One of the things I think the SDAT team did really will is help those of us at the presentation take a fresh look at our city. Whether they extracted it from our ramblings or from their whirlwind research or the material the city provided, they got a number of distinctive things about Albany and made the audience chuckle in recognition or burst out into applause on several occasions. They were also incredibly upbeat about the city, in a believable way. "Thank you for getting us excited about our city again," said Bill Newman in the comment period.
A very random collection of interesting points that were made, some which were new to me, most of which it was just nice to hear confirmation of:
Albany's strengths include its location, its urban fabric, its distinctive neighborhoods, its historic buildings, its institutions, and its neighborhood associations. It's unusual for a city as small as Albany to have the kind of cultural richness that it has.
Though there are neighborhoods where this is not true, overall the city has the lowest unemployment rate in the state, and its employment base has been growing, albeit modestly. (So why do students still think they need to go elsewhere to find a job?)
There's very little "transportation constraints on suburban commuters" (i.e. traffic) into Albany. Low commute times compared to the rest of the state or country, and housing prices in the city that aren't much lower than in the suburbs means that the city will be more successful marketing itself to "lifestyle" residents: people who want to be in an urban area, live in cool old buildings, enjoy culture and walkable neighborhoods, and live sustainably.
We have one of the best housing authorities around. (Some of us knew that, but it was nice to see it identified so strongly. In very few cities can the housing authority be a point of pride.)
To quote Alan Mallach, "Albany is a funny place." In particular he meant that the concentration and size of our major institutions—state government, the universities, and the hospitals—is very large for the size city we are. This means that what they do and how they grow is makes "an enormous difference to the city." And though the rest of the state likes to bash Albany in the abstract, Mallach specifically and directly exhorted state government to take an interest: "The future of Albany is important to the entire state. It should be right in the center of the state's agenda."
Pedestrian and bicycle safety and accommodation are huge issues in the city.
We actually have a pretty good transit system, but no one knows how to use it. It's unclear, not well advertised or marked. We have a guaranteed ride home program for swiper users but no one knows about it. The system is also short on crosstown routes.
Albany is doing just well enough that it could probably coast, noted Mallach in conclusion, but that's not what people want. Albany has the potential to become the kind of sustainable community that "others could only dream of."
Comments