Design Review Committee disapproves replacement "Sign"
Preserve Jazz Festival announces sabbatical for 2015
NOTE: Don’t forget to share your thoughts on whether or not we have a brain drain in Birmingham over on MCQ.
So apparently when The J. Clyde owner Jerry Hartley and Birmingham mayor Larry Langford had their disagreement yesterday tat the end of the Five Points South Merchants Association meeting, they weren’t arguing about that album by The Ramones. They also weren’t approaching the comments from the same perspective based on the varying accounts of the story. Though based on what’s been going on around the region for the past few years, they should have been.
Perhaps if Hartley had used the term human capital flight instead of brain drain Mayor Langford would have understood his point more clearly. Funny thing is I’ve sat in several meetings both here in Birmingham and elsewhere where the term brain drain has been used with most people agreeing that it is the case. It’s not necessarily a knock on the city’s residents, but the causes for the drain are something to consider when you look at the tools needed to showcase the magic that Mayor Langford says is happening right now in town and needs to continue to happen.
This would be why organizations like the local chapter of the Harvard Club created a program called “Stop the Brain Drain” and several organizations, including our Regional Chamber of Commerce (it’s on page 2) and Empower Alabama (under education) use the term to describe our community’s perception that we cannot retain our college-educated individuals.
People have been working for years to combat the issue; in 2002, then CEO of CTS Steve Atkins told the Birmingham Business Journal that “we strive to keep these kids here by getting them involved in challenging and interesting projects and actually help with the brain-drain problem.”
When revealing their Top 40 under 40 in 2008, the BBJ reported that according to available data, Birmingham was the only city in Alabama that didn’t show a brain drain.
Even with those efforts and results, we should not be content with just getting by on our efforts to make the region more welcoming and inviting for those young professionals looking for somewhere to call home at the beginning (and hopefully throughout) their careers or to those that want to advance in their career considering metro Birmingham as an option. I’ll aim my comments towards the young professional angle.
There are a lot of active young people in Birmingham, AL nowadays. They are finding a way to have their voices heard, however we are still hearing them say that they need to go somewhere else to advance their careers. They want to make an impact now and have their voices heard; they’re willing to sit on a junior board and wait their turn, though they hope that they are being used as effectively as possible. If they find that they aren’t, they are more willing to disconnect from the rest of the community, depriving us of that one person that could take us to the next level. Sometimes that disconnection doesn’t necessarily mean leaving town but just leaving the high society life that many feel is the only way to become a leader.
We should not just look to young people as prospective members of a junior board or as people who can offer opinions on suggestions but not the reccommendations themselves. There is still a level of disconnection among young professional organizations, despite significant efforts for that not to be the case. There are also young people that don’t necessarily know how they can contribute nor do they feel as though they are going to be allowed to. Communication should be strengthened – which means more than just sharing what’s going on but figuring out how folks can work together to effective move Birmingham forward faster than it’s currently happening and that we’re actually working together and not functioning on two different planets of reality.
Our region’s future is dependent upon everyone being on the same page about the issues. Let’s hope that the buzz surrounding this exchange that exists online already ensures we’ve gotten to that point and that we can move forward to effectively deal with the problem, instead of spending more time hoping that the overlap that needs to be happening for meaningful progress to be made does.
André Natta is the stationmaster of bhamterminal.com.
A Five Points South folly in progress
The battle’s been won (for now). The issue that we’ve got to worry about now is winning the war.
The war in this case is what will happen on the site where the Chick-Fil-A was proposed (that is assuming that a lawsuit doesn’t materialize). It’s been reported recently that a long awaited renovation of the 103-year old Terrace Court apartment building across 20th Street South from the site is set to begin, with as much as $4 million planned to be spent on the project. That should somehow influence what is considered for the site.
The points (courtesy of Elizabeth Barbaree-Tasker’s comments at the meeting) highlighted by Jeremy Erdreich in this blog post recapping the meeting provide another set of criteria for what could potentially be considered on that site.
There are some saying that Panera Bread would be a proper alternative for the proposed Chick-Fil-A location. Any solution that looks at a chain placing a suburban solution on that site is missing what the major point of the battle should have been.
It’s been an issue of preserving the character of the surrounding neighborhood.
While I’m a huge fan of Panera Bread, I look at their suggested arrival in Five Points South on that site as simply providing a nicer visual but not necessarily dealing with the issue at hand.
You will still have a one-story suburban structure with surface parking taking up one quarter of a major intersection in the city’s greater downtown area. The drive-through will not be there, but the traffic from people picking up their take-out lunches will be.
I’ve long held the opinion that we live in a region that could serve as an example of what a New South metropolitan area could do in the first part of the 21st century. This intersection and the surrounding community provides a golden opportunity to demonstrate just what that could look like and how it would function.
Perhaps it would help if the property owner wanted a solution that was more befitting an intersection that sees an average of 38,000 vehicles a day. Despite the community’s desires, a lot will be determined by what he wants to deal with on that site. This currently means that it will most likely be something that’s one story, at least for now.
Joey Kennedy’s hosting a live chat at 1 p.m. on al.com to discuss the issue further, though I’m thinking that people will be willing to accept a wolf in sheep’s clothing rather than actually affect a change in mindset about what Alabama’s largest city truly lives like at its core.
Let me know what you think in the comments section.
André Natta is the stationmaster for bhamterminal.com.
Photo: The Story Teller – Five Point South. stanroth/Flickr
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Posted in Commentary, development
Tagged AL, Alabama, bham, Birmingham, Chick-Fil-A, construction, development, Five Points South, folly, Panera Bread, status