By Stephanie Clifford
via nytimes.com

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.

By Helen Coster
via forbes.com

In June 50 recent college graduates, from some of the best schools in the U.S., will join start-ups in struggling cities as part of Venture for America, a new program designed to help young companies, promote entrepreneurship and generate job growth. As VFA fellows, the graduates will receive five weeks of training at Brown University—where they’ll learn Excel and other consulting and banking-type skills—before moving to Detroit, New Orleans, Cincinnati and Providence for two years. Fifty companies— like The Brandery, in Cincinnati, and Detroit Venture Partners— will pay the fellows up to $38,000 a year, plus health benefits, to do everything from buying office supplies to making sales calls— whatever the small, fast-growing companies need.

“It’s true that a challenge is to put a fellow in a position where he or she can contribute and develop,” says VFA founder Andrew Yang, 37. “These companies have to have a genuine need for someone. It’s very difficult for a start-up to compete alongside big consulting firms and banks when they’re only looking to hire one or two people.”

Yang developed the idea for VFA in 2008, while speaking on an alumni panel at Brown University. Yang, then the head of Manhattan GMAT, had taken a circuitous and expensive path to entrepreneurship. After graduating from Brown in 1996, he felt directionless and, lured by prestige and security, applied to law school. After a stint at a big firm, and swimming in law school debt, Yang realized that he didn’t want to be a lawyer and launched a short-lived dot-com. Although he later became the chief executive of a successful start-up, he wanted to prevent other young graduates from making the same mistakes.

Back at Brown, Yang met fellow alum Charlie Kroll, who had started an 85-person software firm in Providence, a city that struggles to retain recent college graduates. Yang wondered whether a program, modeled after Teach for America, would help draw young talent to Providence and other cities. Start-ups would benefit from talented, hungry, inexpensive labor. Student entrepreneurs would have an alternative to banking and consulting jobs, and the opportunity to continue their entrepreneurial growth. To sweeten the deal, at the end of two years Yang’s program would award $100,000 in seed funding to the most high-performing fellow.

In 2009 Kaplan acquired Yang’s company, and he pursued his plan in earnest, reaching out to entrepreneurs in four cities where clusters of entrepreneurial activity already existed. Charlie Kroll in Providence organized a meeting of 25 local start-ups. Another contact helped him network in New Orleans. Yang raised $500,000 from private donors, hired a skeletal full-time staff, and in the fall of 2011 began visiting over 30 college campuses, promoting the program.

Over 1,000 students have begun the application process, and VFA recently selected the first seven of 50 fellows. They include a mechanical engineer from Yale, a Boston College senior who built a social networking app that he sells on iTunes, and a University of Pennsylvania finance major. Yang eventually wants to run a recruitment database and charge start-ups for access.

Yang says that cities have been eager to work with him. The City of Detroit is providing fellows with free housing, and Newark mayor Cory Booker and others have inquired about the program. Yang’s goal is to create 100,000 U.S. jobs by 2025—ideally because VFA fellows will start their own firms and hire people, or help existing firms scale. “If you’re an entrepreneur in Detroit you’re going to get so much more support from the community than if you lived in San Francisco or New York,” says Yang. “The community cares about your success.”

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

via The Wall Street Journal

By Conor Dougherty

AUSTIN, Texas—As the nation grapples with stubbornly high unemployment, Texas’s political and high-tech capital shows one way to create good jobs for people who didn’t go to college: Attract highly skilled entrepreneurs, and watch the companies they start hire lower-skilled workers.

Praxis Strategy Group, an economic-development consultancy, estimates Austin added 50,000 “middle-skill” positions in the past decade. These are jobs that require a two-year associate’s degree or the equivalent work experience, and pay a median wage of $17.30 an hour, or $38,000 a year. That pace of growth is roughly four times faster than the nation’s as a whole, three times that of New York and Portland, Ore., and twice that of Phoenix.

Austin’s success in creating middle-class jobs runs against the grain of national trends. As America’s shift from manufacturing to the service sector has accelerated, economists have noted a hollowing out of such jobs.

In recent decades, a select number of brain hubs like Austin have attracted a higher percentage of well-educated workers and a lopsided share of new investment and young companies. In 1970, the top 10 most-educated metropolitan areas among the nation’s 100 largest had an average of 23% of workers holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 10% in the bottom 10, according to an analysis of Census data by Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser. The 13-percentage-point gap has widened every decade since, and had doubled by 2010.



Click on the interactive graphic to see the growth in middle-skill jobs from 2001 in Austin and other regions.

Beyond creating new middle-skill jobs, such brain hubs have generally higher incomes and for the most part have performed better through the recession. In Austin, the 7.1% average unemployment rate in 2010 was well below the nation’s during the same period.

Of course, Austin also has a fast-growing population, which helps create jobs in any economic environment. And it’s not as if other cities can create a more-educated populace overnight.

Still, Austin’s success in creating middle-level jobs shows how a well-educated work force can raise the fortunes of lesser-educated workers as well. Raleigh, N.C., has benefited from the same dynamic.

One consequence of the economy’s shift away from production toward brain work is that companies are constantly seeking new ways to break down high-value intellectual tasks into smaller, cheaper bits. Much the same way that assembly lines created millions of new jobs by reducing mass production to a sum of tasks, employers in Austin and elsewhere are constantly breaking down higher-skill jobs to “create new middle-skill, middle-income specialties,” according to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute.

Take Homeaway Inc., a vacation-rental service founded here in 2005 that went public this year. Its rapid growth allows entry-level employees to substantially raise their income, said Brent Bellm, the company’s chief operating officer.

Mr. Bellm points to customer-service representatives, who earn from $25,000 to the low-$30,000s range and field phone calls and e-mails from people using the company’s website. About one-third of them are promoted annually to areas such as a security team that monitors the site for fraudulent listings and removes shoddy properties. “In a few years, you can go from the high 20s to the 50s,” he said.

Simply put, rapid growth boosts the value even of workers who have a limited education but possess knowledge of a company’s systems.

Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that highly educated cities see faster wage growth for less-educated citizens as well as the high fliers. One reason is that that many lower-level employees use the most productive technologies and act as complements to more-expensive and highly-educated workers, making it much easier for companies to raise their wages faster than overall inflation.

Another force, Mr. Moretti notes, is called “human capital spillovers,” a fancy way of saying that many “middle skill” workers begin to acquire skills that are much more valuable than their overall education level might suggest.

That’s how Douglas Kanneman went from a bored retail clerk feeling grim about his prospects to a computer-equipment technician with a four-bedroom house and the chance to let his wife work part-time while looking after their two children.

Mr. Kanneman, 37 years old, began his working life like a lot of people who didn’t go to college—at a retail store with low pay. Looking to better his prospects at 25, he went to community college for computer training and eventually landed a customer-service job at SolarWinds in Tulsa, Okla., which makes software that controls companies’ information infrastructure like computers and phone systems.

Later, when SolarWinds moved to the tech hub of Austin, Mr. Kanneman went with it. As the company grew, he worked his way into the better-paying information-technology department. A year ago, he did something that he said validated the worth of his new skills: He quit for a higher-paying job elsewhere in Austin, and with overtime can now earn more than $90,000 a year.

“It proved that I was worth as much as I thought I was,” Mr. Kanneman said.

Write to Conor Dougherty at conor.dougherty@wsj.com