I found it absolutely delightful that you should have a conference on villages in the city and reshaping the neighborhood shopping areas a Grassroots do it for yourself approach. It seems to me that offered quite a contrast to the 1960s where I suppose a conference here at decade ago would be talking about government programs from Washington that were going to save the beleaguered City's Mary means gave us an excellent reading this morning on the dangers and problems of working all too closely with the federal agencies with their own agendas the agencies that often fail to respond to local initiatives, but this is about local initiatives. I do hope by the way that we may be able to see in the 1980s some development toward getting the federal government to think more in terms of responding to local initiative than to constantly be setting its own guidelines for its million and one categorical aid program.Which make it so hard for a local community to put together its own program and get any appropriate federal assistance at the time and in the way of wants to have it. I think the time has come for cities to to a survey with a rather cold and objective. I their own condition their strengths and their weaknesses and then to formulate strategies for Recovery strategies that will make them truly competitive. We'll talk more about the competition in a moment or two and I think your conference today symbolizes this turn around and approach more important. You're looking to neighborhoods, which are as I believe. Someone said this morning one where the other the real City within the city where we really live and have our major relationships to our own neighborhoods. And you're looking to be to see what can be done to harness and God old-fashioned American entrepreneurial ISM in the interest of cities. I think that's highly appropriate theme and one do we sort of find ourselves increasingly coming back to in the late 1970s the old American free enterprise idea. Just letting some of those private forces have a To do their work survey after survey by the way now shows that it is small business. That is the greatest job generator in the United States by far job creation by the large corporations is miniscule in comparison small businesses do have a high mortality rate. We all know that but what determines an area's economic growth or its decline is whether it's able to induce the birth and growth of more small Industries. Then it loses through the contraction or the death of smaller businesses and medium-sized ones which occurs at a fairly constant rate across the country vibrant neighborhood shopping areas with all of their potential job spin-offs can be a very important part. I think of that overall economic strategy. What's more the neighborhood shopping areas can Aid and abet the causes of community sustenance of course of historic preservation is we were hearing this morning and which we also saw so well portrayed in the film. They can also exploit today's back to the city or I prefer to say very often stay in the city movement and the compelling National need at this very moment for energy conservation on a rather Grand style or scale indeed is Ray Harris another suggested this morning. The climate in the country is changing pretty rapidly. There's no question that energy limitations will be the overwhelming fact of life for all of us in the next decades. Subtly or brutally energy will alter development residential and Commercial alike across the whole United States and our whole economy is going to be changed quite fundamentally by the change in the energy equation. We will need as Mary mean suggested a very broad definition of what conservation is is rather than preservation and I liked your pickle in the jar figure of speech very much conservation ranges from conservation of neighborhoods and existing businesses to Wild lion Wild Land and farmland preservation at The Fringe given our current national situation. This conservation is no longer a simple question of our aesthetic or are nostalgic preference for old cities and old places are old rural areas. It's becoming a matter of National Security given our present and very alarming dependence on foreign oil. I had a chance to give a speech to the Urban Land Institute in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how I got the invitation but I did anyway, and in the course of which I began to talk about sprawl development versus compact development and I sort of got carried away with myself and finally ended up saying each time. You fellows can sell all the housing you want to and you can build all the commercial areas. You want to particularly for the housing will be the demand. So when you build it in the center city or an established Suburban areas that already have their sewers and it's infill development you're serving the national interest when you build it out there across the open cornfields, you're undermining our national security. Well, there was shuffling in the audience and I later received from Santa Clara California a letter from one man. Who said that only his good childhood rearing prevented him from rising up and walking out on the very minute of the speech and another one from one of the leaders of the organization, which who wrote that some of our members enjoyed some of what you had to say. Now all of these these thoughts we see about the National Future are not going to translate all that easily into neighborhood and Main Street revitalization many of the problems were mentioned this morning, but I think a quick citation including for those who maybe just got in for lunches worthwhile for what does the neighborhood shopping area suffered a day? Well, it's physical layout and stripped form that was appropriate for the streetcar era of its birth and much less. So for the automobile propelled Society the frequent absence of many key stores that are needed to round out a balanced