The drama of the HOA

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Jim

I joined a growing trend three years ago when I sold my sprawling house in Albuquerque and built a smaller home in an active-adult community in nearby Los Lunas. Folks my age are living longer than previous generations and active-adult communities are a lifestyle choice for those of us who are not yet ready for assisted living.

Active-adult communities are the fastest-growing segment of the housing market. In my home state of New Mexico, retirees are the only population group that is growing. In the Jubilee community where I live, at least half of my neighbors moved here from other states. 

Jubilee’s 500 or so residents live in single-family homes and enjoy a variety of resort-style amenities and activities. Most of the activities are organized by the residents themselves: from hiking and pickleball groups to book clubs, yoga classes, social gatherings, volunteer projects and even a resident rock band. There’s a strong sense of community and nearly everyone I’ve met has been friendly and helpful. Jubilee is one of the most successful communities of its kind and has won several national awards. 

Managing all of this falls to the homeowner’s association. The HOA is responsible for maintaining the clubhouse, landscaping common areas and front yards, maintaining the streets and governing what amounts to a miniature city. The association contracts with a community management company that collects monthly HOA assessments and employs a full-time community manager to keep everything running. 

Overall, Jubilee runs smoothly and mostly harmoniously. Resident committees oversee landscaping, fitness and social activities, and administer rules about property improvements with a light touch. The HOA board is another animal, however. 

The HOA technically represents the homeowners. But because Jubilee still is under construction, state law allows the developer to control the HOA board until the community is mostly built. While some active-adult communities are owned by national companies, our developer is a local entrepreneur. He’s mostly well-intentioned but no better or worse than others of his ethically challenged breed. 

The split responsibility between the developer and HOA makes conflict inevitable. Questions of which expenses are charged to the developer or the homeowners are subject to debate between the two homeowners’ representatives and the three developer-appointed board members. There also are a couple of disputes with the developer that are being litigated and eventually will be settled in court. 

What makes the HOA board’s work even more challenging is its constituents. My neighbors are mostly retired professional and business people who have experience, talent and time on their hands. They are actively engaged in their community and are not to be trifled with. We’re a tough crowd.

Homeowners include accountants who second-guess the financial statements and lawyers who have memorized the association’s governing documents and applicable state law. Every subject before the HOA board attracts a few residents who are very knowledgeable and have strong opinions. There’s also an informal community council that subjects the HOA board to further scrutiny.

All of this makes board meetings high drama as restive residents cheer on the homeowner board members as they butt heads with the developer-appointed members over every item of business. When I moved to Jubilee shortly after Covid hit this took place via Zoom as dozens of grumpy geriatrics learned to get online and un-mute themselves. Board meetings have continued on Zoom and typically last a couple of hours. Last week the HOA’s annual meeting was held in person and attracted well over 100 homeowners. It was orderly but heated and lasted for several hours. 

Despite the HOA’s drama Jubilee has remained a happy place. Passionate as my neighbors are at HOA meetings, they’re cordial to one another (and even to the developer) when the meeting ends. Then it’s back to the pool, the pickleball court and the Friday potluck. 

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Operation Homecoming

Posted on June 20, 2023 by Jim

I was waiting on the tarmac at Glenview Naval Air Station when they arrived on a cold night in March 50 years ago. The American former prisoners of war had been released from North Vietnam. Now they were on their way to the Great Lakes Naval Hospital to be reunited with their families and begin their recovery from years of brutal captivity. 

The arrival was part of Operation Homecoming, the return of 591 American prisoners of war following the Paris Peace Accords that ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In February 1973, The POWs were flown from Hanoi to an Air Force base in the Philippines, and from there to military hospitals close to their homes across the U.S. 

They were coming home to a country that had turned against the war they fought. I had returned from overseas six years earlier to anti-war protests in Chicago and demonstrators at the gate of the naval base. When I began looking for a civilian job one recruiter advised me not to tell prospective employers I had served in Vietnam. On reserve duty in the Pentagon I was instructed to wear civilian clothing because servicemen in uniform were being hassled on the streets of Washington. 

