My Athens

My "Athens Rising" Archive

For a few months last year, I helped write the Athens Rising column--an opinion  column about local  development, planning and architecture issues--for Flagpole Magazine, the weekly alternative newspaper here in Athens, Ga.

The column's main writer--Kevan Williams--had asked me to write the column every other week while he traveled out West to places like Portland, Ore. And that's what I did--having fun, mostly--from August through December 2010.

Kevan's back in town now, and I'm off traveling abroad and happy--for now at least--to be free of deadlines.

Here are the columns I wrote:

• August, 25, 2010:  Future of Downtown Athens

• September, 8, 2010: A Look at a Complex Zoning Decision

• September 22, 2010: Exploring an Overlooked Neighborhood

• October 6, 2010: Adding Affordable Housing, Avoiding Gentrification

• October 20, 2010: Tapping Students for Downtown Density

• November 3, 2010: Grocery Store Dreams, Part 1

• November 17, 2010: Grocery Store Dreams, Part 2

• December 1, 2010: Dilapidated Buildings, Factories and Cities

 

How to Brand a City--Do's and Don't's

Don’t try to out-suburb the suburbs with car-oriented living.

Do try to understand what makes your city unique, and use that to create a city “brand” that “springs from the native soil.”

That’s the advice Aaron Renn, who writes about cities for a blog called The Urbanophile, is giving to cities and their mayors. He says cities like Austin, Texas, Portland, Ore., Charleston, S.C., Houston, Texas and Las Vegas, Nev. have seen success in part because “they were able to create aspirational narratives about their brand promise that resonated with the people they wanted to attract.”

What should Athens’ brand be?

I want Athens to keep attracting smart, creative people who like to walk or bike to work, school and play. So, I’d like to create an Athens city brand built on an incredibly vibrant college town scene that’s fed by great local food, serenaded by the best music anywhere--all woven together by some of most walkable and green neighborhoods you’ll find in the South. (There’s still a lot—a lot—of work to be done to create the kind of neighborhoods I’m envisioning, but the raw materials are here.)

What’s your brand idea? And can you express it in a bite-sized, catchy phrase? (I can’t for mine—at least not yet.)

Read Renn’s article here.

Walkability Is Economic Development

What can we do here in Athens, Ga. to attract a bigger share of young educated professionals—the kind of people who are moving their energy, their talent and their earnings potentials to “cool” cities like Austin, Texas, Charlotte, N.C. and Portland, Ore.?

Today’s Athens Banner-Herald editorial asserts that Athens is “not ready to attract the kinds of industries that could provide jobs for those young professionals.” In support of this assertion, the editorial points to the failure to develop a high-tech industrial park near the intersection of U.S. Highway 78 and Georgia Highway 316, the failure to attract two pharmaceutical manufacturers to the area and the failure of the effort to land a new federal animal disease research laboratory.

If instead of failing, Athens had succeed at building that high-tech industrial park, and getting those pharmaceutical jobs and the federal laboratory, it’s possible Athens would now be securely on the path to becoming a “cool” city.  But I doubt it.

There’s always a little bit of the chicken or the egg conundrum to questions about local economic development strategy, but part of the reason Athens isn’t attracting the kind of high-tech firms and jobs we want is that Athens just isn’t a “cool” enough city yet.

Tax breaks and cheap land usually aren’t enough to attract high-tech firms—whose success is keyed to their ability to attract talented workers (that is, the kind of people who want to live in cool cities)—to specific communities. The firms want to locate in places their potential employees want to live.

And what kind of places are those? Well, as the editorial suggests, they are places that have “invested in the elements of cultural coolness: good coffee, good food and good music.” Athens certainly has a decent share of that kind of coolness, but I think there’s more to the story than that. There’s good reason to believe that many young educated professionals today also want to live in walkable neighborhoods where you can get groceries, go out to eat, play at a park, listen to music or go to a bar without always having to get in your car.

The talent of the local labor pool is certainly among the most important factors in determining where high tech firms will locate. The trouble is it’s really hard for local governments to do anything very direct about improving the talent pool of existing residents. But if they want to, local governments can make big improvements in local infrastructure, in making walkable neighborhoods, creating lively downtowns and fostering lively cultural scenes. And these amenities—which are quite tangible and easily perceptible—are proven talent attractors.

