he contributes to the lake shore from and the business side of things a business min sitting here is phil johnson he is an urban planner and landscape architect he's done a lot of things in the city that we have seen around town and thirdly we have norman christopher right for him to the first and oh no you guys are number one today he is an executive director in grand valley state university's sustainability initiatives in you three all have questions that you were e mailed correct this meeting but i do think that look for advantage running the economic development organization here we have a unique perspective we have the opportunity to meet with about two hundred twenty five key business leaders each here we survey them in  and i think as a result of that have our finger on the pulse of the economy of economy about as well as anybody as we look ahead and you know from the planning commission perspective as you look ahead for the next ten years i think it's important for us to look back the most recent ten years and try to get a sense for what kind of changes we've seen of late and what kind of intelligence can we learn and what that might mean for us going forward i think sometimes it's tough to find the time to reflect back and so i'm going to try to do that a little bit today very briefly from a very high level but just some of the things we've all of us have probably seen what maybe we haven't stopped to recognize in the last ten years we've seen some pretty major happenings around our community we've seen both herman miller and hayworth completely rebuild and revamp their headquarters will these massive new structure for a word from the south in the town and herman miller reinvest in redesigning their design your in the south and the time as well tumor t employers making a significant change in significant reinvestment to the community and i think that speaks to a little bit to what kind of talent what kind of job opportunities are going to have and over the next few years we've seen two major companies make major investments in a major new industry in the advanced energy storage space with johnson controls and l g tam we have a whole new industry sector that's developing in front of us sometimes not all smoothly as we've seen in the press but certainly the progress is there in an industry that was not even on our radar screen ten years ago and as you as a plenty commission trying to look ahead i think it's important to recognize there are going to be opportunities these unexpected moments where an opportunity presents itself that would not have been and any of our lists even ten short years ago the food industry throughout the region this last ten years has gone through a phenomenal boom just an absolute phenomenal boom from any any aspect of the food industry you pick you've seen substantial growth from the farms blueberry farms to the processing side even on the retail side and the way we consume and go about our food the whole concept of local pro produce little you know we want to know what we eat that's had a major impact also on the food processing industry where we've seen frankly some of the you know the frozen food the processed food that we would buy in the grocery stores that might have been made overseas and a lot of that now is coming back into the u s market and we're seeing a substantial uptick in the jobs we're seeing a substantial uptick in the investment bank they were seeing a substantial uptick in the waste water usage from that industry but we're seeing a positive impact from it that industry frankly we used to talk about being an automotive and office furniture balance from an economy standpoint and today it's really office furniture automotive and food processing that provide the basis of our manufacturing and a more generic level that we've seen it maybe if you get inside the factories will see a more first hand with the automation in the capacity of our manufacturing environment is substantially increased it's impacting the headcount and the ability to grow headcount but that the drive to automate is certainly hitting here in west michigan and the investments that companies are making are driving that further and further north couple things that are maybe not as close to our activities that have like sort of management things that we kind of keep our eye on and as we as i try to prepare for this conference commentary here today thinking outside of the industrial work that we do and just trying to make some observations over the last ten years as you drive a street and you think back i came here nine years ago so i know what was here then and i can think back to what has changed it's almost fifty percent turnover of the downtown retail environment so what that tells me is it's even through a boom and bust recession of late the downtown remains a very vibrant place a very dynamic place and they can absorb some it's they can absorb the last bookstore can exist absorb a loss retailer and quickly become the place for the next one will show us the vacancy rate remains incredibly low relative the retail in the region but the amount of turnover we've experienced in downtown would i think you heard fifty percent turnover you might be alarmed but if you stop and realize that's a pretty healthy situation to be in the same time i think it's safe to say we've seen an awfully poor performance on the retail on the highway side or the old strip retail centers across the area not just within the city limits but around the entire area you know the sort of the initial push behind the revitalization of downtown was really a response to the mall going up on the highway and over the course of time it looks like downtown has has won that battle but it certainly is  a strong indicator of what the future of retail might turn might not for i mean we're seeing semantic changes in the in the retail world internet shopping is becoming more and more the norm and we're seeing some of that impact here and so as you go about planning we'll talk more and more about trends what does that mean from what have in terms of how you allocate the amount of retail zoning the amount of commercial zoning in the community on the positive side talking with the tourism officials this community has become a much stronger tourism destination and it's no longer just the lake and the beach it's the only the beach and downtown the folks who are traveling to the community are recognizing that the downtown is a destination shopping location and if you look at the license plates throughout the summer and even into the fall if you talk with  shopping site is has proven not to be true so that's kind of a look back again if you want to look ahead i think it's it's healthy first to look back and those are some of the high level changes that i've seen in the last ten years that might impact and influence a planning discussion here today  the overarching thing that we've seen change and we've seen it here in our community if you look at the damage there the job data the economic growth data going back to the one nine hundred seventy we had really an unabated growth curve up until about two thousand little wavering in the eighty's very minor but by and large you could set your watch to the growth in this community all the way up until about two thousand we then saw the dot com bust compound by nine eleven we saw a pretty dramatic recession in that period of time and frankly more so in the nation as a whole but a quick recovery and so we had two thousand we came down in the two thousand and one into two thousand and two then we had a nice growth curve back up to two thousand and seven into two thousand and eight dropped again dramatically  in two thousand and nine than the nation in a recovery this last two three years but beginning in late two thousand and nine or two thousand and ten that was a much more dramatic increase than the nation so in that you know what for thirty years have been a steady climb up  hill the last ten years has been a little bit more of a roller coaster than we've been accustomed to and that frankly is what most people feels the currents going forward not locally but that's the national dynamic an economy that is changing much more rapidly frankly on occasions can be big sort of shifts are taking place that we need to be thinking about from a planning perspective certainly the i think a big demographic shift that we're all aware of but i think now is actually going to truly start to happen and that is the baby boom retirement it's been mentioned really