It is a sense of affinity that draws people to a certain place that they begin to call home. This is where we are “from”. We might even say this long after we’ve left that place, if we don’t feel affinity for the new place we’ve moved to.
Thank you Rod for allowing us to post your thoughts on Voice of Bainbridge.
Last fall my wife and I made one of our periodic trips to Port Townsend. Even though the place is only an hour away, we spend the night there at least once a year. There is a lot to like: We go downtown, we stop at Chetzemoka Park, we shop at the coop, and we sit on the beach at the lighthouse and watch the ships go around the point. This time we were up walking in the morning when we chanced by the new Northwest Maritime Center, where the doors were open to the boat building shops. Outside there was a group of several dozen school kids waiting to haul out the skiffs they had been working on over the last three days. We watched as groups of four and five middle schoolers put them on their shoulders and carried them several blocks to the docks at the Port Hudson Marina, where they waited through a brief launching ceremony before taking them for a trial row.
Talk about bringing all of the themes of this town together: boat building and wood and tourism and education and crafts and water and hands-on learning. Port Townsend knows itself, and it is using its identity to build an economy built on history and interests and skills widely shared in the community. According to the city manager, there are plans afoot to turn Fort Worden into a center for lifelong learning, to start an institute on historic preservation, and to rebuild the upstairs of the old buildings downtown as offices for professionals. The city’s economic recruitment strategy is “onesy-twosy”, to get professionals like naval architects to move there, people bring their skills along and hire one or two local people as they expand and grow. The city manager estimates that between 20 and 40 percent of the community’s total income comes from people who are almost invisible in the local economic statistics, for they live there but sell elsewhere. This is true for a number of people on Bainbridge. If it weren’t for the fact that I needed a business license, the city wouldn’t even know I was here.
An Atomic Theory of the Community-Based Economy
In most places the typical approach to economic development is “recruitment”, otherwise known as “let’s go bag an elephant!” In this approach the salaried representatives of the town spend a lot of time trying to convince the heads of companies in places like Palo Alto that they should move their employees to out-of-the-way places where there are few single people, and even few places to go should they lose their jobs. There are literally hundreds of cities competing for every move that actually takes place.
The other approach, sometimes called “economic gardening” is to grow your own. This puts the emphasis on local entrepreneurs, but in some ways it misses the element of “place” that is so important in modern life. We need an approach that includes both people and place.
The age-old theory of economics puts the primary factors of production as land, labor and capital. This made all three commodities, and put the emphasis for value-creation on management, on how efficiently it used these commodities. The problem with the old theory is that land and labor are no longer commodities. I’ve reformulated the old approach in what I grandly call “the sub-atomic theory of community development”, in which the key particles are money, talent and place. Talent has become a driver, as in the race between Google and Microsoft for the best and brightest, who want to work not in office parks but in central business districts. “Money” is still money, but with a modern twist, for in its modern incarnation, money and capital comes in many colors or flavors, each with its own personality. Pension funds seek one kind of investment, venture capitalists another, and socially-minded investors a third. For places like ours, the money and talent often go together, for people like to invest where they live. For Bainbridge this means that we get cheaper money, for investors will accept a lower return if they can live near their investments. “Place” is not just any old locality, but places with a sense of place, an identity, a desirable place to live and work. In the last ten years Bainbridge has begun to achieve national recognition as a place to live. It does not yet have Santa Barbara status, but it is in the next tier below this, and people who travel know about it.
Stick to Your Knitting
The smart places understand and stand up for who they are, and they attract people who want to be a part of them. One of the first organizations in the country to talk about the “place-based economy” is “Hand Made in America”, a hand crafts organization based in Asheville, North Carolina. Asheville is, very quietly, one of the best, if not the best, center of crafts in America. The traditions there reach back 200 years. They never died out, because industrialism swept by this part of the Appalachians, past a society that was so poor that it made everything for itself in a barter economy. When the do-good matrons of New York City went there in the 1930s, to help “lift” this society, they found people who were still making brooms and rocking chairs and earthenware pottery the way their great-great-grandparents had made them 200 years before. The handcrafts movement was bolstered when liberal arts types moved there in the 1970s and 1980s, and today Asheville combines traditional craft with high art.