Of course, Athens should continue to court high-tech firms to move here. Of course, Athens should try to make it as easy as possible and prudent for employers to move here. Keep in mind, though, that because Athens is home to a large, well-regarded university and already has a solid reputation as a culturally lively spot, the city doesn’t have to beg for attention from employers. We’ll keep getting glances at least.

But if we want to start “winning” more in terms of getting employers to move here, then I think we need to change our economic development strategy.

Instead of scrambling to accommodate whatever random suitor-firms wink at us, let’s adopt an economic development strategy that prioritizes enhancing walkability and cultural vitality in central Athens. (Personally, I think Athens needs more work on the walkability front—that is, on increasing density, creating “complete” streets,” more mixed-use development—than it does on the cultural front.) This sort of strategy, I think, will likely be more effective in getting more employers to say “yes” to locating here. It also has the advantage of being something that local governments can actually do reasonably well.

How to Stop Student Rot

[The best way for established neighborhood residents and homeowners to curb irritating student behaviors—like leaving garbage carts on the sidewalk all week long, making lots of noise and parking on the grass—is to go talk to their student neighbors soon after they move in to discuss things like city noise ordinances and politeness.

That's the advice Athens-Clarke Co. Commissioner David Lynn offered in Sunday's Athens Banner-Herald story about some college students violating a local ordinance limiting how many unrelated people that can live together in house in neighborhoods zoned for single-families.

Compared to trying to enforce an ordinance that requires the counting of "unrelated" people living together, he's surely right: direct talk about what really irritates people—the trash, noise and parking issues—is a better approach.

But even though there's much to recommend Lynn's approach—it's immediately implementable, it doesn't involve writing new rules and it apparently works (at least so far, in particular neighborhoods)—there are problems with it. First, it gets old pretty fast. And second, it won't work in neighborhoods under heavy student pressure.

I've now lived in four college towns, always fairly near campus. It's not fun to have to talk to new neighbors every year about fairly obvious matters of politeness and then be ignored as often as not. Over time as more students move in, fewer established residents have the patience to do that every year and so they move...and yet another block gets lost to student rot—which is a real loss to the community.

That said, I personally haven't had any student problems where I live in Athens...but I'm sure some neighborhoods nearer to campus do have such problems.

Anyway, here's my take on a possible way to address the problem of student rot. I wrote this while living in Lexington, Ky. in a neighborhood that was badly afflicted with the rot...]

* * *

When college students cram into homes built for single families, the rot that results is hard to miss. Even if you've never lived in a neighborhood near campus, you'd have no trouble identifying the telltale signs. Trash-strewn yards. Over-parked streets and driveways. Rotting couches on rotting porches. Loud parties into the wee hours.

There is no mystery about why college students make nice, older neighborhoods look crappy when enough of them move in. What is a mystery, though, is why cities and colleges—town and gown—don't seem motivated to do much to prevent the spoiling of these neighborhoods.

This lack of motivation is not good news for anyone—for neighborhoods, for cities, for colleges or for students. Here are three reasons why town and gown should work together to stop student rot:

1. Crappiness and crime. When too many college students move in, they have two neighborhood-killing effects. First, they quickly make houses look like run down tenements. Second, their high turnover rate sucks the life out of the neighborhood by making it hard for neighbors to come to know and trust and respect each other. When neighborhoods lack neighborliness they rapidly become unpleasant, and risk becoming unsafe as well. Cities risk seeing neighborhoods slide into shabby and dangerous places in need of constant patrol. Colleges risk being surrounded by such neighborhoods.

2. Use of prime residential areas for workers and families. Near campus neighborhoods are usually located in desirable parts of town. They are often walkable neighborhoods, close to work, schools and shopping. Such short commute neighborhoods are becoming even more desirable for working families and individuals as gas prices continue to rise and as more people seek "greener" lifestyles. Having such neighborhoods helps cities attract and retain longer-term taxpaying residents. They also help colleges to attract new faculty.

3. Opportunity to harness student energy. Efforts to stop student rot, if done right (I'll suggest ways to do it right below), can transform even large student populations into unalloyed economic and cultural gold for cities. After all, students are hardly just a bane for cities; they are huge assets, too. The trick is to harness student energy to create more vibrant life on campus and in a distinctive student-centered city district.

Myths about student rot

Let's say, after having absorbed the three points just mentioned, city and college policymakers now understand why it's important to fight student rot. Let's say they are motivated to act. What should they do?

The first order of business should be to avoid being distracted by some common myths.

