By Stephanie Clifford
via nytimes.com


Gardens at the Galleria mall in Cleveland, which has branched out from standard retail fare in hopes of attracting visitors. Photo: David Maxwell for The New York Times

Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview, like many malls across the country, is suffering. Closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, it is down to eight retail stores, eight food-court vendors and a couple of businesses like the local bar association.

So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden.

“I look at it as space, I don’t look at it as retail,” said Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive. “You can’t anymore.”

Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, the Internet is now pulling even more sales away from them. And as retailers crawl out of the worst recession since the advent of malls, many are realizing they are overbuilt and are closing locations at a fast clip.

The result is near-record vacancy rates at malls of all kinds, both the big enclosed ones and the sprawling strips. Sears Holdings is closing up to 120 stores, Gap Inc. 200 stores and Talbots 110. Abercrombie & Fitch closed 50 stores last year, Hot Topic, almost the same number. Chains that have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, like Blockbuster, Anchor Blue, Circuit City and Borders, have left hundreds of stores lying vacant in malls across the country.

Most cities, looking at shrinking budgets, cannot afford to subsidize or knock down ailing malls, and healthy retailers that are expanding — like H&M and Nordstrom Rack — generally will not open at depressed locations. So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts.

Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls. By hanging a curtain to hide the food court, the Galleria in Cleveland, which opened in 1987 with about 70 retailers and restaurants, rents space for weddings and other events. Other malls have added aquariums, casinos and car showrooms.

Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park.

Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over.

“Basically they’re building the downtowns that the suburbs never had,” along with reworking abandoned urban malls for nonshopping uses, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The efforts reflect a shift in how Americans want to shop today: rather than going to big, overwhelming malls, many prefer places where stores can be entered from the street, featuring restaurants, entertainment and other Main Street mainstays. Also, as commuters in urban areas shift to public transportation, the giant parking lots are no longer needed.

The Simon Property Group, a large mall operator, is remodeling 15 to 20 malls a year, said its chief operating officer, Richard Sokolov. It is adding amenities like electric-car charging stations and stadium-seating theaters, and scheduling 20,000 events a year, like cooking demonstrations. Malls today have to “provide a unique set of shopping, dining and entertainment experiences,” Mr. Sokolov said.

Westfield, another large operator, has added dog runs and ice rinks, and, in Toledo, Ohio, the Wait Room, a lounge where customers can drink a beer and check their e-mail “while their significant other shops,” said Katy Dickey, a Westfield spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

While some malls can afford to change with the times, many cannot, and over all, there are too many malls today, urban planners say. The vacancy rate at shopping centers and strip malls was 11 percent in the last quarter of 2011, the highest level since 1991, according to the research firm Reis. Larger regional malls fared better, with a vacancy rate of 9.2 percent.

There are about 108,000 shopping centers in America, according to a 2009 survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers. Just a few years ago, developers competed to build malls, betting that continued growth would support them, but the recession threw those plans off course.

A new enclosed mall has not opened in the United States since 2006, according to Professor Dunham-Jones, and many ambitious projects, like New Jersey’s Xanadu just west of Manhattan, have lain half-finished for years.

“In the aggregate, we have more than we need at this point, and it can have a blighting influence on communities,” said Patrick Phillips, chief executive of the Urban Land Institute. “You see that all over the country, these endless commercial strips that are completely underutilized.”

That is leading to a variety of creative solutions that “would help make ’60s and ’70s suburbia a bit more sustainable,” said Rob Shields, director of the City-Region Studies Center at the University of Alberta, which held a design competition over the last several months that attracted the Detroit and Buffalo proposals.

But putting the theory into practice is requiring unusual city-developer liaisons. Mall owners often need regulatory clearance or financing help from a city to make major changes, and cities can sometimes seize malls that they believe are a hindrance to economic development. And malls were usually built at busy intersections with good access to public transportation — a combination that still works, even if the mall itself doesn’t.

In Seattle, city planners are looking at reworking a still-thriving mall as a focus point for more development.

“We’re at this interesting moment, because in cities, land is very scarce,” said Marshall Foster, city planning director for Seattle, which is trying to make Northgate Mall, a popular mall built in 1950, a center for urban life. “We can’t afford to overlook these opportunities any longer.”

The city is adding transit and trying to increase jobs and living space there. It has restored a creek originally covered by a parking lot, and is pushing the mall owner and retailers to add a street-grid layout and remodel stores so they are accessible from the street.

Cleveland, too, has given over some plots of land to the greenhouse effort at the Galleria mall.

The shift to gardening began with the carts that used to sell jewelry or candles, where Ms. Poole, the director of marketing events, had herbs planted in the disused retail carts inside the mall. She learned how quickly aphids proliferate indoors (solution: release 1,500 ladybugs into the mall).

