- Pritzker Fellows
- Former Fellows
- Lavea Brachman
Lavea Brachman
Executive Director & Co-Founder of the Greater Ohio Policy Center
Spring 2016 Pritzker Fellow
Seminar Series: “Can America’s Great Industrial Cities Pull off a Second Act?”
Biography
Lavea Brachman is a nationally recognized expert on urban policy and practice, focusing on the older industrial cities that dominate the Midwest and Northeast of the United States. As executive director and co-founder of the Greater Ohio Policy Center, a nonpartisan urban revitalization think tank and policy advocacy organization located in Columbus, Ohio, she has pioneered revitalization strategies for cities through research, analysis, and advocacy. Brachman has held fellowships and worked with national think tanks, including the Brookings Institution, the German Marshall Fund and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
In addition to writing and speaking widely, Brachman co-authored the national report, “Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities,” which offered innovative solutions to the challenges facing distressed urban cores. Besides field work in these older cities across the United States, Brachman has traveled internationally to understand best practices that lead to positive regeneration, including Manchester, England; the Ruhr Valley, Berlin, and Leipzig in Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Lisbon, Portugal.
After practicing environmental law in Washington, DC, Brachman was as a partner at a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts advising Fortune 500 companies on brownfield property reuse, then served in the Clinton Administration’s Department of Energy developing future land reuse policies for old nuclear sites. Before founding the Greater Ohio Policy Center, Brachman worked at a Chicago non-profit organization focused on sustainability issues in the Great Lakes states. She has also taught urban policy courses as an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Ohio State University.
Brachman grew up in Ohio and is energized by the inspiring local leaders who are championing change in cities and their neighborhoods. When not trying to convince policymakers about the merits of an urban agenda, Brachman likes to hike, run, and explore the outdoors. Her many volunteer activities include serving on the board of a chamber orchestra.
Brachman graduated from Harvard College in 1984, received her law degree from The University of Chicago Law School in 1988, and obtained a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993.
Seminars
“Can America’s Great Industrial Cities Pull off a Second Act?”
America’s older industrial cities literally drove the nation’s and the world’s economies for a century or more with production of cars, steel, and other manufactured goods. These cities, including Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh, and their industries also spawned unprecedented innovation and entrepreneurial activity, built world class cultural and academic institutions, fostered a middle class, acted as the gateways for American assimilation for immigrant worker populations and generated neighborhoods of tightly knit ethnic communities. Since the mid-twentieth century, however, these cities have been in steady decline, with many of them losing over half their population since their peak.
A perfect storm of circumstances - increasing global competition for these industrial sectors, desegregation, and suburbanization - led to their decline. So what is their future? What does “revitalization” mean when it is highly unlikely that these places will ever reach their previous population levels? What happens if some cities don’t rebound, leaving behind massive, blighted areas, thousands of empty and abandoned structures, miles of unused and aging infrastructure, and/or possibly ghettoized areas with high concentrations of poverty and low-income populations?
The politics around the recovery of these places are complicated, with deep roots in our country’s historic aversion to urban areas and the jaundiced perception that they are unhealthy places with high concentrations of immigrants and criminal activity. Some older industrial cities are sputtering back to life and may be on the verge of a comeback. But they can’t all become another Silicon Valley. This seminar will tackle all these questions and, through presentation of on-the-ground cases and practices, also highlight exciting new ideas being tested to inject new life into older neighborhoods, attract new businesses and leverage the millennial generation’s demand for dense, walkable neighborhoods.
This session will lay out how legacy cities developed: the critical industrial sectors that were their economic engines and the natural resources that attracted industry and remain assets today; these cities’ physical and political development; and how and when their decline began. We will discuss these cities as not just economic and social centers for their own residents, but economic nodes for the regions they spawned, and their role in the larger national economy. We will consider whether these cities are too big to fail; or, conversely, if they are too expensive to revitalize, and what happens if regrowth does not happen? How do we position political support for policies that provide for financial intervention? Some have likened the trajectory of these places to Western mining towns that lost their economic “raison d’etre,” and slid quietly into obsolescence. While this may not be the fate of these legacy cities, it can be a Herculean task for local leaders to turn them around.
Most legacy cities spawned their own collection of stellar institutions - museums, universities, and medical centers - that were founded by the local steel or auto magnates or other industrial corporate tycoons who took pride in their city. Today, ironically, the foundations they established continue to be a critical source of funding for local revitalization projects, even as the cities struggle with the closing of factories that were the source of this wealth. In many instances, these institutions remain the strongest assets. Called the “eds and meds,” institutions like the Cleveland Clinic, Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System, the University of Akron, and the Pittsburgh Medical Center, all perform a dual role - acting as anchor institutions for community redevelopment while also generating jobs and spinning off research and. At the same time, vast acres of vacant and abandoned property blight these cities. How are these anchors finding their economic niches; how do cities make difficult decisions about where to invest precious public dollar; and what state policies are needed to expedite foreclosure and address neighborhood blight? The politics around revitalization and choices about what neighborhoods to leave behind, at least in the short term, are often fraught with turf battles. This session will discuss some best practices and models in political processes and decision-making whereby local leaders, surprisingly, have looked at the greater good and allocated funds strategically.