Myth #1: Students are only half the problem. It's true that students and the absentee landlords that rent to them don't cause all the rot. Irresponsible homeowners certainly do exist. So do responsible students. But because you can find examples of bad homeowners and good students doesn't change the reality that most students are highly transient renters with little stake in the neighborhoods they live in and that most homeowners aren't very transient and usually do care a lot about where they live. Students don't cause all the rot, but they are surely responsible for most of it.

Myth #2: Student rot in neighborhoods near campus is to be expected. Well, of course, your neighborhood is infested with students. You live next to campus! What did you expect? If something like that is your response to people who complain about student rot, consider this: not long ago neighborhoods right next to campus—right next to lots of students—were populated mainly by homeowners with a sprinkling of student renters. Not long ago many of these neighborhoods were pleasant, cared-for places. An enlivening diversity of people—most with a real stake in a good neighborhood—lived there. This mix often included college faculty, administrators and workers and their families, first-time homebuyers, older folks with long-time connections to the area—and some students.

Myth #3: Increasing student enrollments are the cause. Students flood into once pleasant, stable neighborhoods. Homeowners flee. Neighborhoods deteriorate. Surely, increases in student enrollment explain this. Well, that's certainly part of the explanation. But it is only part because the student flood into residential neighborhoods outpaces the growth in enrollment in most places. Choices made by colleges play a bigger explanatory role. Choices such as: building less on-campus student housing; ending on-campus living requirements for freshmen and sophomores; and banning or severely restricting on-campus drinking. It's these choices—choices that push students off-campus into city neighborhoods—and not increasing enrollments that account for most of the student influx.

Myth #4: New ordinances will solve the problem. Under pressure from homeowner constituents, city policymakers may be tempted to fight student rot with new ordinances. Direct attacks on the problem include proposals to limit the number of students that can live together in one house or to restrict the number of houses that can be rented to students. Other proposals target symptoms: ticketing loud partiers, fining students and landlords for trash and poor upkeep and extending college conduct rules to cover off-campus behavior. There an indirect efforts, too, such as using zoning rules to protect architectural character which may have the effect of reducing the financial attractiveness of chopping-up single-family houses into student rentals. Some of these ideas might be worthy on their own terms or employed as temporary measures. But they won't do much to stop student rot because they don't deal with a fundamental economic fact: the intense student demand for housing near campus and the good money to be made by renting. Ignoring the economics isn't helpful. The force is too strong.

Better ideas

So, what should be done? What might work?

As I see it, the efforts of city and college policymakers should aim at significantly reducing student demand for housing in near campus neighborhoods.

This doesn't mean adopting policies that allow homeowners to shoot students on sight. It doesn't mean dispersing students far and wide. It doesn't mean cutting enrollments.

What it does mean is concentrating most of student life where it belongs: on campus and in a well-defined, vibrant student-centered district.

Here are three proposals intended to accomplish that:

1. Revitalize on-campus student housing. Colleges should revive the tradition of on-campus living for most students, and build the capacity to house them. Many students today don't want to live on campus. One reason they don't is that most dormitories really suck; they are the American version of bleak East German apartment blocs. But this can be changed. Some colleges are now building new-style residence halls featuring well-designed rooms with fully equipped kitchens, fitness centers, social lounges, movie theaters, pools, game rooms, cable TV and even restaurants, coffee shops and other retail spaces. Even college administrators are starting to realize that cool student housing and other social amenities help with recruitment efforts. When combined with requirements that students live on campus, such efforts create a concentrated, revitalized campus culture. Students like that.

2. End prohibition. When colleges ban on-campus drinking they give students a powerful motivation to move into off-campus neighborhoods where they can party at will without any supervision. Colleges that lift this prohibition and establish policies to allow of-age students to drink responsibly in their rooms and create other venues where social drinking is permitted will be better positioned to intervene when there are problems. Prohibition doesn't stop student drinking; it just shifts where the drinking is done. The responsibility for supervision properly lies with the colleges, not the residents of near campus neighborhoods.

3. Create a vibrant student district. Even where there's a lively on-campus student culture, students will spill into the city—especially into the nearby neighborhoods—for adventure or at least a change of pace. The city should welcome them with a well-defined, concentrated district that caters to their interests and needs. Restaurants. Bookstores. Coffee houses. Smoke shops. Affordable off-campus apartments. Clothing stores. Free wi-fi. Bars. Art galleries. Some high-end condos for the rich kids. A museum. A public water fountain that it's OK to splash around in. Such a district would be extremely appealing—and not just to students. It would harness the economic and cultural energy of students for the good of everyone.