retail offering for people so they can get most of what they need at one place visual blight from ugly facades and garish signs the street litter and broken down curbs and pothole written streets inadequate and uncoordinated parking and many other problems the greatest of course of which is the competition also known as the Suburban Shopping Center. The shopping centers are incredibly effective tough and sometimes mean competitors while neighborhood strips remained under the fractionalized control of many owners shopping centers are usually owned by large and specialized development companies with Nationwide and sometimes International Holdings. They are a multi-billion Dollar business with professionalism to match that kind of dollar flow. The malls are generally highly accessible right off the right of way to the interstate highways which our tax dollars so kindly help build for them. They take advantage of cheap easily acquired sites growing numbers of suburban families within reasonable reach to them, especially as gasoline is remain plentiful who have discretionary incomes and they take advantage of the municipalities who lay out the welcome mat for them. Many are all-weather and closed Affairs offering a comfortable secure environment for Shoppers the ocean of parking lots just outside their door may be ugly but it's a functional Arrangement and of course balanced by many of the fountains and the lovely attempts to have livable environments, which you saw in the film this morning, which are typical of molds around the country today. The molds are expertly managed with full-time staff professionals working on promotion security maintenance and aggressive recruitment of stores and all the rest. Now, it's true as we heard today that older business districts do have very special advantages. They grew up in a way organically. They have more style and tone and texture to them very often. Their design is a mature and pleasant type that you were comfortable with. It's not instantaneous. They do offer the personal service to customers that was mentioned today. They have history and some flavor. There's an immense amount that they can do as a matter of fact my favorite. What they can do is symbolized in this little booklet, which I just received in the mail from a friend in New Jersey a couple of weeks ago. It's the story of what the Italian Village or Little Italy and the Heart of a very dreary and corrupt Town Jersey City New Jersey has been able to accomplish until three and a half or four years ago. The village was disintegrating and dying because of neglect a failed urban renewal and Suburban Exodus. But today a legitimate my Italian isn't good. How do you say risorgimento or how it would be the Italian word for Resurgence is underway and that old area of brick and frame structures. The tools have included special Street Graphics painting distinctive neighborhood murals on vacant storefronts producing bright new storefront signs planning flower boxes, implementing paint up and fix up campaigns and finally this little pamphlet which may be about the most attractive visitors and shoppers guide to any neighborhood in the country. That I've seen and although a little bit of a got stolen for Charles kuralt. I understand in the last few days and some more got used in the Tribune last Saturday. I want to use a few Choice paragraphs from their little pamphlet because it gives you an idea of the flavor. It says here. There are more than a hundred Food Markets specialty stores taverns and restaurants in the downtown Village neighborhood. There are Italian bread Baker. He's using 50 year old Coal Fired brick ovens fresh produce markets Italian butcher shops. Tiny grocery stores live poultry markets pastry shops Dairy and cheese stores. There are also clam bars a fresh Coffee and Tea Store Spice Shop, New Jersey's only one making supply house a hundred and twenty year old hat factory neighborhood taverns restaurants featuring homemade pasta and many more. The prices are claimed to run 20 to 50% that in the Suburban malls around New Jersey The Village attract Shoppers from as far away as Connecticut in South Jersey and it is become New Jersey's Prime tourist attraction. And then about just one place called the oldest pulled it's called the Vernie's poultry Market. It's the oldest village poultry Market there gives the hours that it's open and so on says it's run by Nick Vernie's whose father started the business in 1922 except for service in World War II and a few years. Thereafter live poultry has been Nick's specialty a gentleman with a distinguished looking white beard a helpful and cheerful smile on the skilled hands of a surgeon which I guess is part of his profession Nick offers advice on selecting preparing and cooking the proper bird. The store is decorated with white pansy wallpaper and more than a dozen tall rubber plants poinsettias and other plants lined up on the right side of the store are 24 poultry cages filled with different foul. Often the children of her nieces customers imitate the cackling birds and add to the cacophony of sounds in the back room a large picture window permits customers to watch the skillful hands of Nick Vernie's and his helper prepare and dress the poultry. I assume that involves the Fatal blow to the neck as an old live poultry markets unless otherwise instructed the feet are given as well as the hens fertile eggs a gourmets delight used in soups when time permits Vernie's also sells chicken parts in a freezer. He keeps Frozen raccoon and opossum and for those who prefer to keep the live poultry alive. He sells Ducks pigeons and rabbits as pets along with the proper food to keep them healthy. I like that kind of thing. I think that's the kind of place. I'd like to have around the corner from where I live and maybe we can't all create wonderful Italian Villages, but I think they just terrific to have or maybe even