Plans to repatriate the POWs had been under way for several years. The National League of POW/MIA Families was organized in 1970 to call attention to the mistreatment of POWs in North Vietnam. The Defense Department organized a careful process to recover the POWs, restore them to health and reunite them with their families. The date of the POWs’ release was unknown but contingency plans took shape during the peace negotiations. 

Early in 1973 the public affairs office at the Great Lakes Naval Base asked my Chicago reserve unit for volunteers to staff a media relations center when the POWs returned. Undated orders allowed the Navy to recall us to temporary active duty on 24 hours’ notice. Our bags were packed when release of the POWs in Hanoi set the plan in motion. 

Our mission was to facilitate news media coverage of the arrival but shield the POWs from interviews and reporters’ shouted questions. When the airplane carrying the POWs arrived at Glenview we kept the unhappy reporters behind a barrier. 

Compared to major installations such as Travis Air Force Base in California, only a handful of POWs came to Glenview and Great Lakes. Their arrival followed a standard pattern. Each man, in full uniform, stepped off the aircraft, was greeted by the local commander, walked up to a microphone to say a few words and then greeted his family before being driven to the Great Lakes hospital. 

They all said pretty much the same thing, thanking the President and the American people and expressing their patriotism. The reporters were disappointed and a little suspicious. Were the POWs following orders that told them what to say?  We replied that we knew of no restrictions on what the POWs could say but explained that these guys were all Navy and Air Force aviators who belonged to an elite group: carefully screened, highly trained and intensely loyal to their units. It was no surprise that their statements were similar. We learned later that the POWs had created their own command structure while in captivity and decided among themselves what they were going to say when they were released. 

Back at the Great Lakes hospital, we continued to field media queries about how the POWs were doing. One of our reservists, George Wendt (father of the Cheers actor), got on the phone and reached out to local businesses to make the POWs’ stay a little easier. He persuaded a furniture dealer to deliver a reclining chair to the hospital room of each POW (and I think the POWs got to take the chairs home, too). An auto dealer gave each POW family the use of a new car during their stay in the area. 

The warm welcome of the POWs by the Nixon administration, including inviting them to the biggest-ever White House dinner, was a step toward healing the divisions of the Vietnam War. Recognition was slower in coming for Vietnam veterans in general. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened in Washington in 1982. And in 1986, I finally got to attend a welcome parade for Vietnam veterans in Chicago. 

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Why we need more immigration

Posted on May 19, 2023 by Jim

Okay, the border is a mess. Even the news media are beginning to admit it. But we still need more immigrants because Americans aren’t making enough babies and are not growing the talent we need to sustain the country. 

The U.S. birth rate has been declining since 2005 and is at its lowest point in more than a century. Changing priorities – fewer people getting married and deciding to have children –may be the most likely explanation. Increasing support for abortion and sex-change surgery will depress the birth rate a little more. The U.S. population is growing at the slowest rate since the nation’s founding and immigration is driving what little growth we’re seeing. 

We’ve always been a nation of immigrants, of course. In the Nineteenth Century the U.S. welcomed the poor, tired, huddled masses of Europe and Ireland. We needed lots of unskilled labor to settle the frontier, fight the Civil War and work in the factories. 

Things are different today because the United States now breeds its own poor, tired, huddled masses. American students have significantly lower academic test scores than their peers in most developed nations. More than three-quarters of young Americans are unfit for military service. Only 62% of working-age Americans are working or looking for work, a lower labor participation rate than most countries. 

We still need unskilled labor but have a greater need for workers with critical skills: doctors, nurses, teachers, construction workers, airline pilots, truck drivers and more. As Americans become less employable, opening the border to Central American migrants who are even more poorly educated will not produce the workforce we need.

It’s not just a labor shortage: The United States is becoming a dumber country. In addition to declining school test scores, an increasing number of problems facing our society are self-inflicted: the result of bad decisions by poorly qualified people in bumbling institutions. If we don’t have enough smart people to build a railroad, keep the streets safe and the lights on, or even keep baby formula on the shelves, how can we expect to remain competitive as a nation? 

So we don’t just need immigrants, we need immigrants with brains. It is unlikely that the next Elon Musk is wading across the Rio Grande. We need to be proactive in attracting immigrants who are educated, productive and have the potential to move the country forward.