about two thousand five is expected to start impacting frankly the stock market declines cause a number of baby movers not to be able to retire and so we're going to see that demographic shift really start to take hold and have a bigger impact than it has over the recent years higher gasoline costs they've been with us now for a while nobody's predicting gas prices to go down anytime soon and so you'll see i believe commuting patterns start start to change the fact is if gas prices go up and you're making ten bucks an hour as an entry level employee somewhere th you can't drive too far and make the economics work so you're going to see i think community patterns start to shift so you're starting to see urban centers pick up some population as a result in part due to high gas pricing i mentioned internet shopping before i mean just look at what's happened to big box retail both nationally and our community it is changing there's no old you're no longer seen the massive massive stores even the cabella is that's gone and grand rapids is a fraction of the size of the stores they built about fifteen years ago so they're scaling that back and recognize that internet sales for a big retailer like a balance is changing the way they build their footprints it will change i think that the amount of retail buildings we're going to need going forward we're seeing some positive things on the job growth side that are resulting of insourcing the cost of manufacturing in southeast asia have climbed at a rate far faster than what we've seen here the drop in the cost of natural gas here is allowed for more industrial to take place here and so those dynamics are bringing some manufacturing opportunities back to the u s in which we've seen some benefits that have that here we've seen projects from china we've seen projects from mexico back brought back and in sourced if you will so there will be i believe manufacturing opportunities going forward and we've seen that the last two years were basically over twelve thousand jobs added in out of what county two out of three have been in the manufacturing sector so we're seeing that resurgence here from a planning perspective when it comes to industry though industry clearly still prefers greenfield over brownfield the way it's all around their process that's all around their equipment they design their layout of their process of their production line and build a cell around that and unless the existing building still matches perfectly or awfully close they're going to go and build a new facility so for an urban environment like holland that has limited available they can industrial land what does that mean going to or were we have to find a way to allow for greater lot coverage to allow our existing industry to expand further before they're pressed to go to another location outside of the city limits so we have to find a way to allow just to gain greater utilization of their property greater concentration of industrial within down that i think certainly are going to impact economic development it may impact the planning committee the fact is the demographics are shifting the fact is we're going to more people retiring than we're going to have entering the workforce we're not going to see the quantitative growth the job growth numbers that we've seen historically it's going to have to focus in on the qualitative side can we get better jobs and we get better projects higher quality not quantity but quality i think is going to be the focus going forward i mentioned earlier commuting patterns in those type of demographic shifts the younger generation looking for different housing products do we offer those kind of amenities do we offer those kind of housing products and certainly we offer that great sense of place that very sense of community i think the other speakers going to talk more to that place making concept and i think we've done that here very well and so continue to build on that hinted at this earlier just to restate it where will the jobs locate if we are seeing this trend of additional job growth of late in investment of late particularly on the investment side where will they locate in making sure we don't plan it away making it too difficult for them to expand to the further sixpence on their property giving them room to grow here making sure as you sort of think through the future land use of the community that we have job centric opportunities in mind that we're not looking for everything to be parts we can everything to be residential in making sure we have that good mix and allow for job growth going forward like i said we've got a great community from a waterfront standpoint from a downtown vibrancy standpoint and in general community that's working together to progress and i think we're going to see some positive things going forward but just want to offer some food for thought from an economic perspective today  we were we were going to we were going to have let you guys kind of discuss some of your ideas with one another and then we were going to let anyone from the audience kind of ask questions and comment on what our three speakers have spoken  is looked at there playing out the next twenty years and also put it through a sustainability lens which is even a little more difficult of a chore so if you allow me it's going to be a bit of a stretch it will be a very fast locomotive in a short i just call it living tomorrow today this is and i didn't have a chance to get rehearsed with randy but actually it was a couple of slides that if we put it both together we both would have said the same thing i've never seen dynamic change rapid change happening like we're seeing it making i get a lot of questions now asking we've been at this for a while to make any impact and so when you look at planning i would just offer the fact that you have to put through a lens now of thinking about what's the long term effectiveness of what you're going to do rather than just counting up how much energy you're saving or how much lead building so you metrics are going to be extremely important for measurement i'm going to throw out a couple with the along the way from the city which i think are very forward leading but to do that requires visionary leadership and so i have the opportunity of kind of challenging a saw what is visionary leadership in this space that if you put a transformational plan together what does that look like but this was my kind of like framework what randy just said and i'll wait and talk to it because two things that are in there are you sort of really made reference to it but i think this mobility issue for west michigan is going to get a lot of attention how are we going to move things if we're in manufacturing going to move  michigan a lot of these thoughts are a combination of business leaders for west michigan summer randy's thoughts but this idea of importance of engineering with manufacturing will continue to lead the way for us higher it is in this space too because now we're asking what are we actually giving his life skills to help these students get jobs in the new economy and i just like to echo his thoughts is michigan ranks twelfth in the nation for the creation of these jobs that no one seems to be able to get their arms around but we know what they are there green and sustainable and you do represent the county land use is important i'll bring some quick comments to him but it's very compact livable communities grand rapids is making huge efforts just in the downtown area alone but i have to tell you i love to sneak out here with my kids and my grandkids and have a cappuccino coffee and sit right out there along those fireplaces and it's just just terrific so you have a great sense of place here too and i enjoy it but when you look at that it's now it's a lot of land use issues in a whole different lens and what we've done before infrastructure a lot of time needs to be spent on the infrastructure side so we expect to build but then we expect everything and we don't necessarily i don't think spend enough time on the transportation things like that i know we're doing some work right now in the city and just the c s o's the combines who are overflow and that's a twenty five year journey to get it to where it is so that's just some thoughts that are there is frameworks on the sustainability planning  it really is transformational it's not transitional anymore and what i mean by that is there is change that's going to happen in this plan and so that puts a lot of discomfort in the planning