Most of our work is energizing. It’s great to see communities come together, put aside their differences and roll up their sleeves and get to work to solving their problems. However, every so often we come up against obstacles. Don’t get me wrong, EVERY community has obstacles. There are nay-sayers, doubt, turf wars and a host of other obstacles every community has to go through. Occasionally though, we come across bigger obstacles than others.

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On November 8, a coalition of statewide and regional partners, including the Michigan Main Street Center @ MSHDA, issued a statewide challenge to residents in the state of Michigan. The campaign, called the “ShopMIDowntown Holiday Challenge,” calls on Michiganders to spend seventy-five percent of their holiday shopping budgets in Michigan’s downtowns and Michigan Main Street^SM districts.

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Ask any Main Street Manager about their day and it will likely be filled with activities ranging from grant writing and promotion activities to mediator between two arguing downtown merchants. While all of these activities add excitement and variety to the day, it is important to know that many of these situations cannot by learned from reading a textbook. Each day brings a new challenge with mounting government cutbacks, struggling businesses, and a society with increasingly less time to volunteer...

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So, despite no longer being a staff member of the Michigan Main Street Center @ MSHDA, I find myself spending my morning writing a Main Street blog… As many of you know, I accepted the position of Executive Director of the Community Economic Development Association of Michigan (CEDAM) in early August. CEDAM is a state-wide trade association dedicated to helping organizations doing community-based economic development across the state through advocacy, resources and training...

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Community planners have long recognized that great places do not happen by accident, but in fact are carefully orchestrated and designed to include some common elements that have universal appeal. Interestingly, the most compelling of these are almost always present in what is considered a “traditional” downtown, a city center that has organically evolved over many generations, and likely was established at a time when compact, human-scale development, mixed uses, and independently owned businesses were the norm...

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This week's we are fortunate to have Lansing's Old Town Commercial Association Executive Director Brittney Hoszkiw as our guest blogger. Prior to working with Old Town Lansing, Brittney helped get the Iron Mountian Main Street and Scottville Main Street programs off the ground serving as the respective communities' first Main Street Manager. In this entry, Brittney follows up Scottville Main Street Manager Josh Spencer's post "The Power of Relationships" with her take on engaging Generations X and Y.

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As Joe Borgstrom mentioned in his last post, the keynote at the Michigan Downtown Conference this year was James Howard Kunstler, a dynamic speaker and visionary whose speech painted a grim picture of the changes he sees coming. Joe’s right when he says that “it isn’t what you say, but how you say it.” I think Kunstler had the right vision, but he delivered only the bad news. His message was intended as a wake-up call, but his dark delivery risked alienating the very folks he hopes will take action... 

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Prior to my current position with the Scottville Main Street Program, I worked in sales. I always made it a point to strive to be the best at what I did. I will always remember what one of the best salesman I ever met said to me when I asked about his sales philosophy. He simply said you need to be their best friend or dazzle them with your knowledge. When I asked which of the two was most important, he told me that people want to do business with their friends...

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said the title of this blog as advice to my five year old daughter. Usually its my response hearing her answer a question my wife or I have asked in one of her huffy, five-going-on-fifteen, timeout inducing tones. “I’ve already told you THAT,” or “FINE.” If you have kids, you know what I’m talking about. However, today I’m advocating for we, as downtown professionals, adopt a little bit of that attitude.

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People’s preferences have changed. Suburbs are “out”… a relic of an automobile culture where high-speed auto access defined every transition of our day-to-day life, (from home-to-school-to-work-to-stores, and back), and was accomplished on four wheels in a climate-controlled environment. No more. Cities are “in”, right? Everyone wants to “live-where-you-work”, and walk to shops, entertainment and – in general – all the best things in life. That’s the great promise of the “back-to-the-city” movement. Except it didn’t happen the way we predicted.

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