenagers can make choices about how to spend their time, they typically don’t have huge amounts of disposable income and limited in transportation, qualities they share with folks within less advantaged populations.
While the answers will vary from place to place, I’ll use a common one: “We’ve got great parks!”
That might be true. But before you say it out loud, answer a couple more questions: Do YOU go to th
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ese parks? If so, how often? How easy is it to get to these parks? What other opportunities for activity and enjoyment are in and immediately surrounding the parks?
Grab a lunch and sit in one of these parks for a couple of hours—how many people do you see? If the park is full of people, the community has a no-cost asset the entire community enjoys. You win!
But if it’s empty, we’ve got work to do in activating the park (making the park more than just grass and tree, hosting events, building sport courts and other things that add value) or creating greater accessibility (making it easier for people to get to the park).
If a park doesn’t make people want to be there, they WON’T go there.
If a park isn’t easy to get to, they CAN’T go there.
Have you ever been to back of a Goodwill, the space where they hold all the inventory? There are GIGANTIC mountains of donated items.
Great, right?
"It’s terrible,” a Goodwill employee said during an interview as we talked surrounded by huge piles of donated stuff, “People donate broken vacuums, microwaves, TVs. Stuff they would never imagine using themselves, they give to us. They call it a donation and feel good about it, but it’s really just garbage.”
Free?isn’t good enough, it’s also got to be?good.
So, what do you do?
Honestly, I don’t know. I’m still working through it.
But I do know that it depends.
If you community is full of amazing free and low-cost things like parks and activities, you’ve got the easy answer: weave those things into your story. Make two our of every five posts on the city’s social media page featuring those things. If you’re in this position, it also sounds like there’s funding in place to continue adding and improving them, so don’t let set-it-and-forget-it be good enough.
If the funding is available, but its compulsively dumped into things that “have a direct economic impact”, take yourself and three of your friends to the Church of Placemaking. Start educating those who need it about its power. A downtown full of public art attracts more people who support small businesses while also not charging a fee to enjoy or participate in. A park—one that robust, clean, safe, and accessible—can rival a downtown in becoming a community hub of interaction and activity.
If your community is strapped for cash, think about who isn’t. Events that are both free and reflective of the interests of the community can be funded by a hospital, foundation, or donor. It’s also important to abandon the thinking that great events have to be expensive events. Pay three popular local bands to play for an hour in a park on a Friday, spend the rest in getting the word out, and plant the seed for a free community concert series that is bother homegrown and has the potentially to attract funding in the future.
Want something that is 100% no-cost? Saginaw, Michigan hosts a community bike ride every Monday in the summer that draws 200 people. They meet in the same spot at the same time every Monday, and each week a different rider creates a different route. It’s magical and doesn’t cost a cent.
So, what do you?really?do?
Honestly, I don’t know. But to figure it out, here’s what I’d do:
Kneading the dough
I had the conversation with Jaime probably two years ago, and it’s one I think about constantly. This idea of economic inclusivity is one we need to knead—working it, pushing it, molding it until both the makeup and message of our community says, “This place is for YOU, money or not.”