because everybody said it's good for you but me i got my own sets  and that's very difficult to be very honest but if you choose the right metrics i think the transformation will be happening and i just going to offer a few thoughts to the lens of the city of grand rapids of how they're trying to do that but when you look at the city of grand rapids they do look at through a few full environmental social and economic so if you drill down their plan you will see those three legs with all of their programs activities and initiatives underneath it but what's interesting is they have taken the sustainable energy and i'd like to commend you wall for the effort you've done in your energy planning here but look at how they look at planning it's heating cooling fuel management renewable energy problems you know can see they've stretched that performance purchase agreements all of that get stretch now how does that all come together so that's a subset in their planning another one is engineering asset management how do i add up all these assets that i haven't how much do i need to maintain what i got to build so engineering is now the challenge with looking at and then you see this resiliency planning in that interesting word of any or all of a sudden is what's that well gets nailed down to this whole issue of the promenade of energy food access biosystems transportation  resilient is this plan going to be against that backdrop very interesting so they've they spent time inside resiliency emergency and disaster is planning we take that stuff for granted it's safe to tell you it took me forever to get here why there were more new lakes created today on my way over here on roads that are closed in open farmland than i've ever seen so what this says expect more of the dynamic this in the severity of what we thought today they had a press conference about the club plan for going to happen the last time anybody could ever remember a flood plan for grand rapids but that's the impact of all of this change happening very quickly so that's another piece and then how do you report it and what is collective impact so just a few quick thoughts along the way i won't spend time on the economic side but because it really gave some good thoughts but there's a lot that's a city's doing to encourage entrepreneurial innovation growth of small businesses they have metrics in the can increase business investment by two hundred million dollars just this year what does that mean it means that as the partner with the business community now you have hubs starting entrepreneurial hubs we have a whole new area of social entrepreneurship happening so it isn't just energy it isn't just water it's these hubs now we're students and young entrepreneurs get into the space and say wait a minute i want to start a business oh you want to manufacture something new i want to improve the quality of life so we have our students now in that space creating businesses to improve quality of life that's a service but it's heavy heavy entrepreneurial activity in these hubs and clusters where people access and communicate across these public private academic and business sectors very challenge with long term fiscal sustainability they're putting dollars into vacant blighted land so they have some one hundred fifty million dollars just in the blighted land to get it to the point where it could be used for a different purpose than other than just leaving when it is low impact development kinds of things creating parks all that so now it's looking at your asset and thinking it gee not like i what it used to do can it be rebuilt to what standards  i don't use it can occur gated into a park and stretch it into more of an access that could be used by residents lots of very creative thinking purchasing interesting enough they have a challenge in the air by twenty fifteen increase their purchase of of these green and sustainable products that we all talk about but thirty percent that's a challenge right into the pertinent part is what do i buy and where do i start useful life of properties  that plant so it doesn't have a plan and if you don't work on time you can see how the connection or with the metrics to what that work looks like fidelity and neighborhood districts they got our recent recognition about people who are looking at emerging downtown development districts in grand rapids was recognized for putting that that's the downtown development authority but now importantly putting the neighborhood districts livable mixed density all for the next generation of tomorrow and that's happening so you can see that other pizza comes in there is food access through the urban food market now the coming downtown that's creating all sorts of new opportunities for jobs so economic impacts important but inside or long term stability purchasing to go along with environmental very interesting and i won't spend a lot of time except that the city's on twenty three percent renewable energy today goal of one hundred percent by two thousand and twenty talk about challenges and opportunities if that you know now if you have a goal and people call them in the marketplace big hairy audacious goals there be hag's that's what they're called but you put leaders with a b hagel out there people start to think about well wait a minute how could we do that and so i admire the leadership of the team and now there's a lot of energy producer bill so to speak that goes into the thought process of how to create that so i know they're looking at land use for renewable energy too so it's not only what they buy what could they construct feed into the grid and it's a wonderful conversation of how you can look at all those different opportunities  do spend a lot of time on carbon it's without a doubt they've got goals in there to reduce their emissions they don't have an assessment of the climate inventory and they marry the claim that with the energy so if you know your energy the metrics are all there to convert it to carbon reduction so that's environment and they in europe when they build they are now building to lead standards and you all know what lead standards are i mean g p s you is now i think on our fifteenth or sixteenth project and we keep raising the bar so it's a continuous improvement every single time but now lead e b lead existing building to your point about you can't grow and green space every time to get the use it but now the lead existing building is there and now even the aspects of lead in the for neighborhood development start so this requires maybe some new training and some new opportunities for the planning to say wait a minute this is a new space but it is a new space but what it is it's it's asset utilization but doing it in a way of a sustained life for tomorrow so all that work goes on and of course opens parks which try and one of their metrics is increasing the number of acres of open park space and so they're putting that metric in so that means that there's greater opportunity for the residents to actually use the acreage in france are going to wrap its parks as a partner with the city and trying to accomplish that next stage is in the metrics in there how many of the residents actually now live next to the park so you can see it isn't just drive a car drop it's like oh i got livability inside so all this now stretches into what i call holistic since the thinking so it's all now the systems thinking into the planning cycle and in just a a last because this is really important and i think we have the social side is we understand environment we can get our arms around energy and water and waste but look at the impact areas that they have highlighted in b metric and i won't go through all of them but maybe the questions will come back and we can put pull out a few but what i admire is the fact that they look for the results of social impact into all their areas and give this equal weight in their sustainability plan so homelessness i have been spending with sustainability now in a very unique area of about two thousand people where we're empowering them to come out of poverty using sustainability and we're actually making progress toughest work we've ever seen but the question is the community development block grant money isn't as accessible as it was so the question is how does that work inside so now what we have is partners along with them the  residents that live where they are creating new types of sustainable neighborhoods that will fit in so that is a much different work but in a comes the metrics