At the State of Downtown Luncheon hosted by the Downtown Association, I learned a lot about what’s what. One of the people who did the educating was a virtual Joe Minicozzi in a video piece prepared for the occasion. Here’s Part One; go to the Downtown Commission site to view the rest. You may want to tape your jaw shut to keep it from hitting the floor when you see the facts within.

If you like what you see, please think about becoming a friend of the downtown, $35/year for a family membership! The Downtown Association would love your support. They’re doing the yeoman’s task of advocating for Downtown, and they could use the validation and support.

From the Asheville Street Sentinel:

“As previously reported, the annual Point in Time Count of the homeless population in Buncombe county is tonight and service agencies throughout the city and county will conducting surveys of those who come to them. According to the North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness, the Point in Time Count is required by all communities that apply for Housing and Urban Development funding for homeless services. Coordinated here by the Asheville-Buncombe Homeless Initiative, the purpose of the Point in Time Count is to get a tally of who is homeless in a specific area on a given night.

The information is used to not only get a head count, but also to see how many people are using what services, and what the makeup of the population that is homeless looks like. The surveys, which are anonymous, ask such questions as Where did you sleep last night? When did you start being homeless? How are you using available services? and Why did you become homeless/through what circumstances? Not including basic demographic information there are 14 questions, and all staff has been trained on how to get the most accurate information they can.”

This post is ripped directly from Asheville, NC 2010: A Financial Crossroads, a report prepared by Asheville City Staff to put our current economic position in perspective. I’ll be featuring excerpts from the report from time to time. Click here to read all eleven pages.

In his book, Cities Without Suburbs, David Rusk used census data from 1950 to 2000 to analyze cities’ fiscal health in the context of demographics, growth patterns and economic bases. Rusk employed a measure of the degree to which a city either “captured” population growth or “contributed” through population loss in a regional area and compared that data to indicators of the cities’ fiscal health (namely bond ratings). Rusk called cities that captured a greater proportion of the population as “elastic” while cities that lost a greater proportion of the population were called “inelastic.” practical means of providing services is ineffective and unsustainable. In short, municipal growth should be balanced and should seek to include that which is truly urbanized.

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