In the meantime

To do these things will require lots of cooperation among city and college policymakers and developers, too. And because it won't happen overnight, city and college leaders must also cooperate on policies for the interim to assure both existing and prospective near campus neighborhood residents that the vitality and quality of these neighborhoods is important.

This means cities should vigorously enforce housing codes and noise ordinances and swiftly fine students and absentee landlords for violations. Colleges should extend student honor codes to encompass off-campus behavior and appoint troubleshooters to work with neighborhood groups and residents to identify and deal with student problems in residential areas.

But don't forget these are temporary "fixes." They are intended mainly to signal that cities and colleges care about the fate of near campus neighborhoods. If intended as permanent solutions to the problem, these policies will only guarantee endless frustration for everyone involved. If the real problem—student demand for housing in near campus neighborhoods—is not dealt with, then the result will be campuses surrounded by shabby, unsafe neighborhoods. This will happen sooner than you think. And when it happens, everyone—students, residents, city leaders and college administrators—loses.

New goal for neighborhood residents

The benefits of these proposals are clear and substantial. Cities get higher quality neighborhoods. Students and colleges get re-vitalized campus life. Everyone gets to enjoy the cultural and economic energy of a new and distinctive student-centered district.

To obtain these prizes, however, town and gown policymakers will have to be pushed into action by the residents of near campus neighborhoods.

But these residents will have to embrace a new, more strategic goal—that of significantly reducing demand for student housing in their neighborhoods.

This means energies currently spent on seeking new ordinances to control student rentals and to punish students and absentee landlords for misbehavior will have to be re-directed. The new work will involve enlisting city and state policymakers to help push colleges to build more student housing and to re-vitalize campus life. It will also mean demanding that cities start working with planners and developers to create student-centered commercial and cultural districts.

Such work will take more time than getting a new ordinance passed, but the pay-off will be much sweeter: a pleasant, safe neighborhood right next to campus.

# # #

Do Loyal, Passionate City Residents Spur Growth?

What qualities in a city inspire the loyalty and passion of residents?

According to a study conducted by Gallup and funded by the Knight Foundation, the top three factors that lead to strong attachment to a city are its physical beauty, the opportunities it offers for socializing and its openness to a variety of different kinds of people.

We should care about this because, according to the study—entitled The Soul of the Community—cities with the highest proportion of attached residents experienced stronger economic growth than cities where residents reported weaker attachment.

Now, the direction of this effect is hard to pin down. Is it attachment that’s contributing to the growth, or growth that’s making the attachment possible? Or both?

The study authors don’t make a strong claim one way or the other, though they clearly suspect that attachment does help push economic growth. To show the plausibility of this, they point out other studies that show that boosting the emotional connection of employees does in fact lead to improved financial performance of the companies where they work.

If the loyalty and passion of residents really does help spur a city’s economic growth, then advocates of local economic development might want to change their focus.

So, instead of asking existing residents to spend tax money to attract outsiders—say, with job or development tax credits or financing the expansion of conference centers—these growth advocates might want to start pushing for improvements that make existing residents happy.  Such improvements might include neighborhood pocket parks, more sidewalks, a permanent public farmer’s market, property tax relief for low-income folks, better designed streets, more public swimming pools. Things like that.

The suggestion isn’t that trying to attract outsiders is bad, but that rather that the best way to spur economic growth—including getting outsiders to open their wallets here or move jobs or businesses here—may be to make improvements that please the people who already live in town.

Maybe good places to live in grow because they invest in what makes them good places to live?

Walkability Linked With Higher Property Values

Savannah Morning News reporter Adam Van Brimmer writes about how enhancing walkability will improve property values in Savannah neighborhoods:

"People will pay for livability," [walkable communities expert Dan] Burden  said. "You change a road and calm the traffic, and you increase property values multiple blocks deep. You put in sidewalks and trees, and values go up even more."

Done in tandem, road changes and sidewalk and tree improvement boost values from $5,000 to $35,000 on average, Burden said.

Considering most Savannah neighborhoods are built out - constrained by established roadways or the natural geography - improving walkability could be the key to sustaining and growing property values.

Same goes for Athens.

Read the full article.

Thanks to Sustainable Savannah.