for what housing choices the way have are they affordable houses mixed density use you know all that kind of opportunity they do spend some more time on the compliances with city ordinances and that stretches into a couple of unique areas meeting code standards for ninety five percent of all the multi family multi family homes that they're up is to get them all to code standards by twenty fifteen so they actually drive a lot of the work by putting very tough metrics out there that are set by who the department  all this is internalized and bought off but then you have to say well if that's the house who's going to build it and then you can see environmentally what are you going to build so there's this natural connection between sustainability of course it has to have economic impact as well  we talked about food i'll drop off a little bit but this this area of civic engagement and community based leadership they actually have partnerships now which they're tracking the in number of partners that are actually  engaging with the city which kind of goes to this next slide it's a little busy but when you look at planning him i do a lot of that with others we just don't have enough money right to do everything and so the question how do you do it where you do it through these folks and i have to tell you everything that gets done now has a partner to attach to it and it's a complementary partner who has the same value system but the partners for you come from public sectors you can partner even with other cities which you probably do but then you've got the private sector whereas business and all this this is just a city issue or you actually having business like what randy just prevented part of this planning process to integrate because they're going to be you know a certainly a benefactor but more importantly could sponsor and provide support along the way but then you've got the service sector which i you know look with the along with the academic sector and you add that up and that's a rich space to look at who are your real corporate citizens here who could help you in this planning process in the cities tried to do that in grand rapids and i can see where now we have that that partnership in place and people or providing in kind services to help get this job done so  and all the city issues and then my kind of like last thought here is it's fascinating to me as i've always thought there was something more than just this triple bottom line sustainability and underneath that are all the new sources of capital and i went to m b a school right then was going to know about financial and i asked that human capital those are only three i don't use as much of those  today what are we using well under those socially or is a whole lot of knowledge if you look at those partners each of them have knowledge and expertise that you could probably use they help in the planing or actually into helping implement some of the projects so that to me is a critical part of the knowledge side of this and then you've got the on the left dan side do this like this three legged color stool but when you move it over one of the interesting pieces is why do we have three or four these partnerships in west michigan around sustainability one in muskegon we have a hollings elan perspective on it we have portage kalamazoo we can see why don't we just have one and i offer the fact that the reason why is place you understand this and you mentioned this place base which could be a nice lead into the following discussion is your culture is different but you have the understanding of what sustainability of cultural capital and community capital now provide a new leg for sustainability because your leg is built on your community and your culture so you understand the other three but now to make that chair really strong i think there's lots of capital work with so thanks for the thoughts me next we have bill johnson here he is a very well recognized in the hauen area landscape architect an urban planner he has contributed to many local municipalities nature of the whole plan the complete plan and tumbles one to choose in the future to take it's to make and what do i say about these things i'm really talking about the results of all this in the nature of the place what kind of place results from all of these dynamics that are swiftly changing and as you point out rapidly changing and disruptively in place so what kind of plans do you make that become more agile and more able to accommodate difficulty of fixing policy and yet everything flexibility what kind of plans are those and i think when you begin to talk about a master plan the very term makes me nervous because there isn't much that masters our futures and i spent a good deal of my career trying to figure out what kind of policy plans are most effective giving one time and durrance and capability to deal with unforeseen events in fact one cannot predict very far ahead just what kind are going to go into buildings and and what their shapes a go to be so planning the future on the basis of building masses short term stuff and you have a size long term thinking it's just crucial that our our dimension of thinking is long term and short term at the same time at the same time and that's a toughie but what i thought i would do in this array of so many things that are necessary consider it in figuring out what this community of endeavor is going to be like i picked out a couple  very humble things that seem to be orderly and things that we take for granted and with think we know how to do it and those two things particularly are the term linkages and the term place places linkages in places in my work is more detailed as general and then you guys  those two items are probably the most powerful modest little pieces of endeavor that you can imagine and i'd like to emphasize that today and talk about the qualities quickly has to be quick  are inherent in what you guys were talking about the process is important i think the process is as important as the outcome how you get to an outcome is as important to go back and correct it as is what it is you come to conclusion so let me do that but first i want to say quickly that i admire those of you who are trying to prepare and update to the man and to the master plan i know how tough it is  and your your efforts to do there are so important you've done a great job here in holland look around you and you see that a lot of things have been right here vibrant business creative investment going on creative reinvestment by those who have prospered and the leadership that is difficult to really describe but always the neighborhood strengths the neighborhoods being strong have made this downtown to mendis it's the neighborhoods that surround the downtown that are as identifiable with downtown as downtown so  inherently central city hall and has been fortunate to have to be almost surrounded by natural and cultural systems river  and the mix of ages here i particularly like the way in which the ages mix i was as you know helping with downtown over the past twenty five years and i finally came here to live because you know that's testimony to what what it's like to be here this community is probably one of the finest walkable communities in the country i know it because i've been to a lot of places and i've worked in a lot of places and i see the outcome being here as being one that has enormous worth and it's the kind of outcome that you see in this town and brings a business at times and spurs on creativity and new thinking about new kind of jobs etc i see it happening right here in the downtown area and the manner in which holland has attended to complete streets rather than just traffic carriers the trucks and the stuff that has to move on them that's taken granted but they also are becoming part of a park system and they ought to it's one of the great open spaces of our communities twenty to thirty percent of our cities are streets what an open space system made to order all we have to do is as carefully and modestly at times just take advantage of them as places as well as conduits it's really a very important of them because they're so  around us they're part of our who media environment so one of the things i'd like to emphasize as i go to linkages in places and process is the nature of what i  call this is been developing in my work over the past thirty years or so framework thinking even as you work with detail in physical planning of a city or community or campus  figure out the framework the