Jackson Free Press

It's hard to believe Mal's St. Paddy's Parade—and the attendant celebrations both downtown and elsewhere—are already upon us. It doesn't seem like it's been long enough since the Great Snowman Contest of February, even if daylight savings time is here.

And yet that week has arrived, and here we are planning costumes and walking krewes and promising to "pace ourselves" this year. (We'll see.)

St. Paddy's is easily one of the major amenities that I love most about Jackson—the unapologetic revelry, the tongue-in-cheek presentation, the gathering with friends, a little risque behavior in downtown Jacktown—all in all, an authentic experience that excites Jackson metro locals while driving visitor traffic through the roof.

This past week, Amy Haimerl, a senior producer for CNN/Money and a good friend to Donna Ladd and me, spoke at a Jackson Community Design Center event and on our Thursday JFP radio show and podcast. One of the key items she talked about is how important it is for a revitalizing city to focus on residents first and worry about tourism after that.

Her thought isn't a new one—it's a key focus of New Urbanism and movements like those emphasized in Richard Florida's "Creative Class" books. While casinos or football stadiums or convention-center hotels might be nice features, the stuff that really drives today's cities are the music venues, bookstores, walkable neighborhoods, recreational opportunities and vibrant downtowns.

And if your town lets itself get hip and exciting—with enough creative people like, say, Malcolm White out there drumming up ideas—you might just hit on something like the Mal's St. Paddy's Parade, which relies very little on multi-billion dollar government projects in order to create a heady little impact on tourism and local business revenues.

Just as we like to promote a "Think Local First" mindset for your shopping, it might be worth calling the development plan for any smart city "Think Locals First."

Another thing Amy said that I hadn't heard before was an interesting definition of the word "economics." Economics is the study of maximizing values, she told us; not just dollars, but anything we value as a society—things like education, livability, safety and recreation.

A focus exclusively on maximizing dollars has another word for it, according to Amy. That word is "greed."

When it comes to developing Jackson, it's important for us to take into account all the stakeholders in our community and determine how our investments will do more than simply maximize the dollars that flow, but also how those investments maximize the livability of the town for everyone in it.

For instance, our story on homelessness last week started us down the road that all revitalizing downtowns have to figure out—namely, how do we treat people who don't have permanent housing, and if we try to remove them wholesale from one part of our community, how does that affect both them and the other parts of the city?

At a Jackson 2000 luncheon forum last week, Dr. Bill Cooley, local businessman, "social entrepreneur" and former professor at the School of Business at Jackson State University, made an impassioned case for permanent housing for Jackson's homeless, pointing out that the cost-benefit analysis shows that it's more expensive to move people in and out of jails and mental hospitals than it is to give them safe quarters that encourage them to reenter society, develop job skills and eventually support themselves.

But to do that sort of thing, we have to decide that it fits our values. The idea that we would spend money on the positive instead of the negative—even if it doesn't always work or if there are setbacks or if occasionally someone is a lost cause—is a question of values. That's particularly true when the evidence shows that doing the compassionate thing actually costs less—and we still, as a culture, pick the more punitive option.

It's cheaper to educate students early than it is to incarcerate them later. Alternative sentences work better than prison for non-violent drug offenders. Public transportation is part of a solution to poverty, particularly when you're only generating jobs on the periphery of a poor city. Alleviating poverty is part of the solution for cutting crime. And so on.

One way to start thinking more about our values is yet another bullet point that Amy pushed—formal "visioning" sessions as part of master planning for our community. There are some master plans for Jackson that could be dusted off and looked at, and some of this planning is ongoing on in certain neighborhoods (like North Midtown and in Belhaven and Belhaven Heights), but an overall plan for engaging the population of Jackson in a strong program of visioning and master planning could help everything from accelerated permitting and contractor issues to low-income housing, transportation, walkability, façade design and more.

One complaint I'm still hearing about the city is that's slow to give permits and get inspections done for some of our local business people. During the campaign, Mayor Johnson promised a small-business liaison to help new entrepreneurs navigate their way through red tape; during Amy's discussion at JCDC, she mentioned that Denver takes its artists so seriously that the city has a liaison specifically for people trying to get the right permits and legalese in place for gallery, studio and performance space.

That's "thinking locals."

We'll keep the pressure on for more public discussion and debate and government responses. In the meantime, use the Community Blog at our Web site (jacksonfreepress.com) for discussions on eco-devo and societal values, and take advantages of resources such as the North Midtown Arts Center, the JCDC, Rainbow Plaza, and other locations and organizations that host and sponsor these discussions. (JFP will be there to alert you to them, sponsor and participate. Just ask.)

Let's keep this discussion going and help shape the direction this city takes by encouraging Jackson to think local—and locals—first.