The Leftmost City by Richard Gendron

Author:Richard Gendron [Gendron, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813344386
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2008-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

THE ORIGINS OF VISION SANTA CRUZ

While progressive elected officials were busy with the details of restoring basic services, such as gas and electricity, and conferring with state and federal officials about providing help for dislodged citizens in and around the downtown area, the growth coalition swung into political action a day or so after the earthquake. In doing so, it drew on the resources of the International Downtown Association, one of several organizations in the nationwide urban policy-planning network that provides local growth coalitions with technical expertise as well as ideological support. By coincidence, one of the major property owners in the downtown area, Rittenhouse, was serving as the president of the Santa Cruz Downtown Association and had attended a meeting of the International Downtown Association just a month before the earthquake. As he explained in an interview in August 1993, he had been introduced to new ideas on how to revitalize a downtown and met the president of the international group, Richard Bradley, so he was in an ideal position to reach out to Bradley for ideas: “So we got in touch with Rich [Bradley] in Washington, and made arrangements to get him out here. So he was here within a week of the earthquake.… When Rich was here, we really got more into this issue of now what are we going to do with this mess. Because within a month to two months, the crap’s going to be gone, and now we have to rebuild it, and how are we going to make this happen?” (Interview with Louis Rittenhouse, August 23, 1993).

According to John Lisher, executive director of the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce at the time, the chamber also was involved in bringing in Bradley: “After the earthquake we called out Rich Bradley, who is the president of the International Downtown Association. He was out the next day after the earthquake, flew in from DC. The next day we were thinking about rebuilding; it was that fast” (Interview with John Lisher, August 23, 1993). Although their recollections of the exact day that Bradley came onto the scene vary somewhat, Rittenhouse’s and Lisher’s accounts indicate how connections between local growth coalition organizations and national urban advisory groups allowed for a quick mobilization of resources to aid Santa Cruz landowners in planning for the rebuilding. Bradley visited Santa Cruz three times between the early days after the earthquake and December 12, 1989, when the city council announced how it would plan for rebuilding. On two of those trips, he was a keynote speaker at events hosted by the Santa Cruz Downtown Association, where he met with local economic and political leaders and presented his pitch about the need for the city to create a public-private partnership to guide the rebuilding of the downtown.

While the idea of a partnership between government and business is not a new one, the use of the term “public-private partnership”—and the explanation of its principles and operating assumptions—began to appear in urban policy journals in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.