Instead of favoring the underclass of Central America, we need to attract immigrants from the many countries that have better schools than we do such as Poland, Vietnam and Japan. Offering green cards to foreign-born graduates of U.S. universities would be a good start. The merit-based immigration systems in countries like Canada, Denmark and Australia may be worth emulating. We already hire teachers from the Philippines to fill vacancies in U.S. schools. How about recruiting physicians from Britain and Cuba to offset our doctor shortage? 

We ought to start enlisting immigrants in the Armed Forces now to offset a serious recruiting shortfall. Immigrants have fought in every war in United States history and there is no reason why they should not serve now. Most of the illegal immigrants being welcomed at the Southern border are military-age young men. It should be possible to recruit the cream of this crop for military service, screen them for criminal ties, give them a crash course in English and offer them legal status once they’ve completed satisfactory military service. 

The United States needs to rejuvenate its population in both quantity and quality. We can easily do so because at least 150 million people across the world want to move here. You’d think our government would seize the opportunity to select immigrants who are best equipped to help the country prosper instead of letting Mexican smuggling cartels decide who crosses the border. 

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The hidden promise of artificial intelligence

Posted on April 17, 2023 by Jim

Futurists and science-fiction writers have been warning us about artificial intelligence for years. Movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey advanced the notion that computers eventually will be smarter than we are and ultimately will take over. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

Now artificial intelligence (AI) technology is here. ChatBot systems like ChatGPT connect a language capability to large-scale digital research – which enables it to answer questions and write college term papers. It’s as if the annoyingly lame “chat” feature on customer service websites just graduated from MIT and swallowed Google. This has led to speculation about the number and kinds of jobs AI could replace such as customer service people, data analysts, paralegals, market analysts, even journalists.

So powerful is this technology that experts like Elon Musk are calling for a pause in developing artificial intelligence to figure things out and make sure the technology is used responsibly. 

Predictably, the politicians are getting involved. The rapid growth of ChatGPT is prompting calls for regulation from Congress. I’m sure our elected representatives are concerned about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on democracy and their constituents. 

There may be a more important motivation:  Politicians are worried that artificial intelligence will replace THEM.

This may be a valid concern, especially for members of Congress. Consider what our elected representatives actually do. They make speeches. So can ChatGPT. Legislators review information and vote on legislation. Check. We already know ChatGPT is politically biased. I’ll bet the system even can be programmed to ask donors for contributions.

The senior senator from my state is a case in point. Since the U.S. Senate no longer debates legislation, his speeches on the Senate floor are largely performative and ripe for ChatGPT. My senator is in such lock-step with his donors and party leaders that his floor votes probably could be handled by a basic iPhone app. His social media posts already may be automated. 

Replacing Congress with artificial intelligence would be disruptive, of course. How can we expect 435 representatives and 100 senators to find honest work? Will we still need ribbon-cutting ceremonies for government projects? 

There may be some advantages, however. Artificial intelligence is lots better at math than any elected representative. It would be less likely to approve government spending the taxpayers can’t afford. 

What if a robo-representative could be programmed to evaluate public opinion polling and actually represent the views of the majority of its constituents? It probably would adopt moderate positions on issues such as abortion instead of stampeding to the extremes pushed by advocacy groups. 

This could make the government logical, businesslike and unifying, and that would be really disruptive. Eliminating political outrage would threaten the business models of CNN, Fox News, the New York Times and other media. But I guess the news media could survive by adopting their own radical change: use automated reporters to produce fair and balanced news coverage. 

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St. Pat’s in the desert

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Jim

One of the few things I miss about my hometown of Chicago is St. Patrick’s Day. Even though my ancestry is Scottish and Hungarian, every Chicagoan is Irish on St Pat’s Day and that’s what makes it special. 

Not that I was expecting much Hibernian heritage when I moved to New Mexico. When I suggest dying the Rio Grande green nobody knows what I’m talking about. I’m tempted to prank my town’s rattlesnake removal service (yes, we have one) by calling the snake hotline on March 17 and asking for St. Patrick, but they probably wouldn’t get the joke. 