where you can do some instant stuff and invite the son of one of those Italian Baker's to come to your neighborhood. Well, despite all the bootstrap possibilities that this suggests for the your inner city retail areas. I think we might listen more carefully also to the proposal of John sour who was the man you saw driving around for some reason I couldn't figure out Mary why he was driving around in a car all the time this morning well and some God or some pretty green, but he was on his way to the mall of didn't come clear where he was going and why but in any event He suggests that a radical management change has to be made He suggests an effect that these older business areas still a big bag of tricks from the bag of their Suburban competitors no city today copies that kind of new pain management plan exactly. There are a few that are moving in the direction among which is the Old Town Mall in Baltimore now 11 years old with some elephants elements of what might be done. Let's take just a minute or two to review and think about as a possible model what this truly competitive inner city shopping area might do to compete strongly. With its Suburban competitors. The first element would be an overall area Improvement plan. We have seen in fact examples of such plans all over the nation in recent years these include and particular The Mall Street copying the European Pedestrian Mall, attractive landscaping and arrangements for all Street convenient parking many such steps are outlined in the new Minneapolis City plan, which I'm sure all of you have read from cover to cover and therefore I won't bother repeat every day of tell in it, but it does have some very very interesting suggestions along these lines, but those breakthroughs in design and layout may not be enough The Next Step may be listed as a program of mandatory design standards and mandatory participation by all the merchants. Once a reasonable proportion of retailers in an area have expressed an interest in the idea is that the city government would step in and use if necessary its powers of eminent domain or urban renewal or whatever other police Powers. It has to compel the laggard merchants to go along with the overall plan. Now, I'm sure that most of you here will agree with the idea of design standards that can be said to be make sense good design is obviously good business and you'll also agree that signs desperately need control and many neighborhood commercial areas to my mind signs need control all over America, but that's another story but it's the mandatory part that raises people's hackles and I think understandably some nervousness. It seems to be an offence to free enterprise to tell Merchants how they should run their stores with their hours should be in there are other practices. We don't seem however to be as worried when all of the stores which flock into the Suburban malls are told exactly how they must operate and given very strict restrictions. On their hours of operation and their showcases and what they do and so on so maybe it is not so dictatorial after all if a majority of your commercial neighbors are saying in order to make our overall lot improve you have to make some changes as well. Now John sour asserts that mandatory participation can have a very important economic impact their comes. He notes a moment when owners must fish or cut bait buildings are often held by absentee landlords Outsiders or Bank Trust departments that are just coasting along without any real commitment to renovation or improvements in that area their very presence hampers, the more aggressive young retailers in the neighborhood and to be candid about it hampers the whole neighborhood in which people live and would like to see some progress mandatory participation can have several positive effects. The recalcitrant retail owners suddenly have just three Alternatives. They can renovate they can sell or they can lease to someone who will renovate what Only then could be expected to happen is the transfer of ownership from absentee uninterested Property Owners to more aggressive Merchants. Very many of them younger people and the old owners according to the Baltimore experience quite often sell to avoid having to spend money for renovation and to avoid being fined for refusal and the new leadership than streams into this vacuum. Now however broadly accepted it first, it does appear that voluntary efforts are hard to maintain to the degree one would like over a period of years among a group of merchants. So how to organize for long-term cooperation. There are reasonable choices of how to do that that type of organizing it can be done through the existing merchants and Property Owners associations whose efforts would be strengthened by special district assessments or matching city funding of some type or one could create a new management organization to work under contract with the merchants and the city or a private real estate and development company might be negotiated with to do that development job. I tried to suggest that to some of the developers of the Urban Land Institute conference. I don't know whether any of them really thought it was a good idea, but they have very good organization skills and I see no reason even when you've disagreed with some one-on-one issue not to go after him or her and use her skills and another just as pyramid despite. Perhaps its design areas errors is being dragged. King and streaming into Pittsfield, Massachusetts and at least we'll be providing some of the development know how to get the job done a third general area. And by the way, I have a whole notebook for that that firm it is still trying outside of Burlington Vermont to build out in a cornfield and Burlington area can only stand one shopping development and it is a straight-out murder attempt against the city's retail area. So I don't know I'm had what not trying to defend them. Now a third