After 30 Years, I Believe We Need a Better Way to Build Great Places

First, a reality check: most ideas never see the light of day. Or if they do, they don’t get past the master plan, the feasibility study, or the financing effort. For many, it’s the appropriate conclusion to the filtering process. Some ideas are simply not well-conceived or won’t survive the marketplace. Saving a leader or community from a bad investment is just as important as executing a good one.

For many others, excellent, well-conceived projects die prematurely due to lack of know-how, leadership, experience, expertise, timing tied to elected or leadership support, and frankly, unfortunate decisions.

I've also learned something that has fundamentally changed the way I think about destination and great place development. For the kinds of efforts that transform places, the client (cities, counties, authorities, DMOs, EDOs, chambers, downtown orgs, developers, universities, etc.) are typically not structured with the capacity to conceive, study and build massive projects. Organizations are built around the day to day of place operations and maintenance. They are typically not set up organizationally, with the talent and experience necessary to completely change their place. These are much longer and more complex development processes than a single building or a repaved road, one that can involve multiple organizations, advisors, leaders, and decisionmakers over many years. Too often, no single party maintains responsibility for connecting all of those efforts and carrying the vision from concept through implementation. That's the challenge I've become increasingly focused on solving.

The journey from vision to a great place can take years, sometimes decades. Along the way, leadership changes, economic conditions shift, funding priorities evolve, and new opportunities can emerge. Through it all, the momentum behind even the best ideas can stall. I’ve seen it happen too many times. A destination has a bold idea, leadership supports it, research and studies are funded and completed, and excitement grows. Then something changes. A key leader leaves, funding gets delayed, or another priority emerges.

After years of waning momentum, the efforts begin again. Start. Stop. Start. Stop.

This is one of the reasons Hunden Partners has evolved over the past 20 years. We began primarily with financial feasibility and economic impact studies, along with certain financing and implementation services, but our clients truly needed a complete system: a chief place office and officer....an added organizational capability focused on continuous transformation for the betterment of the place.

This evolution taught us that building great places requires navigating both the passion communities have for their future and the very real frustrations of limited resources, changing leadership, competing priorities, and inconvenient timing. Today, our work connects strategy and feasibility with implementation, financing, governance, development, and asset optimization so we can help communities move from vision through reality without losing momentum along the way.

Through that evolution, I've come to believe that the greatest need in destination development is continuity. Every community has more opportunities than it has the time, resources, or capacity to pursue. Leaders are constantly deciding which ideas deserve attention, which investments should move forward, which opportunities require deeper analysis, and how today's decisions align with the long-term vision for their place.

Those decisions cannot just occur once every five years when a master plan is updated; they happen all the time. In fact, great place leaders should be working on multiple development efforts simultaneously, given the long lead time for each. Changing and improving a place is an ongoing evolution with small and large efforts paying off in an ongoing way. Simply swinging for the fences on one big project every generation does not sustain a community. In fact, that is the hallmark of a place barely staying relevant.

Last summer, we invited a group of destination leaders from across the country to serve on our Customer Advisory Board as we explored a new idea. Those conversations helped crystallize something we had been seeing for years. They talked about the difficulty of maintaining alignment and support, the need to quickly evaluate opportunities as they arise and seize upon them before support dissipated. They discussed the challenge of preserving institutional knowledge and the pressure to demonstrate impact. And they spoke of their desire to make important decisions with greater confidence. Mostly, they wanted to stop starting over, wasting time and money. They underscored for us that destinations need an ongoing capability dedicated to efficient, momentum-harnessing, expert place development.

From vision, to assessment, to creative financing and partnerships to shovels in the ground, then long-term place optimization...that is what leaders want for their destinations, campuses and communities.

We looked at each other and realized we had already built it. An advisory, expert-led version of that capability. But what we didn’t realize is that we had been building the key elements of a tech platform that gives the power of Hunden Partners’ expertise to our clients.

We call it the Chief Place Office™.

A Chief Place Office™ provides the strategic continuity to connect a destination's long-term vision with the decisions, investments, opportunities, and projects that emerge along the way. For some organizations, that capability may exist internally. For many, the time, staffing, specialized expertise, data, and resources required to maintain it simply aren't practical to build in-house. That's where I believe Hunden Partners can play a fundamentally different role. We can serve as a destination's Chief Place Office™, bringing together the expertise we've built across strategy, feasibility, development, implementation, governance, economic impact, and asset optimization into one continuous capability.

Technology now allows us to deliver that capability in ways that weren't possible even a few years ago, and this is where Atlas by Hunden™ comes in. Atlas gives our clients ongoing access to Hunden's methodologies, market intelligence, analytical tools, proprietary databases, financial and impact models, asset optimization, and strategic thinking, helping organizations explore opportunities, model scenarios, establish priorities, preserve institutional knowledge, and better understand potential impacts as questions arise. Once we build a client’s curated and tailored Atlas model – using our proprietary internal model for more than 20 asset types, Pillars of Place™ assessment, and Place Optimization system for events and venues — those capabilities are ready in an instant, whenever they are needed. Certain questions that once required months to procure and analyze can now be initially assessed in minutes, allowing leaders to act when opportunities arise and keep key information current as market realities change. In many ways, the technology of Atlas allows destination development to move closer to the speed of thought rather than the speed of procurement.

Technology makes Atlas possible, but the human side is what makes the Chief Place Office™ valuable. Hunden’s judgment, experience, and understanding provide the context that technology alone cannot. A strategic plan, tourism development plan, a Placemaking Action Plan™, or a feasibility and impact study may take six months to a year when you include the time to write an RFP, procure the study and complete it. Those analyses are essential and designed to answer specific questions at a specific point in time. Atlas complements that work by allowing us to bring more information and insight to the table efficiently, while our team helps leaders understand what that information means, determine what should happen next, and recognize when an opportunity warrants deeper analysis. A client could model 13 different scenarios in Atlas, identify the top two or three that seem most promising, and then work with our team to move the scenarios into a formalized, well-tested and studied project. That is just one example of the dozens of ways that Atlas and Hunden’s advisory expertise create an ongoing place development capability that helps clients move more quickly on multiple fronts without sacrificing expert guidance along the way.

Our clients — place leaders at DMOs, EDOs, cities, counties, authorities, universities, and private developers — deserve this kind of ongoing capacity at their fingertips, backed by experienced advisors who are only a phone call away. With Hunden’s expertise and Atlas supporting that capability, we can help leaders maintain momentum, preserve knowledge, evaluate new opportunities, align around priorities, and recognize when an idea is ready for deeper analysis and action. Serving as a destination’s Chief Place Office™ allows communities to continuously move forward with greater confidence, speed, capacity, and continuity while reducing friction and delays that too often cause great ideas to lose momentum. The result is better placemaking, stronger destination development, and more thoughtful placekeeping.

After 30 years in this life-changing work, I've learned that building great places requires more than a great plan or idea. It requires continuous, wise stewardship of thousands of decisions along the way. Every place deserves to become the best version of itself, and I believe every place deserves a team, armed with all the right tools, dedicated to making that happen. We truly believe we have created the world’s first ongoing, complete place development platform. Let’s stop starting over and get the best version of your place underway to improve the lives of everyone in your community!