Ethnic celebrations are an American tradition that reminds us of our immigrant heritage and honors the melting pot we have become. They are inherently inclusive because everyone, regardless of nationality, is welcome. When I was growing up in Chicago the city had a big celebration and parade for practically every ethnic group. Everyone could be Irish for a day, or Puerto Rican or Greek. Or get stuck in a traffic jam on Kosciuszko Day, as I once did.

Wallethub ranks Albuquerque’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration only 113th of the 200 largest cities in the U.S. The city ranks higher for Cinco de Mayo and goes all out for Dia de los Muertos. I explain to my New Mexico friends that Chicago celebrates the Day of the Dead, too, but there it’s known as election day. Albuquerque also has Celtic, Greek, Asian and Scandinavian festivals that are too small to merit parades and major hoopla. 

Columbus Day used to be a big Italian celebration. One of the reasons it became a national holiday was to counter discrimination against Italian-Americans. Canceling Columbus eliminates a celebration that has not been fully replaced (especially for the Italians). 

So far Indigenous Peoples Day has been more about airing grievances – like the Festivus holiday popularized by the Seinfeld TV show – and tearing down monuments. I hope this changes as new holidays evolve. Indigenous Peoples Day has tremendous potential for inclusive celebration of a rich heritage and culture. I want to see a big parade in Albuquerque with fry-bread stands. 

Juneteenth parades are beginning to take place in some cities and that’s a positive trend. Perhaps the millions of Central Americans wading across the Rio Grande eventually will organize Venezuelan and Honduran festivals wherever they settle. The more the merrier. 

Ethnic celebrations are a way of celebrating our diversity that actually unifies us. At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, we need more parades and parties. And maybe a little green beer.

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January at the gym

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Jim

It’s the first week in January and I am delighted that the gym in my over-55 community is not crowded. 

I’m not a big fitness buff, mind you. Fitness, yes; buff, hardly. I began hitting the gym regularly when the Navy required me to pass an annual physical fitness test and kept the habit after I retired (minus the military sit-ups and push-ups). These days my last defense against age and gravity is to stagger into the gym and horse around with the exercise machines while reading a novel on my Kindle. 

For many years one of my pet peeves was the New Year’s resolution crowd at the gym. My local fitness center in the Chicago suburbs was part of the Bally’s Total Fitness chain, which had a heavily advertised holiday sale on memberships every year. Lots of people got gym memberships for Christmas and many of them showed up the day after New Year’s. 

This ruined my entire day. By the time I got to the gym after work the parking lot and locker room were full. All the exercise machines were in use by people who did not know how to use them and were unaware of gym etiquette. The aerobics class was a demolition derby of random flailing limbs. I quickly learned to just stay away from the gym the first week in January. 

Fortunately, the fitness frenzy did not last long. The cheerfully sadistic young woman who taught the aerobics class refused to slow things down for the uninitiated and the class cleared out after a few days. By mid-February most of the newcomers had returned to their couches and the gym was back to normal. This validated the fitness chain’s business model of selling memberships to people who did not use them. 

My senior community somehow is immune from the New Year’s resolution exercise mania. The gym gets regular use but is never crowded. Usually there are fewer people in the gym than on the pickleball court or in the yoga class. The only change I see during the holidays is when a few folks are dragged into the gym by their visiting kids. 

Not that my neighbors are a bunch of couch-bound geriatrics. The community has a hiking group and I see lots of people walking or bicycling around the neighborhood. I suspect senior citizens who are attracted to an active-adult community already have figured out how to keep themselves healthy. The neighbors I have encountered are laid-back and mellow folks who may feel less urgency to change their lives than younger generations.

My only New Year’s resolution is to stick to the fitness program I’ve been following for years. And maybe clean the garage.  

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Student loans: Now we’re all in debt

Posted on September 5, 2022 by Jim

The debate over President Biden’s student loan forgiveness is just what we needed: yet another divisive issue. It’s the largest unilateral spending decision by a U.S. president. I’m waiting for the pundits to praise it as a triumph of democracy.

There’s no question that former college students need a break. They were unfairly conned into taking on big loans for degrees that may not equip them to make the payments.

It’s equally unfair to shift that debt to taxpayers who did not go to college, or who paid off their loans. And no, this is not at all comparable to the Congress-approved Paycheck Protection Program loans that allowed businesses that were shut down by the government to pay their employees during the pandemic.