Image credit: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News

Ben Emanuel Answers My Questions

By Dan Lorentz

For those of you who don’t take notice of bylines, Ben Emanuel writes about local government and politics for Flagpole Magazine.  He pens the City Dope column.

To help me better understand my new hometown, I asked Emanuel a few basic questions about the landscape of local politics here in Athens.

I’m glad I asked him my questions when I did. In September, Emanuel will mark his fourth—and, it turns out, final—year as city editor for the weekly paper. This fall he will be transitioning out of local journalism and into environmental advocacy and watershed protection.

Q. Every community seems to have a set of durable conflicts that shape local politics. What are the key conflicts in Athens? Who are the major players?

A. Certainly there's the longstanding issue of town-gown relations—both cooperation and conflict—in all its permutations. The multitude of permutations means that town-gown conflict can take shape through any number of issues, from homeowner-renter/student conflict. For example,  the single-family zoning issues and the rental registration ordinance, early in Heidi's [Athens-Clarke Co. Mayor Heidi Davison] first term), to conflict over the growth of the university (where did that new parking deck at the intramural fields come from?!).

In the end, of course, all the town-gown stuff basically boils down to economics—pretty paradoxical economics. The smallest county in the state has a lot of state-owned land that's off the tax rolls, although not all the UGA Real Estate Foundation's land is off the rolls, [UGA director of community relations] Pat Allen pointed out to me once.  But then again, would Athens even be here if not for UGA?

This economic angle leads straight into a more cultural dimension of the same thing: the resentment that many locals feel toward students, despite the obvious relationship that, for example, [Flagpole Magazine publisher] Pete McCommons hit on in a Pub Notes column at this time of year, two years ago: "This is where Athens gets really strange. It's why we're here, really, as much as the students. You may not personally brighten at the prospect of liquored-up red hordes, but you benefit from them. They bring you money, whether directly or indirectly, and their cash helps keep Athens weird and also reminds us why we want it so."

Another key conflict, while not nearly as old as that one, is growth. In terms of the sprawl angle, this conflict is maybe just a decade or two old, but it's still a defining one—in part because Athens has tried to take a different approach to the issue from the rest of north Georgia.

Of course, "growth" to some means general economic growth, not just land development, so then you get into economic development issues like NBAF [the proposed National Bio- and Agro- Defense Facility] or even the Enron (!) thing several years ago. [Enron thing=the controversy that erupted in 2001 about Athens-Clarke Co.'s efforts to encourage Enron to build and operate a 560 megawatt natural gas power plant in the county.]  The major players are: environmental/land use advocates, economic development/Chamber of Commerce folks, local government (on both sides of the equation).

There's also the not-really-all-that-often discussed matrix of race issues, with poverty issues intersecting heavily. There's Athens/Oconee Co. stuff, with so many upper-middle-class Clarke Co. workers living in Oconee.

Let's close for now with the intra-government conflict between Athens-Clarke Co. (ACC) elected officials (and their constituents) and ACC staff. Since, under the ACC charter, the manager's office holds a lot of power and the mayor is basically assigned the task of herding cats on the commission (okay, along with some other things), many people see this as an ongoing friction that's important. It is, but sometimes I think this friction is overstated.

Q. There will be a few major stories about the upcoming 2010 mayoral election in Athens. What will they be? Speculate. [Note: I asked this question just before Spencer Fyre, executive director of Habitat for Humanity in Athens, announced he was setting-up an exploratory committee to raise funds for a possible run for mayor.]

A. Well, it'll depend who's running, won't it?

It's fair to say that Charlie Maddox and Nancy Denson appear be trying to line up support very early, but I tend to think there will be at least another fairly serious candidate or two before it's all said and done. Sorry, but at present I don't see either of the college students who are running as serious candidates.

If we assume that there's an additional candidate (or candidates?) on the left end of things, then I think we've got a story along these contours: What's next for the whole general liberal-progressive agenda which has taken hold in Athens over the past decade? The commission has changed character almost completely in 10 years, and while there might be a few seats up for grabs in 2010, outside of District 7 [seat currently held by Commissioner Kathy Hoard] it's hard to see the general bent of the commission changing much.

But it has taken several years (a) for the mayor and commission to fully turn over, and (b) for the body then to find its footing and learn how to advance a progressive agenda in the most efficient ways.

