Revitalize...or Die

Your City Is Sick...and More Jobs Isn't the Cure...

Jeff has spent more than two decades helping downtowns recover, first as a Main Street manager running Ohio's statewide program, then as founder of Revitalize or Die and author of Your City is Sick. He joins Teasha to argue that economic development has solved for the wrong problem for forty years.

• Jeff's five points of civic pride: identity, aesthetics, community, standards, and engagement, and why "aesthetics" still gets dismissed as lipstick on a pig despite the real estate data behind it.
• The real diagnosis behind struggling downtowns: not a lack of funding, but rampant apathy, and the six-months-without-cleaning-your-house analogy Jeff uses to explain it.
• What Jeff's civic health assessments and civic pride workshops actually produce for a city in three days, and why he measures success by whether leaders stop chasing "bigger" and start chasing "better."
• How Jeff's own seat on the Mount Lebanon commission puts his framework to the test, including a real fight over bike lanes and who local infrastructure is actually built to serve.