While college grads and working stiffs point fingers at each other, the big winners are colleges and universities. They remain free to raise prices with impunity because the taxpayers will continue to foot the bill and future graduating classes will expect further bailouts. 

It does not help when members of my generation huff that we paid off our student loans, by golly. When I graduated in 1964 tuition at Northwestern (an expensive school then and now) was $1600 a year, about 26% of the U.S. median household income of $6,000. Today’s tuition at NU is $62,391, only slightly less than the median household income of around $77,000. 

I was lucky enough to get through college with scholarships, part-time work and help from my parents, and did not take out a loan until tuition went up in my senior year. In those days student loans came through the National Defense Student Loan Program, an outgrowth of the post-Sputnik push to compete with the Soviet Union. When I was in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam I began receiving collection letters from Northwestern demanding loan payments. I appreciated the perverse logic of using my combat pay for National Defense Student Loan payments.

The problem runs deeper than footing the bill for college costs. For decades we’ve promoted the idea throughout American society that everyone ought to go to college and have lavishly funded higher education. School systems have focused on college preparation at the expense of vocational education. Other countries have not done this: The U.S. is the only advanced nation that does not have a national system of trade schools. 

More than 60 percent of high school graduates now start college but many need remedial courses because high school has not prepared them for college work. Fewer than half of college students complete a degree within six years. The percentage of Americans with college degrees has risen from about 20% in 1990 to more than 30% today, but about 40% of recent college graduates are employed in jobs that do not require a degree. 

A report from the American Compass think tank summarizes it this way: 

Put it all together, and the college pipeline proves incredibly leaky. Out of 100 high school students, 13 won’t complete high school, another 29 will complete high school but not enroll in college, and 27 will enroll in college but fail to complete a degree. Of the 31 who do earn a college degree, 13 will end up in jobs that don’t require one. That leaves just 18 of 100 young Americans—call them the Fortunate Fifth—actually moving smoothly from high school to college to career.

Forgiving student debt won’t fix the inequality of our higher education system. In the short term, one alternative to shifting student debt to taxpayers may be to give colleges some skin in the game: require schools whose students default on loans to reimburse the federal government through a tax on endowment funds. Another approach would allow people to discharge student loan debt through bankruptcy as we do with other debts.

Even though the government has insulated higher education from market forces, we’re seeing some pushback against the high cost and chancy benefit of a traditional college education. College enrollments already were declining, and more colleges are closing or merging. The pandemic accelerated the growth of online degree and technical certificate programs. The Mike Rowe Works Foundation offers scholarships to pursue trade careers.

The student debt crisis is an opportunity for lawmakers to re-evaluate higher education to make college a better value and develop a strategy for vocational education. This is unlikely, of course, but student loan bailouts should increase the pressure for reform from consumers and voters.  

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Credibility is not rocket science

Posted on August 27, 2022 by Jim

I’ve been watching with bemusement as one American institution after another loses its credibility with the public. Fewer people believe much of what they hear from authority figures and I can’t blame them. I’m interested in this because I spent my public relations career helping employers and clients build trust with employees, customers and government regulators.  

It’s not complicated. In general, people will believe what you say if you do not lie to them, listen to them and refrain from harming them. The Public Relations Society of America’s code of professional ethics says roughly the same thing in fancier language. 

I saw these principles in action because I worked for a reasonably honest company. AT&T’s Bell System depended on a favorable reputation to sustain its regulated monopoly. Every employee signed a pledge to safeguard customer privacy, and I know of several executives who were fired for misbehavior. It may have helped that the chairman was a former Eagle scout. 

The company generally was treated fairly by the news media because we never ducked reporters’ questions (and in those days media still covered news fairly). When I worked in media relations at Illinois Bell and Western Electric, we made it a point to be accessible to reporters 24 hours a day. Our answers did not always satisfy reporters but we never refused to comment. 

We had an agenda, of course, and promoted it with the understanding that the news media were not going to accept our talking points at face value. Rare attempts to spin the news fell flat. When AT&T became one of the first companies to report more than $1 billion in earnings, reporters laughed when the news release from the company’s headquarters in New York expressed the number as $1100 million instead of $1.1 billion. 