Special Guests: Derek Douglas, UChicago Vice President for Civic Engagement and former Special Advisor to President Obama on Urban Policy Issues & Joel Ratner, President & CEO, Cleveland Neighborhood Progress
It’s common for regions surrounding legacy cities to grow and sprawl into green and open space, in unsustainable ways, while the cities emptied out, leaving behind hundreds of square miles of vacant and abandoned properties, little or no commercial or business sector, extensive aging infrastructure, brownfields and a dwindling tax base to support it all. In some regions, as sprawl extends into exurban areas, the first and second ring suburbs begin to resemble the center cities’ profiles with increasing pockets of poverty, blight and abandonment. How do we redevelop the economic base of the city? What are some promising practices that cities, like Detroit, are using to attract and retain entrepreneurs and to encourage small business growth that are at the heart of growing an economy? What policies are needed to rebalance economic and population growth in these regions? Finally, can political support be developed for policies or practices that favor economic growth in the inner cities and neighborhoods, given that suburban and exurban residents reside in different jurisdictions and often feel little, if any, allegiance to the center city that anchors these regions?
Special Guest: Josh McManus, COO of Rock Ventures
Cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh are showing signs of economic revival. If they recover, they may reinvent themselves as smaller and leaner with a new urban form. These cities, plus even medium-sized ones, such as Syracuse, NY, Dayton, OH and Flint, MI, that are above a certain population threshold arguably still have a critical mass of institutions, businesses, and regional momentum to facilitate their turnaround, even if it takes another 50 years. What are they doing that is working? Are these efforts enough, or are they too isolated to make the revival sustainable? Then, there are the many small, older industrial cities and towns (Scranton, PA; Mansfield, OH) that were also one industry towns, and now have few assets – cultural, major universities or hospitals – and their futures, if any, may be dim, or dependent upon other satellite cities or a larger regional strategy.
Special Guests: Nan Whaley, Mayor of Dayton, OH & Karen Freeman-Wilson, Mayor of Gary, IN
As some cities start to show signs of recovery, the new residents tend to be the highly educated millennials who gravitate toward the urban, walkable lifestyle. Pittsburgh and St. Louis are enjoying a renaissance of sorts as the millennial demographic is attracted to jobs at the local medical centers and universities; or their regions continue to be populated with highly educated, high-income residents, leaving concentrations of poverty in inner city neighborhoods. Even Detroit and Cleveland - which are still deeply distressed - are seeing a resurgence as newly constructed downtown condominiums fill up with these millennials. Yet large areas of extreme poverty and joblessness still dominate. Many neighborhoods in recovering East Coast cities, like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Newark are experiencing similar challenges, even though they are surrounded by housing markets that are generally stronger. This phenomenon raises two critical questions: first, are existing residents being left behind; and second, will these new residents stay when they have families? We will examine a few places that are trying intentionally to create jobs and develop workforce retraining targeted at lower income populations. But is it enough, and are we still creating two different cities in the process?
Special Guest: Errol Louis, Host of NY1’s Inside City Hall & CNN Political Commentator
Infrastructure is a hot topic across the country as Flint, Michigan and other legacy cities’ residents grapple with devastating environmental and health implications of aging sewer and water infrastructure. Similarly, as federal transportation funding streams erode, our aging train tracks, bridges and highways are in dangerous disrepair; and a lack of public transit means workers can’t get to jobs. Yet, these infrastructure changes require billions of investment dollars. Many legacy cities cannot afford to make these essential upgrades even though many are under legal obligation to modernize their sewer and water pipes. Some cities are rethinking the nature of their infrastructure: Cincinnati and Philadelphia are implementing cutting-edge green infrastructure practices. On the transit front, opportunities exist to remake these cities with accessible transit. But who will pay? As these cities have lost population, vast areas of underutilized or unused infrastructure of all types exist: what should happen to it; who should pay for the upgrades; and how quickly can these fixes occur to avoid future public health disasters and to make these cities livable for workers and businesses in a 21st century economy?
Special Guests: Charles Fishman, Fast Company Staffer, former National Reporter for the Washington Post & Author of "The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water and The Wal-Mart Effect" & Marie Kittredge, Executive Director, Opportunity Corridor Partnership
The city of Detroit’s bankruptcy has attracted national media coverage and on-going attention. Surprisingly few other legacy cities have had to undergo this ignominious process; however, many of their budgets are precariously set against a declining tax base and thus decreasing revenues, but with rising legacy costs. One critical way to grow these cities’ populations is to attract immigrants. What cities are doing this successfully, and how are immigrant populations starting to change these cities’ economic growth potential and trajectories? What are the local challenges and barriers for these new residents? At the same time, critical day-to-day services that these cities must get right to make them livable - police, schools, garbage collection and code enforcement - have been deeply cut. These cities are confronted with a chicken and egg problem: even with new residents, can the cities make the necessary improvements in basic city services, including education, in a timely manner to retain them; yet these services are essential to attracting and retaining new residents?
Special Guest: Dan Wallace, Director of State and Local Initiatives, Partnership for a New America
The term “urban” historically has had racial, ethnic, or equity connotations that have stymied coalition-building at both the state and federal levels. Now, with legacy cities depopulating, they can lack the large constituencies needed to advocate on their behalf. With the recent spate of racially-motivated police incidents - many of them occurring in and around these legacy cities - bipartisan support for an urban agenda is as challenging and as critical as ever. At the same time, extremely weak markets in these cities dictate the need for public policies to spur reinvestment. This increased role for government intervention can make urban policies a hard sell. This final session will challenge the myth that a bipartisan urban agenda is impossible. New opportunities exist to articulate how these cities can become new frontiers for entrepreneurship, small business growth and for families climbing out of poverty. We’ll consider ways to be bold in proposing new policies that value our urban cores and neighborhoods and promote transit, walkability, and affordable housing.