Community Development: All You Need Is... A Name?

With finals out of the way, I'm catching up!

The answer to all of Central Sioux Falls' problems has been found! In response to crime, low wages, and poor housing conditions, the city planners have turned that most fearsome weapon in the community development arsenal: marketing.

Yes, they've decided to give the neighborhood a nice name to, in the words of Sioux Falls City Planner Mike Cooper, "promote the neighborhood" and "turn around the viewpoint of what this neighborhood is all about" [Gina Weber, "City Hopes Neighborhood Name Will Help Image," KELOLand.com, 2007.12.08].

And you can help: Sioux Falls has set up ballot boxes at 19 sites around the city, plus webpages where you can review the 10 names proposed by the Mayor's Neighborhood Conservation Area Committee and vote for your favorite (or even propose your own!). Polls close on January 11.

Regular readers will have no trouble recognizing that the Madville Times finds such marketing efforts to be at best harmless, at worst useless adspeak whitewashing. Madison's new slogan has brought no unexpected surge in tourism, wages, or civic spirit. Have no doubt that there's some advertising firm just itching to sell the city some nice banners with the chosen name emblazoned upon it. Those advertisers will probably be the only folks to see a direct benefit from the great renaming, perhaps followed by the real estate agents who will have a slightly nicer name to slap on the brochures for the spendier housing they'll try to develop as they gentrify the neighborhood and price lower income folks out of their neighborhood and out to less visible locations, like Crooks or Colton.

But let's not be all negative: the proposed names are kind of pretty. The Madville Times chooses Pettigrew Heights (hey! the Sioux Falls city website let me vote! Thanks!). Senator Richard F. Pettigrew lived in the neighborhood and was South Dakota's first US Senator. He also bolted from the Republican Party in 1896 to support William Jennings Bryan and the Populists as he saw the GOP serving as a tool of wealthy corporations. Sounds like my kind of guy... and certainly the kind of guy who represents the interests of the working-class residents of the neighborhood that could bear his name.