system of support both quality and quantity that makes building possible that then in my mind then and this is been  linkages drainage systems that align with these linkages you begin to develop a framework within which many things can happen and you don't need to decide you can always add flesh to those bones so i call it framework thinking we've applied it here and in the holland probably paralleled to good dutch thinking which linkage i'm talking about linkages that are walking biking automobiles parking those are all linkages and  particularly and this is sort of a principle and in my mind anytime you can align a natural system a walkway system a parking system together so that the same budgets w combine to to bring effect effectiveness to the investment those things begin to align beautifully the parking lot does not have to be not glee place and good example of this it's rather simple one you you know it well it's the farmer's market noticed as you go into the farmer's market there are two parking lots on the other   we thought well let's take those thirty trees norm no more purchased just those there and let's bring them together into a little so called urban woodland and put two open pieces of parking on both sides we then have a new place called a market place by those that clump of trees and to either side or perking areas without trees that can be plowed easily and one can be used for an event and the other for parking or vice versa we have flexibility experience you know a simple little thing but just by thinking about downtown greenways green street as i've mentioned before this is a movement across the country the highway departments are starting to call them of complete streets as they should should have done that fifty years ago but beginning to do the right thing in that kind of combination of thinking context oriented thinking safe crossings  we have these wonderful streets are full of traffic and sometimes we take a left and i hands to cross the holland has not done in my mind as well as they could have with that little detail that makes life more satisfying in a downturn i stood last week at the corner of eighth street and u s thirty one trying to figure out how to cross i had twenty six seconds to make it to the middle and i did what i got there i didn't know where i was there was nothing there told me i was anywhere there are no curves i just want that in my safe place so you know it's a detail with those little of a street it can be something that has a name to it it can be an art way with a theme to it pavlos has done that and in a way coming down all the pieces of sculpture i really applaud that kind of thing it has an identity as a street as a simple pathway but danica learning can be part of a theme of a of a walkway system as a street the streets are planted beautifully here in holland whoever's been doing tree placement in some of the new newer streets that are being done specially downtown  seventh for approval in particular really been doing a nice job of choosing the right trees and the right mix of trees and as you know the more that we can vary the species the better and therefore there can be a kind of identity on each tree that becomes a kind of urban botanical garden and any time that you can put two or three things together in one place in terms of an event or an identity or a function or utility we gain combining investments makes all kinds of s e i'm a proponent of naming the places we use if possible and sometimes they happen automatically because of the investor you know of that work but  once in a while you have to kind of invent a name to do that more because it brings meaning to a place and when you accumulate the many many different places that we can do that you can see what i mean  the second one is place huge item and yet we wear out on it quickly as soon as we make a place really we go to other things and don't do too much to bring out that identity of a place and we're talking about an intersection as a simple place or a small neighborhood shopping or restaurant place i'm thinking about this the south well as south korea really is that that place is as important as a piece of downtown and they're working at trying to bring together a little more identity signage that helps that's what i mean about places they can be modest and simple for instance six and call it there's a little park a big stone not little things that dribble away down the curb when the rain comes and you lose your wall but they're big and hefty they'll last a long time that's a very good example of a place that ought to have a name and it does a distinctive identities focused in terms of bringing out their meaning their their function taking more advantage of historic recall history means a lot to people when you you probably don't know this but the central campus  area was that the eight hundred fifty nine illustration of the diagonal university of michigan campus was full of condos and it was gated it was fancy faculty lived with the cattle maybe as they should have dives and the academic buildings were all in that big field of sheep and  of people back students and because of that there were these various trails it just so happened that in thinking about the future  university we took those we selected certain of those trails and extended them in theory into the community they were five and then lead to five precincts of the university of michigan campus just in one nine hundred sixty in the center of each precinct was intended to be a place and then beyond that place would be a parking because it did one thing that was magic it set a very clear set of intentions without detail and it left it left a trail in a framework of thinking that allowed buildings to come forth and it meant a lot as a as a pattern because if you know of the university of michigan  library was built over one of those linkages the alumni center has a hole in it through it that linkage goes the university of michigan law center was the expansion was built underground because the upper part of the plaza was the center of the precinct just like that little funny diagram so it means a lot to be able to use place making strategy in a linkage system to begin to form a very powerful beginnings of a place and i distributed this little diagram mainly to have you know that when you begin to identify key linkages in a city plan and they begin to show up because they're distinctive and marvelous and wonderful and they show up on maps and then combine that with the dozens of different size places along those linkages you begin to have a head start on a community that is durable and sustainable because it comes out of the out of the place want to emphasize that it's a point saying that linkage and place are pretty simple terms we take them for granted too much but if you work at it they become marvelous and holland is marvelous to me to a great deal because of the way in which you can move around by bike and walking walkable city galore and automobile and enjoy it and go through a number of places that begin to show up in a very special thirdly i want to emphasize process because i believe in holland over the past twenty five years or more i suppose i know what in for twenty five years i know that before that there was more beginning happening the way we were the manner in which we talked about the future the the way in which ideas were open notions  prescriptions but more questions the inclusiveness of the process there were there have been probably twenty different at that i'm aware of along the way of key moments of company where there is a community and talking about ideas and one of the important parts of that process that it was interesting i can't tell you how advantages it is if you're on a quest for a plan to take ideas about that plan into an early format and i say early in the sense that you want to get a feedback occurring as to where that's going to go and so you you do it early you get people in and you get some early warnings on left or right and you share those ideas it's amazing what happens when you allow ideas to be an open forum ideas come from the darndest places and from the darn people it's not people like us at the ideas at all it's it's somebody who just showed up at times and the skill of the idea of building that of being able to identify deal when you're here because there are ideas everywhere and there are often in front of you there often times when you're walking on it and don't see it and that the ability to bring idea out that somebody