The garden now produces lettuce, strawberries, basil and other crops, which are sold to visitors and used for the mall’s catering business. An unexpected benefit has been an influx of visitors, which has prompted related retailers to open in the mall, like a company that sells rainwater collection barrels.

“This has been sustaining us throughout these hard years, but now we’re looking at the potential of turning things around,” said Ms. Poole while preparing kale and spinach seeds for spring planting.

By Peggy Lowe
via npr.org


Recruiting doctors to live and work in rural America is a chronic problem. Most health centers try to attract workers with big salaries and expensive homes.

Shots previously reported that one center in Maine was trying to lure medical students to the countryside for their final two years with the hope that they stick around.

The Ashland Health Clinic, a tiny hospital in southwest Kansas, is trying a different tack — a reverse-recruitment model. It’s called mission-focused medicine, and it’s based on serving problems most commonly found in third-world countries.

Ashland, population 855, sits about a five-hour drive south of Kansas City. It’s one of the last outposts on the Kansas open range, where buffalo still really roam along the rolling, dusty plains. There’s no gas station, unless you count the pump at the farmer’s co-op that uses dial-up for credit card approval. The nearest Starbucks is 160 miles away.

The Ashland clinic has 24 beds. The next closest center is 50 miles north, in Dodge City. (Yeah, the same one from those old cowboy movies.)

So when Benjamin Anderson interviewed for the clinic’s CEO job in 2009, he says the board chairman was exceedingly blunt.

Anderson says the chairman told him, “Ben, our facilities are 55 years old. Our finances are challenged. Our morale is low. Turnover is up. We’ve been without an administrator for six months. We’ve been without a doctor for seven or eight months. We really need this facility in this community. And if we don’t have this facility, we’ll lose our school. And if we don’t have our hospital and our school, this will become a ghost town very quickly.”

That pitch clicked for Anderson. He gave up his physician recruiter job in Dallas and moved with his wife out here to become Ashland’s new CEO.

“I’ve always had to have a job that matters,” he says. “I have to have a position that I know it’s not just a paycheck.”

Anderson is now well known on Ashland’s Main Street. But he knew he needed doctors for the hospital to succeed, and he knew he had to offer something different than the thousands of small towns he was competing with.

So he came up with a novel plan. He offers potential candidates eight weeks off to do missionary work overseas. Because he’s found that a doctor who is willing to sleep on a cot in the Amazon or treat earthquake victims in Haiti is ready to serve in rural Kansas. He calls it mission-focused medicine.

“When you recruit a mission-focused provider, they want to see the ghettos,” he says. “They want to know that there’s no Spanish-speaking provider in more than a one-hour drive. They want to see houses that are falling down, widows that are uncared for. They want to know that there’s need and that by them coming there, they would fill a disparity that would otherwise not be filled. So we reversed it.”

It worked. Last July, Dr. Dan Shuman and his family moved here from the Austin, Texas, area. The difference between here and all the other needy areas was his ability to continue his missionary work in Haiti and Mexico during his eight weeks off. But Shuman says Ashland’s own challenges were equally attractive.

“When you’re primary focus is sort of a mission-based focus, when you get into things in order to try to relieve suffering or work toward eliminating disparities,” Shuman says, “then you want to know about those things. It’s appealing to see opportunities.”

Studies suggest that finding primary care providers in rural areas is at crisis levels. More medical students are specializing, so general practitioners are very hard to find. And those who can deal with the lower pay and isolation in rural areas? Even harder. So Anderson raised the bar by shooting for a higher cause. At every staff meeting, he’s part cheerleader, part chaplain.

Indeed, things are looking up for Ashland. In addition to Shuman, Anderson has recruited a nursing director. And that doc who slept on the cot in the Amazon was recently in Ashland for interviews.

Peggy Lowe is a reporter for Harvest Public Media.

via Morning Edition, NPR

As the Mayor’s Conference takes place in Washington D.C., city governments are dealing with severe problems at home — from high unemployment to funding cuts. Steve Inskeep talks to Mick Cornett, the Mayor of Oklahoma City, about how his city has managed to avoid some of these problems.

via The Baltimore Sun


Baltimore Inner Harbor from Federal Hill – photo by ktylerconk on Flickr

Frustrated by Maryland’s high rate of health disparities, state leaders are proposing a new attack — one more commonly associated with economic development. Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2012-2013 budget will include funding to create Health Enterprise Zones, where doctors and community groups in areas with large health disparities, such as Baltimore, could add medical and support services for minorities. Tax credits and other financial incentives would be available to spur interest.

