Part 3 of 3

The Dream

Imagine the Hartford that you would like to see.

Residents in all neighborhoods adopt a YIMBY attitude, distinguishing between safety and comfort, and between facts and feelings, when challenging neighbors. Those who do not own property are prioritized when applying for community garden plots, and that is besides the point, as there are enough gardens throughout the city to meet demand. Every site reserves plots for youth so they can dig in the dirt while learning responsibility and having a space of their own. One can walk down a smooth sidewalk and have shade on sunny days because more street trees, including fruit trees, have been planted and are maintained. Tiny vegetable gardens and wildflowers grow in planters that serve as buffered bike lanes.

We try out ciclovía, temporarily closing streets in various neighborhoods, highlighting the food, art, music, dance, and cultural institutions. True slow rolls, where cyclists are not left behind, bring people into neighborhoods they might not routinely visit. Demonstration projects are the norm; when dangerous intersections are identified, we take quick action to try fixing them, even if we don’t get it 100% right the first time. Schools guide children in designing and then painting colorful crosswalks within 1500 feet of the building — creating a visual announcement that one is within a school zone and helping children strengthen their sense of belonging in a community.

The amphitheater by Front Street gets use, as does the one in Pope Park West. There are no dead spaces because we do not limit ourselves to planning events at venues with parking lots. Directions include information about bus routes and bicycle parking because it is not novel for someone to arrive by something other than a private car. Commercial areas outside of downtown, such as Park Street and Albany Avenue, have installed parking meters; shoppers have more luck finding on-street parking because long-term car storage is not practical under this system. The revenue from these meters is pumped back into the district, helping to keep the streets maintained. All major corridors benefit from BID services on level with those provided in the Central Business District.

Potluck dinners are planned in the community outside of churches and beyond Monday Night Jazz, encouraging people to have face-to-face conversations all year round. Residents lean less heavily on social media as a result, and when they do use it, there are fewer spitting contests because community members have taken the time to get to know one another. Museums are friendlier, whether by installing sandwich boards welcoming visitors and propping open doors, or by programming events on patios. Public art can be approached; there are no fences separating people from sculptures. The painted utility boxes seen in the South End have proven to discourage tagging, provoking other neighborhoods to seek local artists for this and mural art, engaging youth.

Little Free Libraries/Libros Libres open in more neighborhoods. There is free and open WiFi throughout the city, with well-marked charging stations in scattered locations. We are living in the information age and we act like it.

We are able to fund these amenities and programs because we have adjusted our priorities. This creates more jobs for city residents. If people are taking long bus rides into the suburbs for work, it’s not because these are their only employment options.

What We’ve Got

All of those things are possible, but we’re not there yet. We have some leaders who close themselves off to new ideas, and some residents who accept that this is just the way things go.

There was promise of citywide WiFi. That never panned out. We have a functional Central Business Improvement District, but go to Park Street, and you have to wonder why there is litter covering the busted sidewalks. If you walk or bike to a meeting, you’re treated like a super-athlete or an alien with three heads; you decide if it’s better to be fetishized or viewed as a weirdo. We are contemplating sharrows. Getting anything to happen through the correct channels is painfully slow, and that’s if you get the green light at all. Promoting progressive ideas is a constant battle, fought with people stuck in a time capsule or with those who overthink risk.

The Shift

If there is any interest in crawling out of the rut that Hartford is in, we need a cultural shift. Becoming a sustainable, forward-thinking city requires leadership and citizenship who embrace creativity and experimentation, and who possess courage.

Look at any business that has stalled. Are there one or more department heads who stopped evolving and accepting new ideas forty years ago? Does it seem they are terrified of change? Are they phoning it in until retirement?

It’s not a matter of hiring and employing younger people exclusively. You lose experience and institutional memory quick by taking that route. But, employees of any age who fail to adapt are no longer serving the company’s best interests. In the case of a city, this stagnation stunts growth in a way that impacts more than revenue.

One way to deal with this inflexibility? Improv classes. All current and new City employees should be exposed to the basic “Yes, and…” concept. Eventually, in improv, people do hit dead ends and say no, but in the meantime, they’ve entertained a number of ideas. Basically, City officials and employees need to be empowered to explore possibilities via brainstorming, rather than writing something off because it does not fit an algorithm that worked for them in 1968.

We seem to make problem solving more difficult than it is, as if we need to come up with dozens of shiny, fresh ideas. It’s simpler than that. What are other mid-size cities doing? They’ve done the trial and error for us already in many cases. LimeBike is an example of this. The dockless bike share company did not get its start in Hartford; it launched in other cities first. By observing what went wrong elsewhere, they planned so the introduction here could go more smoothly. What the casual observer does not know is that in the months leading up to bike share entering Hartford, there were all kinds of meetings between company reps and members of the community, including police and corporate leaders. From having these conversations, they learned of the need to do early outreach to the scrapyards to prevent loss. It has not been perfect, but Lime has made adjustments as needed.

We need to learn to be okay with a level of beta testing. This does not mean leaping thoughtlessly or ignoring data, but making good faith attempts with an understanding that there will be failures and we can learn from those and make changes as we go. This is a different mindset from encountering failure, throwing up our hands, and proclaiming something a total loss.

This requires gumption. It requires breaking out of non-stop planning mode to take action, sooner than later. Again, we want thoughtful decisions that are made using research, but it is problematic to stagnate in the planning phase. Taking ten years to polish plans, then secure money, is essentially guaranteeing that we will need to rework those plans because technological advancements have made aspects of our plans obsolete.

It seems that the unwillingness to move from eternal planning to action is a stalling maneuver, ever-hopeful that the past will return to save us and all this pesky rapid change will fade away.

We need more courage. We need more City officials who routinely get out of the office and into the streets and parks. We need to hire more City residents, or require and enforce that new hires move to Hartford. We want the best talent, but look around and make the case that all our current out-of-city hires fit the bill.

We show our priorities by how we allocate funds. Are we prioritizing car storage or people? Jobs for many, or high wages for a few department heads?

There is no single business that will move into Hartford to save us. Having a police force triple what we’ve got won’t get us to where we need to go. There are smaller decisions being made every day that impact us all, but which often go unchallenged. How are we working to change this?

Read part one and two