Frame the issue/ What is it: This idea has been tried before in __ cities over the past 20 years and hasn’t worked. El Paso has the 8th lowest level of creative class workers, only 30% compared to #1 DC with at 61%.
What do we agree with and want keep
What do we want to remove, reduce harm
What do we want them to include, benefit us
Allies
Stakeholders
Opposition
Goal for next communication:
Goal for the next meeting:
What is the Uptown Downtown Project?
The City of El Paso has selected a few areas downtown and north of downtown for redevelopment. These areas includes the “Montana Corridor” south of our neighborhood. The explicit goal of the project is to attract the Creative Class/ Knowledge Economy to El Paso by building high-income housing in areas where development costs are lowest and most profitable to developers. Their motto is “Jobs follow workers,” and they’re following the out-dated and invalidated ideas of urban planner Richard Florida from his 2002 book “The Rise of the Creative Class.”
Developers wish to build high-income housing in the low-income Montana Corridor instead of in high-income areas in Kern Place, Mission Hills, or the west side because land is inexpensive and relatively plentiful in this high-density area. Richard Florida’s ideas have been implemented in dozens of cities, and he has admitted that it only benefits high-income individuals that move to redeveloped areas. The previous low-income residents get priced out of their neighborhoods and displaced.
How are we getting involved?
Allies
Stakeholders
Opposition
Action 1: Email Stantec our understanding of the project for clarification
Our goal with this action is to frame the issue from the perspective of current residents who will be displaced, instead of from developers who are looking for quick profits. This idea has been tried before in dozens of cities over the past 20 years and hasn’t worked. El Paso has the 8th lowest level of creative class workers (30%) compared to #1 DC (61%).
Richard Florida now recommends investing in local economies by giving people “the tools, the narrative, the conversation about inclusion”.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/creative-class-saving-cities-making-impossible-live
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/06/171257463/cities-must-strategize-to-boost-service-workers-pay
In an interview on NPR 10 years ago, Richard Florida revealed that “places that have large, creative class concentrations have greater levels of inequality. […] We actually looked at the amount of wages and salaries people have left over after housing. When you do that, the creative class, they do better. They have more wages left over after paying for housing. But everybody else does worse.”
“If we want to boost demand in the United States, if we want a real stimulus today that’s lasting, we have to boost the wages of nearly half of our workers who work in the service industry. The way to do that is not to falsely do it by just imposing minimum standards, although that may be worth doing in some big cities, by the way. The way to do that is to make their work more productive, to engage them in innovation, just like we did in our factories. When we began to organize workers in team, organize them in quality circles, engage them in continuous improvement, the factories got more productive and the wages of the workers went up.
INSKEEP: To listen to the workers – that’s what you’re telling me.
FLORIDA: The workers know best how to do their jobs. Whether it’s in a manufacturing facility, you know, figuring out how to put that door panel on a car, or we found in our studies backed by the National Science Foundation a couple of decades ago, even when it came to environmental cleanliness, the workers knew best where to put the drip pans, how to stop the spills, how to keep the emissions in check. Listening to the workers and making them part of the solution, not just in factories, not just in Silicon Valley high-tech work, but in all sorts of work – that’s the path to prosperity in the future.”
Tasks:
Create content to email Stantec
Create website to distribute to allies
Contact Richard Florida via Valentine Sandoval
Action 2: Meet with allies and present a united vision of development to Stantec and the city
Goal for next communication:
Goal for the next meeting: