Mayor Chris Coleman
City of Saint Paul, Minnesota

I became Mayor of Saint Paul in January 2006, just days, it seemed, before the national economy went into a free-fall. Reacting to years of unregulated and unsecured transactions, the financial sector was on the verge of collapse. A record number of mortgage foreclosures shook neighborhoods we had spent two decades rebuilding. Hundreds of people lost their jobs and state government, with a staggering deficit, decided to balance its budget on the backs of cities. And an inter-state highway bridge fell into the Mississippi River at rush hour.

The collective sense of crisis gave rise to a series of conversations about the role of cities and regions in rebuilding our national economy.

Those local and national dialogues served to frame questions that now touch everything we do: What does it mean to turn the page from a paradigm defined by increasing consumption to one that is grounded in sustainability? How do we put our cities and region on a secure footing for the future—one that stops depleting our natural resources and erases the disparities defined by race or class? In an era of scarce resources, how do we sustain our collective work?

For its part, Living Cities invited us to bring those questions to a national learning community. A series of “boot camps” were designed to be times and places apart where we could explore this emerging paradigm. With colleagues from other cities and the best thought-leaders in the country, different multi-sector teams from the Twin Cities traveled to Cambridge to design more integrated energy efficiency initiatives and explore how to take greater advantage of our HUD Sustainable Communities grant.

We struggled with difficult questions about how to measure the impact of our work. We were challenged to think about how we might attract and align private capital to what we had become used to thinking about as public investments. And we worked across sectors and silos to bring multiple perspectives to bear on complex questions.

More recently, Living Cities made a significant financial investment in our work through the Integration Initiative. Along with four other regions, the Twin Cities is testing the proposition that we can, through thoughtful and collaborative investments in evidence-based strategies, improve the lives of lower-income people and the communities they call home.

Our work centers on the Central Corridor, where a new light rail line through the middle of region is now under construction. With Living Cities and a host of other partners, we propose to align our investments from affordable housing and small business development to place-making and pre-school education to energy efficiency, job training and public art—all for the long-term benefit of those who live along the line.

It is not an idle exercise. Our goal is nothing less than to fulfill the promise of our democracy and form a more perfect union. That means reversing the progression of climate change. It means closing the achievement gap. It means ending hunger and homelessness. It means turning the page and building a new economy from the ground up.

There are those who will tell us that fundamental change is not possible. They point to entrenched economic and political interests, years of disinvestment and centuries of discrimination to make their case.

Living Cities takes a different view.

At a recent Living Cities Boot Camp, a participant from northeast Ohio lifted up the proposition that the work we are trying to do—building a new economy grounded in sustainability and equity—is no less revolutionary than was the proposition in 1783 by a small group of Quakers in England that slavery should be abolished. Within 50 years, slavery was outlawed throughout the British Empire and, in 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Living Cities takes the view that our work together is both inspired and compelled by the conviction that we are capable, in the face of a moral imperative, of making fundamental changes in our time.

Congratulations on your first 20 years.