UAC marks 25th year

by Susan Ford
Toledo Free Press
Article published May 18, 2005

On May 3, Toledo City Council marked the 25th anniversary of the Urban Affairs Center with a resolution recognizing the center’s contributions. UAC is one of the University of Toledo’s applied research units.

The center works in four program areas: community development; urban and regional planning; economic development; and urban education. I asked assistant director Sue Wuest which projects have had the most impact.

"I think our work in housing and community development," she said. UAC helped the Fair Housing Center with its redlining lawsuits, providing research and data analysis. "That had a big impact, not just locally but nationally," she said.

In urban and regional planning, she pointed to the work the center has done on sprawl, elevating the civic dialogue on issues related to smart growth and offering examples of best practices.

In 2004, the center did a study on barriers to adoption of alternative energy technology. I was interested in how the report had been used. Sometimes a study is just given to the client who commissioned it, said Wuest. Or it may be posted on the center’s Web site.

"I’m sometimes surprised when I find out how people are using our web site or reports," she said. "We'll get e-mails from people in other parts of the country … when we've not been able to have a local impact."

Director Patrick McGuire sees the center as an effective way to link the university's talent and capacity to the community, offering faculty the opportunity to see their research and ideas used to solve real problems.

"The work we have done—in collaboration with BGSU—to identify the industry clusters that drive our local economy is one of the best examples of how we have been able to turn data into a regional economic development strategy," he said.

Wuest said when she picked up the resolution, council members seemed most appreciative of the center's help in the area of economic development. UAC's projections of tax revenue, for example, help council with budgeting.

"A lot of times council members will call here to just talk something through," she said. What they're interested in often rtelates to why a company decides to leave Toledo. But "the firm didn't leave Toledo to go to Maumee," she explained. The difference between Toledo and Maumee is rarely relevant to business. They just found a space. "It wasn't, 'I've decided to leave Toledo,'" she daid. The company needed to expand, they needed a new building, and that was the place they found.

Wuest contrasted three scenarios. Toledo doesn't have much "shovel ready" land. You have to assemble a property, maybe do some demolition. In Arrowhead Park, you drive past a lot you like and you call your builder.

"That's all there is to it," she said. Or, "if you're driving by a farm field, you knock on the door of the farmer or you call a Realtor, and that's the end of it."

The Arrowhead Park site or the rural site aren't necessarily better, she said, but they are easier.

"Cities who are more competitive plan ahead and put together the business parks—which is hard to do in tough economic times, because it may take ten years for the businss park to fill up," Wuest said. "You have to be able to make long-term, expensive investment and if it doesn't fill pp in five years, risk somebody calling you a failure because they don't understand the long-term nature of it."

Susan Ford is a Toledo Free Press Contributing Editor. She can be contacted at sford@toledofreepress.com.