The plan is designed to save lives and healthcare dollars, according to Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, who last summer formed a work group on disparities led by Dr. E. Albert Reece, dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“Maryland has world-class hospitals, top medical schools and one of the highest rates of primary-care physicians per capita, and yet we continue to see disparities in health care and outcomes among Maryland’s racial and ethnic communities. It’s clear that a lack of access to primary care in many communities is a significant factor driving these disparities,” Brown said, adding that funding is in the governor’s budget proposal, which has yet to be released.

According to state and national data, the disparities are many: In Maryland, the infant mortality rate among blacks is almost three times that for whites, the incidence of new HIV infections among blacks is almost 12 times that of whites, and Hispanics are more than four times as likely not to have health insurance as whites. Moreover, nearly twice as many African-Americans suffer from diabetes as whites, and hospital admission rates were three times higher for blacks with asthma and 41/2 times as high for blacks with hypertension. Treating such illnesses is costly, according to the work group, which cited data showing nearly $230 billion in direct medical costs could have been saved from 2003 to 2006 if there were no racial and ethnic health disparities.

The proposed program would work something like economic enterprise zones, where businesses receive subsidies to create jobs and activity in certain areas. The health zones program would be a pilot, available in two or three geographic areas. New and existing primary-care practitioners could receive loan assistance repayment; income, property or hiring tax credits; and assistance in installing health information and other technology. Subsidies would be capped, likely in the tens of thousands of dollars. Local health departments might get involved in recruiting participants.

Brown said he would push to expand the program statewide if it proves successful in a couple of years — not a given, considering the logistical and cultural complexity of the problems. For example, residents of some neighborhoods don’t have easy access to grocery stores that sell fresh fruit and vegetables, or don’t visit the doctor until there is an emergency. Reece said many groups have tackled disparities, but the work group wanted to focus its attention on chronic diseases responsible for 80 percent of health costs. They drilled down to a few key maladies that often have “ripple” effects. They include diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

“We decided to identify … areas where we thought we could make an effective impact within a reasonable time frame,” he said. The health enterprise zones approach is unique, he believes. Work group members got the idea from a similar program built around children’s needs in the community of Harlem in New York City. Program applicants are likely to come predominantly from rural and urban area where disparities are most pronounced.

In Baltimore, studies show a 20-year gap in life expectancy between upper-income, predominantly white neighborhoods and poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Recently, city health department officials began working with community leaders in 55 neighborhoods to identify the most pressing health needs and develop plans to tackle them. The state’s zones would complement these efforts, Reece said. His work group also proposed other elements to promote health and track outcomes.

The group suggested Health Innovation Prizes with small financial rewards and public recognition for individuals and groups that improve health and well-being in their community. The group also recommended tracking disparity data for programs that already exist for primary care physicians and hospitals. Incentives and penalties assessed through these programs could eventually be linked to disparities.

Reece said the prize and the enterprise zones are two things Maryland can do now to help reduce disparities in a few key geographic and health areas. If legislation to create the zones is passed during the current legislative session, the details will be worked out by the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Already, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, department secretary, supports the move: “The creation of Health Enterprise Zones will help communities target resources to have the most powerful impact.”

meredith.cohn@baltsun.com

By Motoko Rich
via nytimes.com

Private Sector Gets Job Skills; Public Gets Bill



When companies are deciding where to build new facilities or whether to expand in places where they already have factories or offices, states compete to shower them with incentives like tax breaks and help buying land. Increasingly, companies have come to expect that state and local governments will pay for job training, too.

For Sunday’s paper, I wrote about a $1 million customized training program that North Carolina designed for the benefit of Caterpillar, Inc., the global industrial equipment maker. The company opened a new plant in Winston-Salem in November, and the state is paying to train nearly 400 workers who will make axles for mining trucks.

North Carolina is also spending about $1.5 million to train workers for a new Honda Aircraft plant in Greensboro. About 163 workers went through training at Guilford Technical Community College in various areas including jet assembly and electrical system installation in the hopes of securing a job. Because Honda delayed the opening of its production lines, some of those workers, like Kent McDaniel, featured in this report from the video journalists at Purple States, decided to seek work elsewhere. Others, like Linda Merritt, stuck it out and are now working at Honda.

By Mark Fidelman, Seek Omega
via BusinessInsider.com

H.R. 2930 or the “Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act,” would provide companies the ability to raise up to $1 million (US) to fund projects and companies. The bill will ease fund raising restrictions and regulations on both companies and investors.

So if you are a start up in need of an early round of financing, you no longer need to ask friends and family, you can ask friend of friends or their extended network for seed capital. And that’s where companies like Kickstarter will have an advantage over Angel Investors.

Let’s face it, the Professional Angel community is insular. They invest in each others deals, they invest in similar types of deals, and they invest in who they know. Why? Because it’s safe and they have a legitimate need to protect their client’s capital. But that has led to a lack of investment diversity and has created an investment “group think” that is limiting the potential of the community.

