01/28/2026
Plan for now, and plan ahead!
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In community revitalization, we’re obsessed with process. We follow procedures so religiously that we lose sight of what we’re actually trying to build. But what good is a perfect process that consistently produces terrible outcomes?
Take municipal real estate development. We’ve been following the same broken process for decades despite mounting evidence it doesn’t work. It wasn’t designed to produce good results, only to manage inputs, approvals, and review committees. We’re so focused on who approves the flour and what the baking temperature should be that we never stop to ask what we’re actually cooking.
We should flip this. Start with the product: What do residents want? What buildings will make them proud, retain local wealth, support small businesses, and strengthen community attachment? Once we know what success looks like, we work backward to create a process that actually delivers it.
The same disease infects chambers of commerce, downtown organizations, and tourism bureaus. Staff become experts at executing a process, board meetings, programs, initiatives, without ever questioning whether the work produces meaningful outcomes. You can become incredibly efficient at crocheting swim trunks, but if the product is useless, who cares how good you’ve gotten at it?
Many chambers still operate with mission statements from the 1950s. Our communities and economies have transformed dramatically, but we keep running the same plays. That’s not noble, it’s wasteful.
Every organization needs regular timeouts to ask: What are we trying to accomplish? Is our vision still relevant? Are our resources producing the outcomes our community actually needs? There’s no value in doing the wrong thing efficiently.
Process matters, but it’s a means to an end, not the end itself. You can’t determine your route before deciding where you’re traveling. You’ll never arrive.
Start with where you want to go. What kind of downtown do people want? What housing do residents need? What will make your community worth staying for?
Decide what you want to build. Then figure out how to get there.
