Image from “Pearl District Design Plan.”

The Pearl District – a near-downtown neighborhood with a lot of history and a lot of lingering challenges here in Tulsa – is working hard to reinvent itself.  Convenient to downtown, highways, and entertainment districts, the neighborhood has struggled for years to reestablish itself as a mixed-use, pedestrian friendly place to live and work.  Organizers see it as a vital addition to downtown revitalization projects, providing some continuity and a landing place for people who don’t want to live downtown per se, but who frequent the ongoing developments there. 

Take a look at the satellite image of the district currently, and the planned use map provided by the Pearl District Association.  The “6^th Street Infill Plan” is available here from the City of Tulsa, but the PDA and the City have gone even further, with a design plan including a canal feature.  There is a pilot project for a form-based code (a personal favorite idea) - creating a look and feel without dividing usage zones like current zoning requires.  They’re stretching, but people thought that turning a disused warehouse district with a drainage ditch into an entertainment area in Oklahoma City was a stretch too... 

I’ve posted about the Better Block project in Oak Cliff  a couple of times – this looks to be Tulsa’s experiment with the idea. Tulsa’s Young Professionals “Tulsa Urbanists” work crew has a take on the Better Block planned: “Polishing the Pearl” – coming up in April.

From distressed neighborhood to vibrant place to play and live – improving property values, generating sales taxes, and reusing valuable space…  This is the heart of economic and community development.  It's going to take some time, but this is going to be fun to watch.

Back in September I posted about the Better Block Project in Oak Cliff - the Dallas neighborhood that is shaking up the status quo with a focus on redeveloping a "cool" community in a formerly dilapidated neighborhood.  Since then, BetterBlock.org has come online as a stand-alone home for the project, and the "how-to" pointers are still easily accessible. Better still - the blog on the front page updates news from Better Block projects and experiments around the country.

It's catching on - Houston, New York, Boston projects are all coming up, according to the news feed - and it represents a real potential for demonstrating citizen-sourced redevelopment plans for our cities. Place matters, and these guys are helping to show the way.

Tools You can Use

I thought I’d share some of the tools and services that I use to make my working life run just a tad better.  You may have better ideas – and if so, I hope you’ll leave a comment and point me in the right direction.

Google Chrome (with extensions)

NitroPDF Reader

Evernote 

TaDaLists 

LastPass

Paint.Net

Posterous

Google Chrome 

Chrome is light, fast, and reliable.  After a few days of using it, both Firefox and Internet Explorer will likely seem ponderous. Like most, but not all browsers, Chrome offers a family of extensions from a crowdsourced development community – some useful, some not.  I’ve loaded these five:

1.    “Awesome Screenshot” – useful for quickly capturing, editing, and exporting browser screen captures.

1.    “IE Tab” – lets you run a Chrome tab that mimics Internet Explorer – since some pages will only work when viewed with IE.

2.    “Evernote” – I’ll talk about Evernote later, but this extension lets you quickly capture selected text and drop it into an Evernote note.  Useful to help you ingest little tidbits of information that you might want access to later without bookmarking a whole page or site.

3.    “LastPass” – I’ll talk about LastPass in a minute, too.  This is the browser plugin for a password vault.

4.    “HoverZoom” – This just enlarges pictures on some sites when you mouse over them. Seems especially handy on e-commerce and social networking sites.

Nitro PDF Reader 

Adobe cooked up PDF, so we all went out and downloaded Acrobat Reader.  But, unless you want to spend the money on Adobe’s pay-to-play products, reading PDFs is about all you can do.  Enter “Nitro PDF Reader.”  For a free reader, it is feature rich.  You can add text to pages, place sticky notes, stamp signatures, and export text and images.  There are some nice collaboration tools too.  So far – Nitro’s PDF writer seems to be a bit behind, but not dramatically so – and they’ve got some work to do on the browser plugin and snapshot tool.  For a free, early release, it is worth your time.