general area must be to get the financing essential to attract new stores or help areas already there to room to renovate and to expand this can involve long-term financing government assistance to firms by way of loan packaging counsel during negotiation and encouraging local banks to cooperate in many cases federal guarantees may be sought to free up the needed banking funds. So I would hope that in a progressive City and a progressive State such as yours the Reliance on the federal small business administration in the like could be heavily supplemented or maybe even replaced by strong. State government and local government initiatives. I remember stories of how the Twin Cities banks used to have rescue squads to go out and do a quick rescue job when any one of your precious homegrown big corporations was hearing the siren song of one of the conglomerates or maybe even about to yield to a takeover attempt. I don't know if that's still being done or not. But maybe that same kind of help has to be lined up for smaller business loans the type of venture capital that it becomes so very very difficult to get in today's economy large companies can generally get the capital they need but the lenders either either don't think it's worth their effort or it's too risky or both to deal with small businesses. Very frequently. This is a way of course that money flows because of that towards capital investment and mergers rather than to product and productivity breakthroughs in jobs a real underlying problem in our economy a strong local consensus that the small neighborhood firms should be assisted by The Business Financial community. Might well create a new and quite different atmosphere and indeed it might be accompanied by this type of technical counsel for the smaller firms and the other types of need of help that they need and that light. I was very encouraged this morning to hear the from John Cochran his vision of how the community Banker can lead and small area retail development getting an improved balance of shops opening the window to Federal Loan guarantees. Hoping to start Merchant cooperation counseling small businesses in a number of marketing and Management areas. These were all activities that he urged the local Banker as the largest he put it of the small businesses among the small businesses to lead with and if all the local banks took such an attitude many of our problems would be a lot easier to solve. I'm sure I was most interested also to hear mayor tappers remarks about the bankers retinas to lend a neighborhood shopping area which lacks a big anchor tenant whose presence guarantees continuity and a flow of patronage into the area these big tenants, especially large department stores, like Sears and pennies and Hudson's that group in this world plus the big food chains and so on are becoming a very difficult problem and City retailing efforts Across the Nation what I noticed when I did my coverage on shopping centers last year is that many of them prefer for a slightly increased security factor or slightly increased anticipated profit to go to one of the Suburban malls. The result of that choice is especially outside smaller cities that they cut away the heart of the retailing in the small City for their slightly increased profit whereupon we the taxpayers have to come in with our dollars in our assistance to take care with Urban renewal plans and taking care of some of the social wreckage that is caused by the corporate decision begins to make me think that some more corporate responsibility carry directly would have where their Investments are going is required in the country. And I think it may be time for some of us who are the consumers of the goods sold by these large corporations to let them know what we think of where they stand on some of the decisions that they are making a significant letter-writing campaign and other types of communications to the seers and to the Hudsons Dayton Hudson's and these and the pennies and these other firms about the stakes that are now they're in terms of where new development goes because they very much determine where the big developers make their effort. I think might be quite helpful. I wouldn't want to suggest anything here in Minneapolis, but I understand you have a firm now known as Dayton Hudson and I look around I see the Duluth area, which is very much hanging in the balance where they technically are in favor of the inner-city thing, but I Whether they're putting the muscle on Sears Roebuck, which they could do. I'm sure because of their other Association and other places. I see East Lansing Michigan which required the downtown business people and the university to put on a full-scale referendum campaign the first successful one in the nation as far as I know and stop that same Corporation from putting in an outlying mole last November and I see Detroit where the grand old date and Hudson store which was well Victor grew and gave me a big talk on this when I went to interview him last year in Vienna. He said that the Dayton the the Hudson store in Detroit had been together with Macy's one of the two stores competing to have the most retail space in America from the 1920s onward and it was absolutely no an unbelievable Mecca of American retailing gradually, they closed off floor after floor after floor of that old building until it's just a few left. Now Dayton Hudson says that they're steady show that it can't be saved and they're getting out Alban that great man who built more Suburban shopping Space than any other developer in the history of America to come in and do a big new plan for downtown Detroit which involves the demolition of this building and Dayton Hudson says our studies show. It's not financially viable to rehabilitate that building and to have let's say several floors of retailing and put offices above it or put residences above it, but they won't give out the details. Well, I