Parks as economic development

Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class lays out a great case for how to let a city grow so that it best attracts creative people. These folks, for the first time in history, are the primary drivers of economic growth, and if Minneapolis, and Minnesota, want to grow economically, then tax cuts won't cut it, but bringing in and keeping creative people will do the trick. There are many areas on which to compete, but one area where Minneapolis is very strong, but our current Park Board representatives are working hard to weaken us, is our park system. Florida writes on pages 180 and 181 “Many outdoor pursuits favored by the Creative Class are adventure-oriented. The essence of climbing, hiking and a host of similar sports is to enter some other world, away from your workaday world, and explore it and experience it while performing a task that is often challenging in itself. In short, the idea is to have an adventure. Game sports like baseball are fundamentally different. Baseball also offers an other-world to enter, whether you are playing or watching, but the other world in this case is a highly structured one: four bases ninety feet apart, three strikes and you're our…Adventure sports are you against the task; you against nature; you against your own physical and mental limits.” Pittsburgh, where team sports are everything, as exhibited by two new publicly financed stadiums and native sons littering the NFL, ranks number 90 on the creative index. Minneapolis/St. Paul currently ranks number 10. We have a growing economy, and Pittsburgh is in trouble. Truth is, our parks have provided people with extraordinary opportunity. Nicollet Island is every child's Tom Sawyer fantasy. The lakes allow us to test Mother Nature, there are bike trails and a Stone Arch Bridge to rock climb. Yet our current Park Board majority focuses on athletic facilities. Well, that's the kind of thinking that will kill us economically. When our Park Board spends money on baseball fields at Neiman instead of liability insurance on the Stone Arch Bridge for climbers, they fail the Minnesota economy. When we surrender our wild island to private businesses for the creation of an artificial turf football stadium at the expense of our imagination, we fail the Minnesota economy. The Park Board needs to step up and recognize its role in the economy and understand that it has done everything wrong for the past four years.

Comments

[Kai Hagen]

Good piece, Jeremy.