‘Think Pretty’

All the exciting ideas about a creative economy, aired at length last week in Lewiston at a Blaine House conference on the subject, eventually are reduced to practical tasks. The person at the conference who may know those tasks best was John Barrett III, the mayor of North Adams, Mass., whose town has gone from something of a joke to a weekend destination for urbanites. More importantly, it has become a place that its residents are happy to live in.

North Adams is the possessor of both the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, opened in an abandoned electric-parts mill, and $35 million in state assistance, which took years of hard work and many matching grants to acquire. During the decade or so of revival, the small city’s drug problems were reduced, its unemployment rate fell from 16 percent to 5, the value of its property rose and its children, now adults, began to return, bringing jobs with them. How did the city do it?

A hundred different ways, but the simple maxim from Mayor Barrett was, “Think pretty.” Everything a town does should be done with an eye toward making the place more attractive, more inviting. He says the local Wal-Mart there has dormer windows and was repainted five times to get the right New England color. Every road in town has been repaved, he said, and period lighting went up in the downtown. Even before the major rebuilding of the town, he said, a supermarket with a western theme wanted to build, but was told either to change the way the supermarket looked so that it blended with the region or build somewhere else. The supermarket was redesigned.

Some other suggestions:

. Get community support. The mayor made this point repeatedly – the creative economy is not an elitist exercise. Without a large number of residents appreciating and backing the idea, it will die.

. Take care of the basics. All the snow downtown is removed within 24 hours so people can shop, he says. The schools are taken care of so the town can attract families. Ball fields are in good shape.

. Any time a business changes hands the new business goes before the planning board to check on the condition of the building and require it to meet or keep up standards of appearance.

. Buy vacant buildings. That way, a city keeps control of what goes into them.

. Keep housing affordable. “I don’t know many rich artists,” he said

. Forget about hiring more consultants and downtown managers. There are people in your town with plenty of talent for remaking it. They need to be encouraged to participate. And focus on the other assets your town has rather than trying to import ideas from elsewhere.

. Forget about one-time events. People come in, spend very little money and then move on.

Mayor Barrett concedes that his community still has a lot of creating to do to remake its economy, and certainly other communities would find success along a different path from the one North Adams chose. His observations are valuable because they show there are many small things city leaders can start on immediately to begin turning their town into a more desirable place to live.