has they'll never forget it when they've come in they've watched the the actual evolution of a plan before their very eyes that's powerful stuff and it makes me asked question is as we've been talking about here and my own sense of what when we talk about sustainability how about including how do we make plans plans sustainable how do we keep them from getting out of date too fast and how do we keep from putting so much work in them that we're under we were afraid to change them because it's too it's taken as a year of art work we can change that how do you how do you do this my answer has been this framework thinking if you notice that most of the things that if you've been around and hearing us talk in a planning way most of the things we used to express ideas are purposefully not out of the computer we keep computer language a way  that i think you know what when i think about some of the times that we've presented to folks in a gathering like this where you're from the neighborhood in the tables out there we produce the plans are talking about that night they see them before they leave it's a talked about and when it's that immediate and that touchable and they go away and the next time you hear about the plan they see their idea and they saw it the night it was talked about that is powerful stuff and i think it leads to a sustainable planet that we wish we could have more of so i'm going to stop there and not to let that go this is very brief and you know there's no way in the short period of time to fully express myself on these things but it's pretty powerful notice in  you can't quite find downtown because it's in the midst of many other functions that are close to it and when you think about the water that goes through the city the dead center is to not only downtown but the township as well we wish beyond description how much we'd like to see township and city be more and in the hospital situation if you were to pick up and this is true for if you were less so in my early years were more sort of if you picked up one piece of a hospital you pick up the whole place because that is a concept that ought to be part of every move we make that one thing is part of three other things and that lateral input from things you haven't thought about is part of second the nature of plans and how how our plans that we build can be more urgent and allow us to think long term enough specificity that it means something i mean long term i don't know how to put a year or two but far beyond the norm and the creative really flexible to move in turn that for instance we talk about vision it's an important part of our whole way of working to be visionary at least to begin with and  vision can be revisited the vision isn't always absolutely fixed it can be refined as you work in the trenches and begin to adjust some of the the the pieces of that vision might need adjustment i love the idea of details informing the long haul the long haul and from the details how can we do a better job of these kind of plans  simply is you have all these initiatives and you've seen it from the state level now it's they've dashboards and dashboards it very easy for people to look at because they've got color attached to it so you could take this structural plan that you put in place and yes it complex and it's it's a life cycle analysis and it's connected but how do you stand back over and say hey is all that stuff working and what a one way to do it is just put color rather green is go yellow is in progress reds wait a minute it's not working and that's the way plants you can see the reports up on people's websites a very simple dashboard so in the case of light i just speak from the city grand rapids they've got right now out of all the things they're doing they put a transparent reporting process up there that the public because the public needs to be educated not just the planet so the businesses everybody so right now because i know that question was going to come up it's about sixty five to sixty eight percent are in progress twenty five percent are on target in pain or so they are not a percent so those get updated by the department heads so it isn't somebody just sitting back and saying one of what that it no these are all fit from the bottom up through the apartments who measure their own impacts and then it's collected imposed and it's done on a continual basis so you get to your point of view you can always look and say gee are we do we need to go back and refresh that is that connected or linked as you were to say but that's one way to keep it open transparent allows everybody input but it also gives you quick snapshots and then if you take it one step further you can say well gee if i'm running a city then took this job nine years ago and we host a number of companies to try to court them and get them to come to the market and always surprise me i bet it's greater than fifty percent of the companies will ask sort of what's the value system of the community what are we trying to accomplish and they don't want to know about our lakes and are they just want to conceptually what are we trying to accomplish and if you if you go to most community development websites they're going to say you want to be the best place to live work and play everybody sort of the same  me the question sort of speaks to who are we who we want to be and do our plans sort of reflect that and i think bill to your question and i'm by no means a planner allow me to try to everybody is but there are layers of plans i whatever but you drive through town and you generally get a sense that this is a place where the plan is to provide if not the most but aspire to be the best and i think that sort of is a bit of a long term very generic a long term plan for the community we're not we've never been one that's sort of raced we're not phoenix just looking to build and build and build and build and build and by and large we've built high quality sometimes taking our time i think for example right now we were not building as much as we could and should given the for one key advantage we have in that whole demographic shift is the fact that we still have a growing population base if you get in the demographics it's slow to touch but we still see we're still growing and we're still having young people come through the system if you look at other parts of michigan where they've seen actual population decline and i think at a base economic level population makes the world go round and this is an area that we still have a position of strength and it's a matter of not necessarily having attract all that young talent it's how do we retain that young talent so if we if we can get that dynamic that we can retain that will be ahead of the curve certainly in the middle class the question is do we have the housing stock that is of interest to them if you  chicago you get to the urban centers you see a dynamic urban place you see a dynamic sort of concentration of young people that's where they want to go they want that urban experience i think it's part of being young you want to get out to want to you want to go see the world but i would argue right if you look at the that's the housing that's converted to rental necessarily but you look at the the baker loss project the scrappier loss project the upper floors of a street that sort of sort of lost style apartments that is high demand right now and it's going to mark in these built a fair amount of this service involve the subprime us in i'm going after this that market is hot in that that population base is starting to grow and we're not really competing for we don't have enough of that product there's waiting around town there are many buildings like that in the cost of building new and trying to get that money back on the rents is a real difficult one to get a spreadsheet to work but the fact is right now we don't we don't have enough in my view of the product for that  right answer but there is and give you one aspect one of the ways that i've seen because i work with a lot of students the whole idea is to keep the old west michigan big goal one of the ways is through the social media and i've seen this actually start to have great effect the great effect is now when you go up and look at city websites they're driven by social media so they're driven absolute facebook twitter and spot now i can relate that there are students now who go to these meetings and post this stuff when it's done because if you want to get a message out you could correctly whether right or wrong