Evernote

Evernote is a digital pad of Post-It Notes on overdrive.  You can capture quick notes, clips from around the web, and retain them in organized, searchable  “notebooks.”  Since it is cloud-based, you can access your notes anywhere, including over all the major smartphones via custom (and free) apps.  You also get a customized email address with your Evernote account.  Add this to your email address book, and you can fire off a quick note to yourself from wherever inspiration strikes you. The free version has a 40MB monthly upload limit (which don’t seem to be a problem for mostly text-based notes) – and a premium service is available for $5 per month.

Ta-Da Lists

Ta-Da Lists is a dead-simple free web-based to-do list organizer.  You make a list, add items, and check them off when they’re done.  You can keep multiple lists, and edit items as necessary.  Like I said – simple, but useful! 

LastPass

LastPass is a password vault.  You remember your LastPass master password, and then use it to fill in password for individual sites.  It has a built in password generator, so you can change your site passwords to something secure like a 10 or 12 character random combination of upper and lower-case letters, and numbers.  In all honesty – it takes a little messing around with it to get comfortable with how to use it properly – but with browser plugins for easy access, once you have it up and running, you’ll likely enjoy having the kind of control it offers.  There is a premium service ($1.00 per month) for those that want to use LastPass on a smartphone.

Paint.Net

Paint.Net is a free Windows-based photo editor.  It is fully functional, and the interface is much easier to use than GIMP.  For fast editing, quick graphics, and the non-professional user, Paint.Net is probably all the editor you’ll need.

And – of course:

Posterous

Posterous hosts this site.  It is simple to get started, and robust enough to handle all sorts of uses, from personal blog to project team website.  I’ve used it for both, and have been very satisfied.  Once established, you just email your post to your Posterous blog, and the site uploads your newest entry.  It does a good job of handling attachments for text, photos, and documents as well. 

I was fortunate to attend the Tulsa Town Hall lecture by eminent astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, today.  Tyson is an engaging speaker, and provides a manageable point of access to the cosmos, physics, and the sheer vastness and mystery of the universe as we currently understand it.  Besides that, he’s kind of funny, to boot.  If you get a chance to check him out – you should. Tyson is also an outspoken advocate for increased investment in science and engineering, as well as “STEM” education – science, technology, engineering, and math.  He closed his presentation with a couple of maps.  I had to go track them down – they were compelling.

Tyson provided a slide that showed the scientific output of the world – as gauged by peer-reviewed scholarly articles.  The relative outputs of various nations are shown stretching the size of their country of origin’s boundaries in proportion to the outputs of other nations (source after the jump):

The map is striking.  Africa almost disappears – and South America and Central Asia don’t fare much better.  Japan, Europe, and the US loom large.  Check out the supporting data HERE. Dr. Tyson pointed out an interesting correlation – the places with high output also tend to have much higher standards of living – it makes sense.  It is, however, the second map he shows that tells the more interesting story.   The map below shows the growth in science output from 1990 to 2001.  It shows who is make more recent investments in science.   

Where the top map shows China in a smaller role – the bottom map shows Chinese scientific output exploding.  Europe appears even bigger than before – South America returns to the map (thanks to Argentina and Brazil).  You might notice – the US shrinks in relative importance.  So – while the US is still putting out a vast amount of science – others are coming on strong – and picking up the pace faster than the US.  Source for the growth map is HERE.

So – where did this map come from? Check out WORLDMAPPER.  This is an intriguing way to look at data on a global level. They’ve got around 700 maps which “distort” borders to relative sizes on various subjects: from human poverty, to container ports, torail networks. For something equally striking – take a look at the comparative map for numbers of illiterate women.

This is indeed the “World as you have never seen it before” – Worldmapper’s tag line, not mine – and perhaps it brings some clarity beyond our usual view of the world as shaped by familiar borders.

I’m a proud TCU alum and avid Horned Frogs fan - I even used to work in City Hall for the City of Ft. Worth.  While I spent a lot of time boosting Ft. Worth (and, I’ll admit, occasionally disparaging Dallas), good things can and do happen there, too.  

