Michigan’s chief of placemaking

Gary Heidel, Chief Placemaking Officer for the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) since 2013, is the first and only official with that title in any US state.

Heidel oversees a MSHDA program that focuses public and private resources on what he calls “strategic placemaking” in towns and cities in order to generate economic development. “We are trying to take advantage of new market demand that has been created,” Heidel says. “It’s a combination of the millennial generation and baby boomers who want a specific type of lifestyle and are willing to live in that lifestyle” whether or not they have a job at first.

Businesses locate where they can find talent, Heidel says. “It’s no longer the case that businesses locate just to get tax breaks or things like that. They have to be able to know they can attract talent for their industries.”

Michigan is among the nation’s leaders in high-tech and research and development and, thanks to its automotive industry, has more than its share of Fortune 500 companies. In this economy, however, places like Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Kalamazoo have to compete on quality of life with Chicago, Minneapolis, or New York, he says.  

Strategic placemaking uses development, with targeted infrastructure improvements, to create a sense of place. One example is downtown Detroit, where more than 10,000 jobs have been added in recent years. Billionaire Dan Gilbert has purchased at least 34 large properties, including many old skyscrapers, and fixed them up. Infrastructure investments on the waterfront and in parks have contributed to a remarkable transformation in a two-square-mile area. Smaller to mid-sized Michigan cities like Birmingham and Grand Rapids have also seen significant investment downtown.

Opportunities for strategic placemaking: Michigan urbanized areas (red circles) and "urban clusters' (yellow dots).

Real estate developer and theorist Christopher Leinberger argues that the trend toward “walkable urban” places will drive the market in coming decades. Real estate represents more than a third of US assets and more than double the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ combined, he says. The walkable urban trend is all about placemaking and this will help lead the economy, he explains. Michigan has devised a statewide strategy to ride this wave.

Focus on communities

Municipalities are receptive to this message, Heidel says, “because traditional economic development has not always worked out well for them.”

“We provide resources to help them organize to do the planning and visioning, and we offer tools that will enable investment in the area – particularly housing,” says Heidel.

MSHDA stresses “development planning, not planning for development.” What’s the difference? Most municipalities do the latter, he says: “You create a plan and hope for the development to come.” With strategic placemaking, he says, the tools are assembled to facilitate place-based development within a short time frame — say, two years. Beyond that, plans get out of date relative to the market.

Placemaking is local, yet it is influenced by state policies in housing, transportation, economic development, parks, and other areas. It involves public investment that leverages private investment. Michigan’s placemaking initiative called MIplace (see May-June 2014 and June 2012 issue of Better Cities & Towns) touches on all of these areas.

MIplace began in 2012 with the Sense of Place Council, a 40 member statewide coalition of trade groups representing nonprofits, entrepreneurs, lenders, developers, historic preservation, arts and culture, recreation, planners, health,  representatives from state and local government, and academia.

Heidel co-chairs this council along with Dan Gilmartin, CEO of the Michigan Municipal League , which hashes out place-based policies that government can pursue. MIplace came out of the Sense of Place Council.

Coordination of  state government

Within state government, Heidel chairs the Interdepartmental Collaboration Committee (ICC) Placemaking Partnership Subcommittee (PPS), which brings together the state departments that impact place. Members include MSHDA, which oversees housing programs, the Department of Transportation, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), the Department of Natural Resources with its Transect-based parks program, the Department of Environmental Quality and its brownfields program, the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Michigan Land Bank Authority. “The overarching goal of the ICC-PPS is that Michigan’s economic development and placemaking activities will produce jobs, spur regional economies, and elevate the quality of life for all our state’s citizens,” according to the ICC’s 2011 annual report.

Republican governor Rick Snyder came into office that year and has made placemaking a policy platform. “From almost the get-go, the governor has defined placemaking as a key ingredient to econ development,” says Heidel, who has been with MSHDA since 1986.

How does this work locally? MIplace has essentially “reverse engineered” the process of placemaking — which requires strategic investment and development in mixed-use corridors and urban centers. A form-based code with administrative review creates a land-use entitlement system that developers can easily respond to.

The foundation of the program is education. The state has created a placemaking curriculum that has already trained more than 10,000 people in the public and private sectors in the last year and a half. The curriculum has three levels—from nonprofessionals to architects and developers. “We have to change the dialog in the state about this new movement related to economic development and jobs and the role that place plays in that,” says Heidel. Placemaking is usually delayed “not by intention, but because people don’t know the next steps,” he explains.

MEDC launched a “Redevelopment Ready Communities” (RRC) program in 2014. As of March 2014, 31 communities were participating in the program, and more than 30 additional communities expressing interest. Communities must take steps to show that they are ready for strategic placemaking. “There is recognition on the part of local communities that they need to do something to expedite development,” Heidel says.

The carrot is that RRC designation allows a community to receive priority status in interagency state investments, he says. A community can also be selected for a “place plan,” whereby MML and the Land Policy Institute at Michigan State University will assist in providing tools to prepare a key corridor for redevelopment. The charrette process, with full stakeholder engagement, is the cornerstone for creating the vision for place-based development.

MSHDA emphasizes target market analysis (TMA), which analyzes the potential markets and ties them to building types that are not always adequately supplied. These include apartment buildings of various sizes, mixed-use buildings, townhouses, multiplexes, courtyard buildings and others that may not show up in traditional market studies that look at what has sold or leased in the past.

MIplace applies to communities of all sizes, Heidel says. Small towns see themselves as rural, but according to the analysis of the rural-urban Transect, they are actually collections of urban neighborhoods surrounded by rural land. “Once that connection is made” in the minds of local officials, “they see they can connect to the program, the process, and the financial support.” Many Redevelopment Ready Communities are small towns. 

Michigan has 18 urbanized areas with at least 50,000 people, all with downtowns and existing and/or potential mixed-use corridors. It also has 90 “urban clusters” of 2,500 to 49,999 people, all with some kind of mixed-use center (see map), including 13 in the Upper Peninsula. All of these have placemaking potential.

Michigan’s program is unique, but other states that have expressed interest include Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Indiana. Governor Snyder co-chairs the Great Lakes Commission, an interstate agency that meets on issues related to the region. The states share common issues such as economically distressed industrial cities. “We have been talking about different strategies, including placemaking as the cornerstone of economic development,” Heidel says.

Other states may incorporate pieces of Michigan’s strategy for generating walkable urban places — a practical approach that is translated into language that local officials can understand. Placemaking is simply “good development projects,” he says. “All of these programs can create economic development on their own but if you bring them together that can be powerful.”

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