I’m privileged to be able to go through the Leadership Long Beach experience this year. It’s a nine-month leadership development program for a class of thirty people each year, focused on our great city. Even though it seems like we just started, we have only a few more class meetings and are now hard at work on some very interesting class projects (more about the one I’m part of in another post).
At our most recent class meeting, we had some particularly interesting speakers. I truly enjoyed hearing from former Long Beach Mayor Eunice Sato, and from current Long Beach City Manager Pat West. The combination of their remarks left me feeling optimistic about our city’s future, even if there’s a bit of macroeconomic turmoil at the moment.
Mayor Sato spoke about the initiatives she and the city council took to concentrate investment and redevelopment in Long Beach’s downtown in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Of course, we are all reaping the benefits of those efforts today. I was particularly struck by the wisdom of her observation that public investment helps give the private sector the confidence to invest.
While I agree that downtown is one of Long Beach’s greatest assets, Mayor Sato spoke of the need now to invest in all the parts of Long Beach that are not downtown. Happily, this seems to be just the approach being taken by City Manager Pat West, who spoke of so many projects in so many places I truly lost count. Under his leadership, the city is buying up and, in many cases, redeveloping property along our major thoroughfares, helping to eradicate outdated or inappropriate land uses and integrate key institutions – for example, the Pacific Coast Highway Campus of Long Beach City College, or Poly High School – more fully into the city’s landscape. And I personally thanked Pat for those nice white fences enclosing empty sites. They’re so much better than chain link and embody the “broken window” theory that improving the small details of a city can influence public perception and even public optimism.
It’s possible that our city officials will get a boost from federal urban policy in the next administration. On Wednesday I had the chance to attend a symposium at USC based on the recent Brookings Institution report MetroNation, which argues that U.S. metropolitan areas are the engines of this country’s prosperity. I didn’t know that the country’s 100 largest metro areas contain 65% of the country’s population and generate 75% of the gross domestic product. The “Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana” metro area ranks second (to New York) in the Brookings list. (One of our local challenges is to get Long Beach more often recognized in its own right, not just as a satellite or – eek – suburb of Los Angeles!)
As economic engines, Brookings argues, the nation’s metro areas deserve federal support of investment in innovation, education, redevelopment, and infrastructure. While this represents a shift from past conceptions of the U.S. as an agrarian nation, I agree it’s the right way to look at our future. The team at Brookings seems to be organizing an effective effort to get this message across once our next President is chosen.