The Resilience of the Faithful, Conventional Wisdom Dept. 0

The touching faith in developer magic–the childlike belief that someone in a business suit waving a PowerPoint presentation will miraculously transform a city–never dies.

Witness this, which the resident curmudgeon at my local rag demolishes most convincingly.

I think the belief in developer magic is the belief of the desperate. The city fathers can’t make the Ford plant reopen; new plants don’t seem to get built except in far away places with strange sounding names.

Heck, they can’t even keep track of who’s on the payroll.

So they turn to burning money to developer gods to attract the conventions that will never come.

Once again, persons go to hotels to visit cities. They don’t go to cities to visit hotels.

Conventions go to Chicago, Las Vegas, San Franscisco, and other cities because the conventioneers want to go to cities like Chicago, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. Their convention centers have succeeded because persons want to visit the cities; the cities haven’t succeeded because persons want to visit the convention centers.

Virginia Beach is a nice town with a nice beach; visitors come for the beach, not for the hotels.

Norfolk is a nice little city (unlike Virginia Beach, Norfolk feels like a city) with a Naval base or two or three; visitors come to see their friends and family off to deployment.

As great a museum as the Chrysler is, the Smithsonian it’s not; as nice an urban neighborhood as is Norfolk’sHistoricGhent (I swear, the way it’s described by all the radio announcers it is one word), it is no Greenwich Village–it’s not even Fort Washington.

Nevertheless, desperate persons do desperate things, so I expect that City Fathers throughout the nation will continue to worship at PowerPoint rites and to burn money on the altar of developer magic, hoping to conjure up a replacement for that defunct industry or missing plant now decamped abroad.

Afterthought:

If developer magic is such a sure thing, why are the developers not able to cast their spells over private investors?