pretty different here but when you want to get a message out you want to receive it fairly quick and spread it right ok so if you want to really so what fine i will safely walk into that space and say that's not me i do not have that capacity but there is willing to do that for me take it one step further in all the filming and everything that's all done by students they're now doing videos think about the operative using studious of students through videos of all the good things that you just mentioned post them up on the website shoot them through you tube and all of a sudden the attraction is coming and people are going to say what a great place because you are greatly resourceful terrific work at that great stewards in the list goes on and that's how these plans are built they're built on the keep not the capabilities but the values and the competencies which you have and so how do you spread that show people what you long time and and so it's been really interesting to hear your ideas broad concepts broad goals but having flexibility when i did our last master plan update i'm sure we didn't have a sustainability committee and it wasn't merely the discussion of sustainability and i guess i'm kind of directing this to fail to say all right you've been asked i assume by city council to update the master plan now now you have a sustainability committee and we're sitting here and we have all of these sustainability issues and goals and metrics and dashboards and all of that how much of that field do you think is to be incorporated into a master plan those kinds of things or is there a master plan that basically goes along with with what bill has seen as master planning that the law is flexibility  there's the sustainability plan i just i just don't know how we're going to integrate there to sort of i don't know how much in great an issue of grand rapids how much of the sustainability goals and issues never they are part of the master y so their window to implement is five years so what they're doing is going to take of these projects and all these activities putting it through a fairly difficult transformation investment plan and fiddle a broader but when you look at twenty or thirty years in a master play and the question is how many of us can really look at the effect of judgment of what that you can provide a framework or a future vision of what you'd like but how does it really get done so they made this shift so right now most of their activities is done in the shorter window with very good financial scrutiny for the projects they get implemented with pretty good looking goals that they're trying to target and mix by twenty fifteen to twenty twenty so that's a mystery be just a little bit so there's definitely a little bit more on the shorter window because of the dynamic this and the change but it doesn't say you don't have a larger integral is that it tries to  industrial over here and commercial over there something the state requires of us and we do occasionally so we don't consume them and so that's really kind of what we're going through that process right now i think the thing that you're talking about is a much bigger project  and needs to be addressed much more outside of planning commission if you're well what we're currently doing this is things are going to touch on it but i think that what we're doing is a little more pragmatic at this point in time not to say that we can't run you want to make one comment product housing product because i'm also on with brooke on the neighborhood advisory committee one of the things that we've found in our developed is that you can't turn something into something it's not so you can't necessarily go out and make that empty space something what we do have in this town that once we do have a lot of single family residential that be very desirable by owners of more renters within that twenty thirty something age group if we could if we could develop that product how how do other communities or how do we do that bill i know we talk a lot about the downtown you get past ten twelve it's different it's different where i live i've got people on my block i said you want to meet the j p s they have no develop that sort of product in the city one of the things that holland has so much of is pride in their neighborhoods i don't and i looked at the map and i pulled out my own mapping included actions six different circuits each one three miles to form a thank each stemming from one place and each having a different theme from history to natural systems to urban fun there's nobody knows knows terms because they don't generally don't think in those terms but i thought that was remarkable and some of them go through the neighborhoods when it be interesting if the neighborhoods a saw the walkability of their neighborhood which is already good already but  with points along the way note and a certain energy changer intersection given a little more importance because of certain unique conditions that at that intersection that's what brings a community out of the anonymous becomes pacific i think that one thing would be very important going back to your question about the pragmatism of master plan that you're talking about land use colors and i and i am not sure about this but i don't know why one could not place in a master plan a set of outcome hopes outcome intentions it's called outcome intentions that many of the things you're after are systemic natural systems ground water recharge drainage systems and you already have some streams going here and there throughout the neighborhoods already some of them open the surface some of them buried the systemic qualities year after  don't combine very well with the business of building the business of building is parcel but parcel and if you've noticed i'm sure you have when you have a project an architect instead of engineers or working on a project you notice that the end of the world is the edge of that sheet that's the property and yet the dyers the long term desires is more systemic than that how can a developer or a builder of a certain parcel be made aware that there's again either implied or maybe award awarded in thinking systemic as they work through their parcel i remember recently a project where a stream corridor or which had been plumed for logging for one actually did occur not necessarily always the way we looked at it but i'm really wondering if working to pass the buck or create more work for ourselves but i'm wondering if it's time for a twenty forty document or a twenty fifty document  overlap but encourage or reveal opportunities beyond ones normal site marvet i mentioned before that the population of this area is generally continued to grow if w the advantage from a demographic same point on the retaining the youth and hopefully maintaining that edge city population in correctly so if i'm wrong but it's been relatively flat hasn't really fallen back with been relatively quiet for quite some time in one in really makes the only way to grow the population is through children and finding a way for the housing stock you're right we have a lot of products in that single family home sort of piece and there's that product sort of between the street sixteenth street that is getting tighter in the question is is that a product of interest to modern buyers or moderate renters there's a lot of folks who choose to run renters by choice but is that housing stock that may or may not have a garage more than likely detached garage when we're continuing to see the demand for the traditional two bedroom two car garage three bedroom house i think they're going to be at upgrade not a two year plan it's a ten year plan twenty years i think in their case but they went through a series of programs where they upgraded some of the single family homes they also had aggressive buy to build one and you come back with some larger homes that can retain the children keep them into the school system which is another area that needs to be the most of the population within a school so it will be different we don't have a lot of additional baker last type of develop projects on the rising but  making sure that single family home product that we are offering within the city limits matches what populations demand and i think that needs to be looked at birds i'm not a lifelong resident of holland sixty eight years old this is calculating i've lived more than fifty years of those sixty eight years of major urban centers like chicago and boston and washington d so when it came to holland