For Example: an innovative and inspiring project (movement?) taking place on the other end of the Metroplex in a neighborhood called Oak Cliff – specifically, North Oak Cliff.   A few years ago, Oak Cliff was consistently mentioned in a list of places to avoid in Dallas.  You drove through – if absolutely necessary – but didn’t stop…and really, driving through wasn’t all that advisable, or so we were told.

Oak Cliff is an old neighborhood just south of downtown Dallas.  Full of  pre-WWII and mid-century homes, its location is also quite convenient to…well…all sorts of things, but perhaps most significantly the central business district.  With relatively low housing costs, and short commute times, close-in neighborhoods all over the country have experienced renaissances at various times, usually driven by young professionals and older hipsters looking for a urban feel in someplace besides New York.  Oak Cliff, too, is in the midst of its own renaissance – bootstrapped by some dedicated relative new-comers and some long-time residents who are carving out a name for their community based on tenacity, energy, and creativity.

You just have to check out the “Better Block Project” for yourselves.  The first project created a pop-up demonstration of what is possible: street-scaping, outdoor cafes, public art…the things that make PLACE matter.  They’re getting national coverage as a result (and deservedly so).  They intend to go again with a second project:  this time, a whole plaza, and the idea continues to draw ever-widening attention.  Dallas is even looking into making some of these improvements permanent.

Here’s the “After” and “Before” of the first Better Block Project demonstration on 7^th Street in Oak Cliff:

Image from CooltownStudios blog:  http://www.cooltownstudios.com/2010/04/27/crowdsourced-street-to-become-permanent

The project’s founders are central to Go Oak Cliff – a local community development not-for-profit, where they have included a page on How to Build a Better Block – taking the framework that made the first project a success and breaking it down into a brief “how-to” for the rest of us.

This is Economic and Community development 101:  involving the community in finding new ideas (in this case, a return to some old ideas!) about how to make a place vibrant and attractive again…thinking differently about the assets and resources available, and getting something done instead of waiting on “them” to come around and fix the problems.  It is art, culture, community development, urban planning, business development, and FUN rolled into one. And – proof positive – it works.  Vacant properties were used to become art galleries in the demonstration project with the blessings of their current owners.  Afterwards, “…immediately following our original better block, these vacant spaces were leased.”

Well done, Oak Cliffers.  Well done.

The latest self-sufficiency standards report has been released, and I’ve got a copy of the Oklahoma-specific report to review.  This guide – prepared for various communities all around the United States by the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington– is essential in figuring out a close estimate of what it actually costs to survive in a given area.  Survive – not live in luxury, not live free from worry – just survive…

Here are Tulsa County’s self-sufficiency standards for selected family types:

A close reading of this table shows that the average adult living in Tulsa county needs to earn roughly $9.23 per hour.  The Federal minimum wage for jobs covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act is $7.25.  So – a minimum-wage worker in a covered job needs to find an extra $2.00 per hour to make up the difference for basic survival.

A single adult with a preschooler and a school-age child (not an uncommon situation!) needs to earn almost $19.00 per hour to meet the same standard of living.

More great discussion about the standards and the application of this information HERE.  Clearly, thinking carefully about the kinds of jobs that we choose to target for development, and the accompanying wage levels, is a critical component of good economic development strategy.  The number of jobs is not enough – those jobs must also provide an avenue to self-sufficiency.

There are some great, public (read: free) resources for analyzing economic data, though many times you have to be willing to wade through and reformat information for presentation purposes. The US Census Bureau collects and analyzes a mountain of useful data.

 "LED on the Map" (for the curious, that stands for Longitudinal Employer-household Dynamics)

 - Provides a map-based view of where people live and work, with several additional layers of analysis on wages, industry, and commuting patterns.

 - Data lags a bit - the current most-recent analysis only covers through 2006 so the current economic situation is not reflected.

Here's an example: 

This map shows where workers earning $1200 per month or less live who are employed in Tulsa County.  Remember - this is up through the end of 2006.