Closer to home, Portland is another example of the place-based economy. It is the sport utility knife capital of the world. Why? Because people working for Gerber Knives learned to make knives, they liked to hunt and fish, they started their own companies, and they stayed in the city. Today Leatherman is there, as are other makers, as well as the company that supplies them with specialty steel. Portland is also home to Nike and Columbia Sportswear, which now owns Mountain Hardware. Adidas is there because it hired away a top Nike executive to run the shoe company, and he wouldn’t leave the city. In our region, the Eastside is a world leader in the wireless industry. The people that put together what became ATT Wireless and T-Mobile were from here, they stayed here, and they invest their new found wealth in start-ups in something they know about: wireless phones. Port Townsend has been in the hospitality business for a long time, for when the ships coming into Puget Sound stopped to pay their custom duties, they also paid off their crew, and those sailors went ashore to a downtown full of brothels. That economy has been on its back for a long time.
Back to my sub-atomic theory: If the three “particles” of matter are money, talent and place, it is affinity that keeps them together and collaboration that sets them in motion.
It is a sense of affinity that draws people to a certain place that they begin to call home. This is where we are “from”. We might even say this long after we’ve left that place, if we don’t feel affinity for the new place we’ve moved to. It is like the old American Express ads that talked about “membership”. We are proud to say that we are from a given place. Portland and Vancouver, B.C. have this kind of affinity, it is part of the civic spirit of these places. Bainbridge has had this, although the old guard’s refusal to let go of power has really cost us much of our civic capital, and we need to rebuild this if we really want to keep this place from becoming just another suburb.
Certainly we are a place of many talents, but it is hard to say what which are embedded in the DNA of our island. We have people who are nationally recognized house designers, who design zoos around the world, who are known for making fish rods and for rigging safety harnesses outside high rise buildings. To get work, the people here travel to Seattle, San Francisco, Seoul and even Outer Mongolia. But it is a question of what we have in common that we can use to create more local jobs, especially those that pay highly enough to meet the mortgage, pay health insurance premiums, and put enough by to replace the roof next year. Where is the synergy of our talents?
Perhaps it is too much to ask for such unity, at least until we have learned to work together for a while, and indeed have more “work” on the island. There is a lot more we could do to work an economic development strategy into our plans for downtown, to create places that are fun and enjoyable to work in. And it would be good to create more of a work atmosphere here, so that we don’t have to go off island to get the jolt of energy that we need in our work lives. One of the challenges of working here is that most trips to meet with colleagues involves a four-hour round trip to Seattle. Would that there were a way to combine the business world, academia, and civic affairs all in one place, outside the big city. It would also provide more opportunities to plug our kids into real life, so that they don’t view the island as a place they have to leave to join the “real world”. One step in the right direction would simply be creating a critical mass of workers here who can interact from time to time.
Here is a modest proposal: Besides creating places to work downtown, let’s turn the ferry yard into the 21st century place to work, one that not only has offices and labs but boat yards and cafes. Let’s turn all of that concrete into a creative place. They’ve done this with similar sites in San Francisco- Fort Mason and the Presidio, and surely we could do it here. Maybe the theme of the place could be getting back to the Sound, and taking care of it as well.
The next time you park at Waterfront Park and walk to the ferry, look through the cyclone fence and see how that site is now being used. For the longest time there were chairs piled up there, sitting in the rain. Now it is mostly asphalt. If we are as creative as we say we are here, let’s find a better use for this place. Let’s start thinking about how we can make this place, and the island in general, better for the people who live here now. I, for one, would be eager to work in a nice place on the harbor, not a suburban office park like Island Gateway, but an exciting place with different things going on outside my window. I wouldn’t mind hearing kids chattering away outside while they rigged the sails on a boat, or spending my own lunch hour teaching at a learning center. I might even find a way to work these things into my work.