So, I think it's already an open question about where we're headed as a sorta-working-on-progressive city, and it makes sense to me that that concern would be crystallized in the mayor's race. But I'll admit it's my own bias to see that as a big issue.

But there's also economic development. All candidates will have to be thinking about it. A relevant question: What have various folks learned from the NBAF thing?

Just one more issue: charter review. I don't know and can't say how it will come up in the election, but it's supposed to happen soon thereafter, if I understand correctly. Periodic review of the ACC charter is built into the document itself; open questions may well pertain to the form of government here. Could get interesting.

Q. A little history lesson, please. How has the commission changed almost completely in 10 years? What drove the change?

A. In a nutshell, it's just that the mayor and commission, as a body, has shifted toward a strong predominance of liberal-progressive political perspectives. You can see the contrast most starkly in seats like District 5, where David Lynn replaced the late Hugh Logan, and in the mayor's seat, where Heidi replaced Doc Eldridge. Even if most folks around here were called Democrats back then (and Doc was, in case you don't know), they were traditional centrist/conservative "Democrats" (or good old boys, as some would say). I don't want to overstate it—after all, Gwen O'Looney was mayor before Doc, and if Gwen wasn't a break with tradition...

Basically, you now have folks in elected office here who value environmental protection, neighborhood protection, who are socially liberal and who seem to be interested in promoting the kinds of things a progressive city promotes, from bike lanes to partner benefits to vigorous recycling and on down the line. I guess that's fairly obvious to a newcomer, but just remember that we are a smallish Southern town, so—like anywhere—things haven't always been this way!

What drove the change? I don't know—maybe the townies and the liberal profs and their kids all just finally built up enough critical mass to win elections? Maybe certain issues—like land use/ sprawl/ growth—catalyzed political change? I wasn't around back then (er, okay, I technically was around starting in the very late '90s, but I was in college, and NOT paying attention to this stuff), so I have to say I really wouldn't know.

There's probably a lot in what I've written above that long-timers here could and would correct or finesse!

Q. Who cares the most about the outcome of the 2010 mayoral election? Which people? Which constituencies or interest groups are hungriest to win?

A. I'm not sure I know yet. I've already made clear here, I think, that I tend to think from the liberal-progressive (and enviro) perspective, and I think that that whole crowd will be very interested in holding onto their gains of the last few election cycles while also laying a foundation to continue moving their agenda forward. So I think those folks are hungry to win for those reasons.

Is the Chamber of Commerce/ Republican crowd hungry to win back City Hall? Maybe, but we're not really seeing it yet. And if they are, they might need to find a stronger candidate than what they've got. Who knows: maybe they will find someone else.

Meanwhile, for some people there's probably a very real question of how much the mayor's race matters, on account of our form of government. It will matter, though, to enough people, at least as much as past unified government mayoral elections have: after all, you could say that change is still underway here, and has only begun but is not fully accomplished. And you need a mayor to direct that change, most likely.

So personally, I see the race in those terms: the folks who want to see a truly progressive city here probably feel the need to keep working hard and lay the groundwork for continued progressive change. This may be a narrow perspective on my part, but hey: it's early yet. It may well be that a lot of people will express their preference for a moderate political position (or conservative, for some), but I don't see them as "hungriest." That's just me!

Q. Local government officials have recognized and are dealing with a host of challenges facing the community. Are they missing anything? What challenges aren’t getting the attention they should?

A. I tend to give our local officials a lot of credit on this front. I'd be tempted to say that air quality doesn't get quite the depth of attention it really needs, but then again it was a topic at this month's Mayor & Commission work session (see John Huie's story in Flagpole), and apparently ACC Environmental Coordinator Dick Field made the argument there that we've done a lot to improve the situation already.

To take another example from last week's Flagpole, homelessness is a growing problem, which everyone's aware of, but I think it's fair to say that the problem is outstripping the "solution infrastructure" at present.

That's not really the kind of thing you're asking for, I realize, but I'd guess (purely a guess) that you could say the same about a lot of social-service issues right now. For instance, it seems like out-of-school opportunities for middle- and high-schoolers are light here compared to bigger cities, but I've heard folks recently talking about getting those kids into work readiness stuff and other programs.

That's the thing about Athens: most stuff is probably on the radar, but a whole lot of stuff probably also needs attention in more depth. But I'm probably missing something!
___ ___ ___

This interview was conducted via email. The text published here is an ever so slightly condensed and edited version of the actual exchange, and has been reviewed by the interview subject.