The Overland Park Convention Center in Kansas, which has generated only 40% of the hotel nights predicted before it was built.

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Last week I wrote about the phenomenon of what might be called the “Showtime City” – the city that tries to build an economic development strategy around visitors and special events. Cities large and small are now trying this strategy, and we’re seeing a real-time experiment right now with World Cup games in several large cities around the country.

The challenge for people who work in city government is how to manage the Showtime City. Can you successfully build an event-based economy in the first place? Once you have those events, how do you make sure they don’t bankrupt or overrun your city? And how can you avoid a backlash from local residents if you succeed?

I think there are four lessons that cities have to bear in mind in order to make a Showtime Economy work. These are:

1. Begin with realistic expectations

2. Use existing venues and facilities whenever possible

3. Manage the event situations carefully

4. Make sure the locals benefit from all this activity

1. Begin With Realistic Expectations

Just as every city seems to want a tech economy that allows them to become the next Silicon Valley, cities trying to build a Showtime Economy all seem to aspire to be the next New York or Las Vegas. But the thing to bear in mind is that there are only so many concerts, so many conventions, so many youth sports tournaments. There is only going to be one Las Vegas, one New York, one Orlando. You have to begin with realistic expectations.

And that begins with a realistic understanding of the role your city can play in the regional or national Showtime economy. Is your city small but well situated geographically in a large metropolitan area? Then your aspirations may be well placed. We are seeing this right now with Inglewood, the city where Sofi Stadium is located. Inglewood is a traditionally African-American working-class town of 200,000 people. But it’s in the heart of gigantic Los Angeles, close to LAX, and has a long history of hosting sports venues, dating back to the opening of the (now closed) Hollywood Park Race Track in the 1930s and what is now known as the Kia Forum, which was built in the 1960s for the Lakers NBA team.

But not every city is in that situation. More often, we see cities reaching for the stars when they are either

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An image from LaBella Associates’ village-style land use study for the Town of Clay, New York, near where Micron’s semiconductor plant will be built.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the idea that villages, rather than conventional subdivisions, will be a necessary part of the revival of my home territory of Central New York when a new growth boom hits driven by the arrival of Micron’s major semiconductor plant.

As suburban and rural towns deal with growth for the first time in memory, villages are a cost-effective way to provide a variety of housing types and activities that traditional suburban development simply can’t provide – at least not without huge fiscal strain.

But, as I pointed out, existing villages in a place like Central New York have limited capacity. To take advantage of the benefit villages provide, you have to build new ones. And that’s not easy.

Oftentimes, planners seem to think that the way to create new villages – or strengthen existing ones – is simply to change the regulatory regime. It’s a common refrain, especially among New Urbanists and form-based code devotees, that traditional villages are “illegal” to build and therefore regulatory reform is required to make them “legal” again. How many planners have applauded wildly when Andres Duany, in the middle of an acerbic speech, throws the zoning code into a trash can. Sometimes, they applaud even when it’s their own zoning code.

But here’s the thing: Zoning alone won’t solve the problem. Rural/exurban America is littered with form-based codes that haven’t been used. (I wrote about this a while ago in reference to Ramona, a rural village in the mountains of San Diego County.) In writing new codes – especially in the South – Duany and his colleagues have generally not been working for local governments. They’ve been working for developers who want to build New Urbanist communities in unsophisticated cities and towns.

And that experience makes it clear that while yes, you need zoning, you also need four other things to successfully create new villages that can help alleviate growth pressure in a fiscally sustainable way.

Main Street, Skaneateles, New York

First, you need significant infrastructure – principally roads, sewer, and water – and this is a new thing to many communities, especially those that have lived off of wells and septic forever.

Second, you need a variety of housing types – not necessarily apartments, but certainly smaller houses and townhomes.

Third, you need retail that will attract beyond the village – because the village alone will not be big enough to support anything more than maybe a coffee shop.

And finally, you need developers willing to take all this on – and that usually doesn’t mean the developers you’ve had forever, who are used to building low-density single-family subdivisions.

In the absence of thee four things, all you’ll have is pretty pictures. So let’s take a look at these four things, one at a time.

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