it was kind of unique for me in my life experience and why we're not a small town like a few thousand people it felt to be like a small town kind of category and i began thinking about you know a national issue of the preservation of a palette in small towns and where does it go wrong and where does it seem to go right and how and seems to have done so well on that and i've been thinking about that one of the ways downtown sort of fall off small towns begin to fall off the map is that the downtown becomes less vital and how it sort of sees that potential problem maybe it was real when they started wasn't here then and over the last say twenty years spent hundreds of ns of dollars and public and private partnerships say making our downtown vibrant as important to us keeping it from sliding off into a small town disintegration is important  secondly school systems you know when the school system goes downhill the town does too and i've been a schoolteacher for part of my time here in holland and i've been just so impressed that over the last ten or twenty years the citizens of million dollars or more a community plan to keep those schools vibrant public safety is always a problem of if it isn't taken care of towns can go downhill and we've gone through recently studies about our public safety department we're spending an unusually large percentage of our budget on public safety and we've decided to keep doing that because that's important keeps time going again over ten or twenty years that's one hundred million dollars plus or minus on public safety so now a lot of what i'm interested in right now and what i hear some of you talk about is neighborhoods that seemed to me to be another key point we're going to keep the housing stock in and they were hoods vibrant or let those things slip away and if the scale maters it sounds to be a late solving their problem requires three steps decades hundreds of millions of dollars in a community responsibility it's not just a whole bunch of homeowners on their own but a community responsibility and we building toward that now in terms of plans and that kind of scale with community responsibility for all of our neighborhoods  housing are we good or is that part of what we're talking about in this land use plan and neighborhood development plans that i'm hearing about energy retrofit plants that i'm hearing about is seems to be a lot of talk about that  we could become a big focus like these other things are a community focus on an individual landholder each one on its own i can't speak for technically because i don't know the situation in terms of a master plan my guess is that there's a great deal of desire to do what you're talking about to keep them whole and beautiful and effective as a place to live but i guess i do know that there are some things that have been very impressive to me  watch some of the neighborhoods seek a new kind of center of the school isn't the same as it used to be the center of so there's this searching for and rummaging around or how or how does this neighborhood that doesn't have a definite edges but as a sense of center how can that be expressed in the can it be a gathering place how do we do that they're asking those questions until i don't know if you want to add anything here about the neighborhoods but there are so active in trying to do some of these  things i guess the only thing i'd say you know we're about to step this planning process into a look at it at some sort of target areas focus groups looking at different elements of of the community one of those will be housing in neighborhoods i guess my hope is that there's already a neighborhood improvement committee there are already several sections of the plan that deal with neighborhoods in the community that are probably two or three years beyond that five year window of planning that w like to be play and up to date i'm hoping that part of this process brings brings those ideas together in those different we've got several different forms that are dealing with neighborhood kinds of issues in the home energy retrofit that piece the district heating piece they're all gorilla and lo and behold as as they talked here's a simple thing about what i was trying to say earlier they talked about walkability and  these neighborhoods have that in spades and and but the hospital suggested that maybe some of those walk systems around the hospital in the neighborhoods could become wellness well yes and be stations where you could walk by practice and by discipline begin to check off your walking frequency and get well again either as a beautiful way of a hospital to join with a neighborhood that they're next to and maybe interrupting you don't to come together on a common ground that's pretty healthy stuff it seems to me on maybe i just haven't pulled that out of the betrayals i've seen so far marvins talking about updating the plans in the colors and making sure everything's right so we're legally ok so state ability has talked about for the last couple years energy but at the same time in conversations we've talked about how can you make a community more sustainable and what elements are there i think those elements have much more what bill is talking about about these intentions you know what's the intention of undertaking this and there is one intention and that's to be legal and to get the places right so that you can continue the development that needs to go on t growth but at the same time there's another intention which is how much do we want to make our community like something and they have to be very broad in nature and they have to fit the framework because the framework is here we've got the lake we've got back at our river we've got our railroad tracks we've got a major chord or of traffic i'm not sure if if if the people that are expecting you to do this plan which i'm assuming is city council and the mayor and the city staff have been able to or if you've articulated with them what those intentions are and that may be a very important starting point to know what you want to do or how broad this activity is going to be i think it's a no no but maybe it'll come clear with some of the focus groups and other questions from anyone in the audience s the next couple of months we will be holding meetings on on topical but we're following focus groups those will include they'll be a session retail development will be a session on housing in neighborhoods as i mentioned they'll be a session on moving about we will be inviting very specific people to those meetings it's open to anybody that would like to attend and we'll have a schedule put on the website and we'll probably get a press release out on it but we'll have specific people invited to those i think paul you know in response to your comment part of that is to kind of winnow out what those intentions are what the objectives are in our downtown work we've we've called them themes and if you go into our downtown plan a number of themes that carry through and sort of define the expectations of where we're trying to head with things i think those kinds of things will come out a little more specifically than they have in the past certainly if you go back to the ninety two plan there were  some pretty specific goals in that plan but it didn't necessarily carry through and it's you know that that piece is out of date and we need to freshen all of that up so we're going to go through this process on those kinds of topics and then we're going to get out and work with the with the community and trying to get their input will begin to draft a plan and draft some of those beginning pieces which are the sort of the vision i think of what we're trying to do as a framework i'm not  exactly as bill has but along those lines that it needs to be something that can absorb changes over time and set a direction and define what the themes of what the community wants to be and we're just at the beginning of that process with the planning commission  at the same time we're still under some pressure to get a plan done partially for the legal reasons that the u n margin of alluded to just so that we've got a plan that is comfortable for for us moving forward and brings those kinds of issues all to one place so so it's a process where at the beginning of the process i really want to thank the three guests for your participation the there's a ton of things i've written down and you know i think it just gives us a lot of things to think about as we move into the the various groups thank you very much