Ron Blatman’s ‘Saving the City’ Series Poses the Question: How can we ensure a better future for our cities?

What was the genesis of Saving the City—what inspired this multi-part documentary series?

I'm a San Francisco native who grew up in the City. I have been interested in cities since I was a little kid and visited a lot of cities. I’ve worked mostly in commercial real estate development and finance and consulting, but I also have a city government background and an architecture and urban design background. I look at cities from all different kinds of angles.

So, with that background, and being involved in San Francisco, which, as many people know, is an exceptionally dysfunctional city, the question became: How can you impact change? One can approach that in many different ways. I decided to do something in media. If you get lucky, you can reach a lot of people. My medium of choice is video and film. That's where I got the idea to do a film series discussing how different cities approach the same issues. I wanted people to learn from each other's experiences.

Illuminate for our readers how Saving the City frames the challenges and opportunities facing cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and others.

We organize this as a series of one-hour programs looking at how different cities approach the same subject. I've always believed that the media and public policy do not show enough context for how things have worked in the past. I wanted to show how people have tried to remake cities over the past 100 years.

In today's world, there's a housing crisis, a transportation crisis, and an infrastructure crisis. But these problems are nothing new. They've been going on for decades. If you look at writing from the 1920s to the 1980s, and take away the dates, you would think the content is about today. It’s not that what cities have done in the past is necessarily good, but instead that our problems today have context. People have been trying to address these issues for a long time.

We are working on four programs simultaneously—an introduction and three subject episodes. In the first program, we do a quick primer starting from the City Beautiful movement in the 1890s to our present day. We show how people have continually tried to make their cities better places. Our first subject episode covers housing, the second covers parks and trails, and the third one covers families in the heart of the city. Then, assuming I can raise the money, we will cover more topics like transportation, cities and food, public safety, and immigration, economic development, waterfronts, climate change, and zoos and aquariums. There’s an infinite list of stories to get tell! 

What are you discovering about context, history, and past examples, as you meet and interview various city leaders across North America?

I'm in Toronto right now filming a project called Regent Park, which was Canada's oldest, largest, and most notorious public housing project. It had the highest crime and poverty rates in Canada. It feels very similar to housing projects in the US.

Regent Park was a series of brick buildings on 69 acres from the late 1940s as part of a post-war effort to house veterans. It was originally set up as temporary housing, but instead became permanent public housing. Currently, there is a project underway that will likely take between 25 and 30 years. Most of the housing project has been demolished and with a mixed income neighborhood. It was supposed to be a one-for-one replacement, with subsidized units, and then densify the area with many additional market-rate units. However, the mix is about 60% market rate and about 35% affordable units on the site. But it also comes with recreation centers, schools, parks, cultural centers and the most elaborate social social services network you can imagine, with language training, vocational skills, media labs, dance instruction, and sports programs.

This is based on years of thinking about how to lift people out of poverty and place them into the mainstream of society. It’s worked pretty well here, and is currently home to 12,000 people. By the time they’re done with the next two phases, it will probably exceed 15,000 people. Cities used to think about how to warehouse people in “better housing” or “modern housing,” without giving thought to social services, which is just as important as physical housing.

How does Toronto’s Regent Park project compare to other initiatives—what do both have in common with the other cities in your series of documentaries?

We're comparing the Regent Park project to Centennial Place in Atlanta, which opened in 1996 just in advance of the Atlanta Olympics. At that time, the project was called Techwood Homes, built in the 1930s. It was the most violent part of Atlanta, when Atlanta was called the murder capital of the US. Techwood Homes was so violent that the cops wouldn't even patrol there. 

The project was demolished and replaced with 700 housing units, mostly mixed income, but not with a one-for-one replacement of affordable units. However, it’s a mixed-income community with a school, YMCA, early childhood education, and some social family interventionist programs. It's been very successful, and been immaculately maintained. It became the model for HUD's 1990s Hope VI program, now called Choice Neighborhoods. Many public housing projects around the country have been replaced with mixed-income developments, in the hopes that having people from various backgrounds and incomes living together lifts all people up.

The big difference between the US and Canada is that in the US, a lot of developments have been rebuilt in a new urbanist model with two-story townhomes on streets spaced out on residential blocks. They were replacing five-story brick buildings. In Canada, they demolish the projects and then actually densify the sites. In Toronto, they kept the large number of affordable units the same, and then densified with the mixed-income part. The US often reduces the number of affordable units, but maintains the number of units that were previously there.

Share the other issues explored in the Saving the City series.

We filmed a story in LA about converting office buildings to residential. It's a hot-button subject right now, in the wake of COVID and with people working from home. People are asking about what to do with the empty office space. Despite all these media stories, this is not a new issue. In 1999, LA City passed the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance which transformed the city's historic core downtown. In the 70s and 80s, much of the downtown business district moved west toward Bunker Hill, leaving a bunch of 13-story buildings effectively vacant, save for the ground floor retail. To deal with this, Tom Gilmore, an enterprising developer, the Central City Association, a downtown organization, and the City itself, worked together to change building codes, fire codes and zoning codes to allow for the conversion of the upper floors of these buildings to residential.14,000 units were created, and all mostly before COVID. We wanted to show how LA was ahead of the curve in doing this.

A similar situation happened in lower Manhattan. When the financial services industry and all their support companies moved to Midtown from the 70s-90s, there were many high-rise buildings left in lower Manhattan. The city started converting those buildings in the 90s. Today, tens of thousands of people live in lower Manhattan. There's now a Whole Foods and a Tiffany’s. It's much more of a neighborhood than just Wall Street sense.