think there's some corporate responsibility and it's legitimate to ask questions why that type of decision is being made. Now we come to the last but not least important element of strengthening the neighborhood commercial areas to compete which is said to be common management this of course is an area in which the Suburban Mall positively shines common hours are set there's common promotion for advertising sales and special events. Then an Administration most shopping centers have professional administrators who maintain Financial records and run the day-to-day security and sanitation and clean up and so on of the area, of course they keep out in the Supreme Court is let them buy special decision any uncomfortable people like those who wish to hand out political brochures because this is said to be private property at the same time that the claim is made that this is the new Main Street the lack of such common management including physical deterioration for day-to-day maintenance and greater instances of crime or the heavy price that many of the older business districts have to pay for not having the management supervision and the service that's provided in the malls. I might add the need to to have a development staff like the molds that seeks out and then recruits promising new retail tenants a well-rounded variety of stores may be the most difficult to achieve Factor without such a staff or at least there you may end up also with many boarded-up storefronts because the active recruitment is not underway would coordinated management lead to mold like sterility in the old neighborhoods. I think that is a legitimate question there and there may be some danger. I don't know but if the alternative is to have the local Merchants slowly go out of business and disappear. I'd rather take my chances on common management and then work on some ways to preserve character and individuality within that setting which I think there should be enough space to do. I'm not sure where that whole idea really would work. But it seems to me at least the time has come now viewing what the competition is for some broad number of experiments to be made with a common management theme in the older neighborhood areas and perhaps with some main streets around the country to see if it indeed makes the difference that people like John sour claimed that it would. Now in all of this the positive strong leadership of the city government is essential women glue was eloquent on this point this morning. He knows of course from his own experience and leadership in Minneapolis and Dallas and his activity now in st. Paul he's right in saying that the city has to be Innovative and bold and provide positive leadership to cut red tape to set better design standards including for the streets to provide design Council to store owners to provide One-Stop permanent review procedures. And that was only part of a long list. He provided of what cities can and should do this relates to an important growing idea in America cities are no longer what they were originally just the folks who put out the fires and maintain order on the streets and picked up the garbage and maybe if they were public-spirited to supported the library nor are they what they later become alone. They are not just delivery agents for a broad range of state and federal social programs which indeed they are but they are also In the eyes of many of them and certainly from the point of view of necessity becoming economic Fighters for their populace to gain jobs and investment and in a complementary fashion to encourage design and quality that makes that kind of job expansion possible that expanded role is an important new development of our time City governments must be held to account if they fail to see that full their their full new responsibilities and potentiality in this area business as usual at City Hall will not be sufficient. I gather from your proposed City plan that there is a strong interest in having Minneapolis step up and support services in this area though. I heard a little bit of uncertainty this morning about how much the new plan concentrates on the smaller neighborhood commercial nodes modes of versus the somewhat larger a commercial ones around the city still as I read the plan. I saw a great deal that was quite applicable to the smaller neighborhood areas st. Paul. I might add has already received some national note through the national league of cities. Is for its designation of eight neighborhoods is neighborhood revitalization areas each area with a local development cooperation among other things such strong City leadership facilitates, obtaining Federal loans and grants to complement the local effort. This leadership of the city is entrepreneur should be taken very seriously also by the other City departments which appear to be uncoordinated or having other responsibilities police fire code inspection licensing zoning planning taxation sanitation, because how that job is done by those other City departments makes of course a great deal of a difference how commercial development will be progressing or not progressing and determining whether a certain neighborhood shopping area can make it or can't make it eventually of course a neighborhood is only as strong as its belief in its own self. I think the neighborhood's with that belief and their own potentiality may have a chance to enjoy golden years and the next couple of decades even Very definite destitute ones may be able to join the success list for it's not income alone. That makes a neighborhood click or not click. It's the belief that the neighborhood is a good place to live a safe and a clean place but also a place with character and with soul soul alone is not going to transform a neighborhood, but it will have a lot to do with it. It's maybe the first important stepping stone which these revitalization efforts can start. Thank you again.