Building credibility with employees was equally important. Our employee publications, in addition to recognizing and highlighting employees, delivered information on issues affecting the business as candidly as possible. I had regular skirmishes with the company’s lawyers over this. 

During a period of massive layoffs at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, management needed to keep employees informed without arousing speculation in the news media. The solution was a confidential newsletter that was distributed to supervisors to guide them in talking to employees. While it was impossible to predict future layoffs, supervisors were able to explain to employees that more cuts were likely if present trends continued.

This long-term investment in credibility paid off during the frequent labor disputes and strikes the telecommunications industry encountered in the 1970s and 80s. Illinois Bell had a phone-in employee newscast on an answering system. It got little traffic under normal circumstances but was so popular during strikes that we had to add circuits to meet demand for up-to-the-minute information. During one strike a competing union hotline failed to gain traction because employees trusted management’s newscast more. 

Our biggest communications challenge was the court-ordered breakup of the Bell System in 1984. The largest corporate reorganization in history (at that time) was an unprecedented shock to an employee culture built on stability and certainty. For the first time, executives could not tell employees what was going to happen because the future of the business was tied up in antitrust litigation and regulatory proceedings. It was natural for some employees to suspect that the bosses know but aren’t telling us.

The solution was a series of employee town meetings that became a permanent part of the company’s communications. After some initial discomfort, Illinois Bell’s executives became comfortable answering questions from employees. A few even acknowledged responsibility for management’s occasional missteps. Being candid about what they knew, what they didn’t know, and why they didn’t know it renewed confidence in management and helped employees develop a tolerance for uncertainty. 

The same kind of challenge to credibility is facing American institutions and most of them are failing in the eyes of the public. Only 52% of Americans still trust the U.S. Center for Disease Control, 44% trust the FBI and only 16% trust newspapers. Members of Congress and used-car salesmen have roughly the same reputation for honesty. 

I wonder if the high-powered communications experts these organizations employ will start advising their principals to be transparent, candid and truthful. It’s not rocket science, and if all else fails it might work. 

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Confessions of a recovering opinion pollster

Posted on June 20, 2022 by Jim

When I get curious about a controversial political issue (okay, that ‘s redundant) one of the first things I do is check the public opinion polls. That’s because I’m a recovering opinion pollster.

One of the most satisfying jobs in my public relations career was as the opinion research director at Illinois Bell Telephone in the 1980s. Opinion polling is an important way to measure public relations work. Tabulating news coverage or web clicks does not really tell you whether you’ve raised awareness or changed opinions. Survey results are a reality check that may shatter assumptions (and I enjoyed being the corporate gadfly). 

I had no academic background in opinion research but worked with top-notch outside experts, including an advertising agency research director and a market research professor. Every business lunch with these folks was a master class.  

Opinion research can guide policy when it’s used effectively. My biggest project was when Illinois Bell sought regulatory approval to replace a patchwork of local telephone rates in the Chicago area with a single plan of usage-based rates. Because rate proposals like this had been defeated in other states by regulators and legislators, gaining public support was critical. 

We conducted more than a dozen focus groups and a number of telephone surveys to determine the issues most important to customers and test their reactions to specific proposals. (I was in hog heaven because the hundreds of millions of revenue dollars at stake in the rate proposal justified a generous research budget.) Our survey results helped shape the final rate proposal and ease negotiations with consumer groups and regulators. The rate plan ultimately was approved. 

A focus group is a facilitated discussion with a dozen or so people to elicit their opinions. Researchers observe the discussion behind one-way glass or on video. This is qualitative research that identifies issues and reveals a range of viewpoints but does not represent a majority opinion. It’s a good way to test products and TV commercials. You don’t want the boss observing a focus group, by the way. He’s bound to say: “See? I was right all along. That lady agrees with me!”

Major decisions require a two-step process: Focus groups to identify what the issues are, followed by a quantitative survey of hundreds of respondents to determine majority opinion. Focus group findings help formulate questions for these large-scale surveys. Without this step, you may miss something important when you write the questionnaire. 