We filmed that story in LA, and we're comparing it to the experience in Dallas. Dallas is converting portions of Class A office buildings to apartments. This is a little different than what I've seen done in other cities. In Dallas, some of the most prominent buildings in town are being included in the conversions because the office market there is so bad.

We did a deep dive on the evolution of central Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was declining slightly in population and decentralizing in the 1930s. During WWII, Pittsburgh's furnaces were burning 24/7, creating steel for the war effort. Pittsburgh was already known as the Smoky City because of the heavy pollution from the mills in and surrounding the area. Pittsburgh’s business and government leaders wanted to attract and retain talent after the war. They were also concerned about four things: Clean air, clean water, controlling the water— because Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle downtown used to flood regularly— and rebuilding large chunks of the city. Pittsburgh became the first American city to go all in on redevelopment. People were thinking about this type of redevelopment even before the war. 

There are also parallels between Pittsburgh and St Louis. St Louis enacted a smoke ordinance, and Pittsburgh used it as a model. However, St. Louis’s smoke ordinance never got put into place because of WWII, but Pittsburgh actually implemented theirs.

Another parallel with Pittsburgh is in the late 30s. St. Louis thought they should create a gateway monument to the west along their waterfront, their Mississippi. Their industry was already in decline. In 1937, St. Louis voters passed a bond measure, which allowed for the demolition of 30-40 square blocks along the riverfront. They clear cut a chunk of the city and set up a design competition in the early ‘50s for the gateway monument. Eero Saarinen won and created the Gateway Arch, and it opened in 1966. These dramatic city-changing projects take decades from conception to completion. In this instance, it took 30 years between demolishing the riverfront site and the Gateway Arch being built. 

Pittsburgh had a similar trajectory. Pittsburgh sits at the confluence of three rivers and merges into the Ohio River. They cleared the site and created a state park. In 1944, there was then a proposal to put a giant water jet at the foot of that park, and in 1974, 30 years later, the state park opened and the water jets were turned on. This is also known as the Gateway project.

In the 1970s, the professional sports world wanted to build these concrete soup bowls that would house both football and baseball teams together, as opposed to today where they build separate stadiums. The Pittsburgh Pirates played in Oakland, in an old ball field called Forbes Field. They decided that they should move downtown to a new, riverfront stadium. So, a new riverfront stadium opened in 1970 just across the river. It was within walking distance from downtown, over the Allegheny River. The impetus came from St Louis in the 60s, when they built Busch Stadium, a downtown ballpark.

This is an example of two cities making parallel decisions. The series shows that from a 30,000-foot view there are patterns that are repeated in cities all over. It's not like there's nothing new, but if you see these patterns of things that both work and don’t work, cities can learn from each other.

The COVID pandemic obviously impacted the urban cores of cities globally. How did you incorporate this unique event into your documentaries?

COVID has a big impact on what we're doing. However, I don’t want to be too closely tied to COVID because we're trying to have a larger contextual framework, and not be tied to a singular event. For example, the work from home movement was already underway before COVID hit, and it was accelerated by it. COVID accelerated a number of trends in cities. Before the pandemic, Facebook had at most a 75% occupancy rate of its office space around the world. People were already working from home. 20 years ago, consulting firms and accounting firms were “hoteling,” where employees share desks and phones, and when they leave they flip the pictures of their kids down.

Mass transit systems have also suffered since the pandemic. There was initially a palpable health fear from people around using transit of a lot of people from using transit. In LA people won't ride trains and buses because there's a fear of crime on the systems. It doesn’t matter if it's overblown or public perception.

Elaborate on the most promising city initiatives documented?

It would be most promising if cities could figure out how to get out of their own way. 

I think subsidies are a fool's errand because you get caught in an entanglement. In New York City for the past 50 years, if you're a big company, it's just a question of how much you get, and small companies get nothing. It’s unfair that the little guys are paying for some of the freight for the big guys. There is no excuse for the amount of time it takes to get permits to open a small business. There is no excuse for trash pickups not being done regularly, for street lights not working, for public safety not being functional.

If cities would just do what they are supposed to do, and do it well—like, provide the services they set out to provide—then we would see them come back more quickly. But I think people see the difficulty with bureaucracy and politics and throw their hands up. It also has to do with leadership, who’s in City Hall, as well as civic leadership and the business community. It doesn't take an army, but it does take people with vision and energy to follow through with what they're doing.

One of the best things that cities have done right in the last 20 years, is public space, open space, trails and parks. Cities all over North America have built fantastic parks in their downtown area, as well as trails that are in the core and extend regionally in metropolitan areas. Cities did not have this until 20 years ago, and then they started to pop up and became incredibly popular.

We did a piece on the Atlanta Beltline, which is an abandoned industrial railroad that's 22 miles long and connects 45 neighborhoods. That project, which is about 70% complete, has kicked off $10 billion worth of development, with billions more in the pipeline. It has become a symbol of Atlanta, an extremely popular place. 

We did a story on the New York High Line. The High Line was expecting 300,000 visitors a year, but it instead gets 7 million. Even cities like Birmingham, Alabama, have incredible city trail and regional trail systems. Smaller cities have been actively developing their trails, connecting people and bikeways. And some of these developments are getting people to live in the heart of the city, which is a huge, huge issue. Other cities are trying to catch up. Cities are realizing that you can’t rely purely on office and commercial use to get people to come into their downtowns.

Lastly, how can our readers watch & support the documentary series, Saving the City?

Saving the City is a nonprofit endeavor, and all contributions are tax deductible. We have funding from major foundations and many individuals, but we are always in need of more funding. Our website currently has eight video previews on it. You can sign up for our newsletter.