Conversely, sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo enable people with a diversity of knowledge, skills and experience to fund projects and receive rewards for helping entrepreneurs. It’s called crowdfunding and it allows almost anyone to give money to an entrepreneur to complete a project.

In some aspects it’s like American Idol. Because it enables anyone to vote (by making a prescribed monetary pledge) and become a fan of a project (by following it). At the end of 30 days if the pledges don’t meet the minimum requirement as set by the entrepreneur, then the money is refunded to the investors. If the project funding goals are met, then the project moves forward, but with an important added fan base.

Today on crowdsourcing sites, project funding ranges between $100 – $8000 and pledges a fraction of that amount. But if H.R. 2930 passes, you can bet crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter will quickly move into the business of helping entrepreneurs raise Angel levels of capital ($100,000 to $1 million) .

So why will the Professional Angel Investment community die? Because, if entrepreneurs are given a choice between raising funds through an opaque, arduous and slow Professional Angel route versus a much more efficient, diverse and knowledgeable path, the latter will win ever time.

Case Study: KickStarter
Rather than speculate, I decided to invest in a Kickstarter project myself to understand how it all works. I chose an iPhone/iPad game called Stop Those Fish by Eye Interactive for three reasons.
First, I know the founder of Eye Interactive and he sent me an invite email to participate. Second, I could tell that Eye Interactive’s new game was creating buzz from my personal network which provided me with social proof (due diligence). Third, his first game Zombi Samurai reached #3 on the charts making it one of the most successful games in the last few months.

I asked Jason Seldon, Eye Interactive’s founder why he decided to raise funds from Kickstarter versus taking a more traditional route through Angel’s or friends and family. Seldon responded, “I believe Kickstarter’s value goes way beyond their stated value proposition of being a new way to fund creative projects. In addition to helping individuals and small businesses fund these creative endeavors, I believe it is also a way to generate tremendous pre-release buzz for a new product and to build a fan base prior to launch.”

Seldon continues, “It gives early adopters a unique sense of ownership over a new product. In our case, project backers actually get their names in the game credits. So it really encourages a deep connection with consumers. In a sense, you are building a street team comprised of all of your project backers prior to product launch. These individuals can then serve as brand ambassadors to help make your newly launched product a success.”

What the Crowdfunding Critics Have to Say
If the bill passes, the first objection you’ll hear from critics in regards to crowdfunding sites is the opportunity for scam artists to commit fraud and place unsophisticated investors at risk of losing their capital.
My reply to objection # 1 is twofold. First as we’ve seen with Wall Street, even sophisticated systems that are heavily regulated are subject to fraud. In this case, several hundred billion. Second, because sites like Kickstarter do their own background checks, make the process transparent, and allow potential investors to see who has invested (social proof), the risk is mitigated by a number of check points. I’m not saying it’s fool-proof, in fact I am positive we’ll see fraud at some point, but the benefits of crowdfunding far outweigh the potential for fraud.

The second objection I hear is that new start-ups will lose the coaching and networking opportunities from a professional Angel investor. In the short run, I agree with this objection. But in the near future, crowdfunding sites will overtake those basic functions and eventually crowd source the networking, intelligence and strategy aspect the Angels provide today. More, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter will enable virtual teams to sign on (think eLance meets Kickstarter) to help start-ups fill talent quality gaps.

Who else will H.R. 2930 benefit?
Besides start-ups, crowdfunding sites, and mom and pop investors, companies like Angel List, and Bolstr will offer nearly anyone the opportunity to participate in an investment round.

For example, if the Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) start-up Nimble wanted to quickly raise a round of capital, Angel’s List could convert Nimble’s followers to investors by offering them a chance to participate in their next round of funding. If the new bill passes, I suspect Angel List will provide a swipe your credit card platform to participate.

As a quick aside, I’d like to touch on is the rich analytics and statistical information these crowdfunding sites can potentially track. Imagine giving start-ups the ability to see how many page visits, clicks, and conversions they’ve had to their page. More, who is referring potential investors to the page? Which segments of social networks seem to be supporting the idea the most? What is the sentiment of start-ups product?

That information could be used for a variety of purposes from improving the business idea to increased transparency.

The Professional Angel community will quickly lose its wings if H.R. 2930 passes. You can bet on it.
Sites, like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Angel List, and Bolstr will offer superior services through the crowd sourcing of funding, talent and the ability to organically build a fan base. These crowdfunding sites will eventually offer superior access to intelligence and strategy than professional Angels provide today. The crowdfunding process is much more transparent but potentially more dangerous than traditional Angel financing.

Read more: http://www.seekomega.com/2011/11/if-this-bill-passes-the-angel-investment-community-is-dead-and-companies-like-kickstarter-take-over/#ixzz1f8vBiwwN