Once in a while focus groups can guide a clear decision. Illinois Bell’s rate proposal would have eliminated a premium plan with unlimited calling for a flat monthly rate. In the focus groups we noticed that the most outspoken consumers, who emerged as virtually every group’s natural leaders, subscribed to the unlimited plan and liked it. We quickly concluded that angering the people most likely to write their legislators was not a good strategy, and persuaded management to grandfather the unlimited plan for existing customers instead of eliminating it. 

Public opinion often changes over time as events unfold, as we see with many political issues. During the run-up to the court-imposed breakup of AT&T in 1984, I conducted a tracking survey that asked the same questions in a series of surveys over several years. We found that customers overwhelmingly favored the breakup until it actually affected them. Then some were indignant: “You mean I have to get long distance phone service from a different company and pay more for local service?” When I presented my survey findings I described the sudden opinion shift as the “holy shit moment.” 

We may be seeing a significant shift in public opinion on gun control in the wake of a spate of mass shootings. Congress is working on bipartisan legislation that reflects a strong public consensus for expanded background checks and “red flag” laws but avoids measures with less public support such as allowing teachers to carry guns and banning “assault-style” weapons. 

Opinion survey findings are only as useful as their interpretation. When I worked with Unilever’s foodservice business I conducted a first-ever satisfaction survey of hundreds of employees who attended a lavish annual sales meeting. My survey respondents liked the presentations, hotel accommodations and recreational activities but were critical of the food. This worried the sales department. A month or so later I conducted a survey of another employee conference and found similar criticism of the food. Then I noticed that when I went out to lunch with the company’s managers they always critiqued the restaurant. I discussed this with my clients and we came to the same conclusion: This was a food company and the employees were foodies. Criticizing what they were fed was in their DNA and was not a management problem. 

Academic research is important and mostly useful. I enjoyed partnering with college professors in surveys for the National Stuttering Association. But I’m inclined to trust corporate surveys a little more because businesses have a bigger stake in the outcome. An academic paper that’s later refuted is embarrassing, but a blunder like Coca-Cola’s New Coke costs millions of dollars and ends careers. Professional polling companies also have a lot of skin in the game.

One of the reasons I check polling data as part of my news consumption is that politicians and pundits not only fail to represent public opinion but often misrepresent it. On the contentious abortion issue, for instance, polls show that the majority of Americans favor a right to abortion in the early stages of pregnancy but only about 20% support late-term abortion and 10 to 15% want abortion to be completely illegal. 

The end of Roe v Wade will force politicians to play for keeps on this issue for the first time by actually passing legislation. Opinion polls suggest that most Americans will support the kind of moderate laws most European countries have enacted. Yet some politicians — who apparently have not read the polls — are stampeding to the fringes by pushing for either completely unrestricted abortion or a total abortion ban. It will be interesting to see ow this plays out.

Election polling is particularly slippery. Deciding whom to survey requires guessing which groups of people are going to vote, which may not be the same mix of people who voted last time. I enjoy getting calls from local political pollsters during election season. Sometimes they test campaign arguments by asking my reaction to statements such as: Candidate X failed to pay his taxes in 2011. Does this make your opinion less favorable? My usual response is: No, I already know he’s a crook. Usually I can guess which candidate sponsored the survey.

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Turning around a local economy

Posted on April 5, 2022 by Jim

Two years ago I built a new house in an over-55 community in Los Lunas, just south of Albuquerque. Los Lunas is the fastest-growing town in New Mexico and the development is exciting to watch: new industry, hundreds of new homes sprouting from empty desert and road construction to accommodate heavier traffic. 

Years ago I was involved in a different kind of development, an economic turnaround in my hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. Oak Park is one of the oldest suburbs of Chicago. It was a growing community in the 1870s (thanks in part to the Chicago Fire) and was completely built up by the 1920s with around 50,000 residents crammed into 4.7 square miles. 

My parents moved to Oak Park in 1955, and I settled there with my own family in 1969 after my hitch in the Navy. At that point the community was facing unprecedented challenge. The adjacent section of Chicago had undergone racial resegregation and experts were predicting the same for Oak Park. Crime rates were rising, businesses were leaving and residents were nervous. Oak Park responded with a commitment to integration and renewal, and organized a series of community initiatives to make this happen.

One of the things that needed fixing was the local economy. Oak Park had been one of the largest shopping destinations outside Chicago’s Loop but department stores were moving to new suburban malls. Auto dealers, unable to expand in built-up Oak Park, were moving farther out in the suburbs. 

An unlikely catalyst for economic renewal was the Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio, which had been in private hands for years and came on the market in the early 1970s. To assure its preservation as a national landmark, the local banks got together and purchased the house until the National Trust for Historic Preservation could acquire the property. 

The banks’ partnership was so successful that instead of adding a local government department for economic development, the Village of Oak Park worked with business leaders to organize the nonprofit Oak Park Development Corporation (OPDC). OPDC was funded through annual contributions by the banks and other businesses. One of the banks donated office space for OPDC’s president and a secretary. OPDC had a contract for services from the village government and the village manager sat on the organization’s board. 

OPDC’s mission was to attract new businesses to Oak Park and help existing ones expand. One of its first tasks was to work with local government to make the village more business-friendly on issues such as permits and zoning. 

Oak Park had virtually no restaurants because it had outlawed liquor sales in the 1890s — after the great-grandfather of one of my high school classmates bought the last tavern and poured the liquor into the street. OPDC worked with the village government to build public support for going “damp” to permit liquor sales at full-service restaurants while continuing to ban bars and liquor stores. Within a few years Oak Park became a magnet for fine restaurants. 

One of OPDC’s most successful ventures was a business loan program. In those days cities could get federal community development block grants, and most communities used this money for business loans administered by the local government. OPDC instead deposited the federal money in the local banks as a reserve fund, which enabled the banks to write below-market-rate loans for three times the amount of the federal grant. The five banks participating in the program had an agreement to share the risk in case a loan defaulted. Because banks wrote and serviced the loans, they had a stake in the outcome and served as consultants to startup entrepreneurs and minority business owners. 

Most of the loans were used to restore and repurpose vintage commercial buildings. A local movie house underwent a million-dollar rehab to modernize the theater and restore its Art Deco features. Multistory department stores were converted to mixed-use with offices or apartments on the upper floors. A street of obsolete, too-small retail spaces was reborn as an arts district with galleries and craft shops. The loan program, along with village grants for exterior renovation, enabled many local businesses to upgrade and refurbish their properties. 

I joined OPDC’s board in 1982. My employer, Illinois Bell, was one of the organization’s investors and appointed me as its OPDC representative because I lived in Oak Park and had been active in the community. It was an impressive board. In those days banks were locally owned, and the bank presidents attended the meetings rather than delegate the task to subordinates. Other board members included the village manager, a state senator, several local business owners and two prominent nonprofit leaders. Meetings were brisk, focused and productive. (I learned a lot about how a board of directors ought to operate.) 

The bank presidents, most of them relatively young, were innovative problem-solvers. On one occasion the board held an emergency meeting because a vintage commercial building was due to be demolished the following week. Within a couple of hours the bankers came up with a million-dollar package of loans and grants that saved the building from the wrecking ball. 

Oak Park’s economic turnaround was more than million-dollar deals. OPDC was a one-stop shop for new or expanding businesses. The three-person staff maintained a database of available business sites, helped entrepreneurs obtain village permits and connected them with the loan program. OPDC’s president actively recruited Chicago-area companies and restaurant chains to locate in Oak Park. 

Economic development was only one of Oak Park’s community renewal initiatives. The village integrated schools and neighborhoods, tightened building code enforcement, built a new village hall, installed new street lights, improved police protection and expanded community involvement and participation. As Oak Park’s reputation grew OPDC’s clientele included a growing number of minority, women and gay-lesbian business owners.

Watching all of this happening was exciting. I remained on the OPDC board until I left Illinois Bell in 1990 and continued to serve as the organization’s public relations counsel until 1998.

The economic development corporation restructured in 2014 and is coping with a new set of economic development challenges. No longer a quiet suburb, Oak Park is following the pattern of urban centers outside the city with high-rise buildings where department stores once stood. 

The Frank Lloyd Wright landmark that started the economic turnaround was restored by a nonprofit foundation and spawned a thriving tourism industry that has made Oak Park a destination for visitors as well as a great place to live.  

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