Let’s think big about dogs.

Here’s the background.  I spend some time at our apartment in New York and when I’m there it’s highly unusual for me to get on the elevator and not have a few dogs as my fellow passengers.  The dogs are well behaved…some friendlier than others, but then the people on the elevator fall into those two categories as well.  The dogs are often more interesting though.  And when I follow the puppies and their owners out of the building, I observe that some head to the dog park portion of Riverside Park, others just casually stroll down the streets of the upper west side.  The owners (or dog-walkers, which is a profession in NY) walk dutifully behind, carrying a litter bag which they invariably use to clean up after the dog does what dogs do when they get out of the apartment building.  It all works splendidly.

Here’s the Cincinnati observation.  For the past 15 years our offices had been on Central Parkway in the Kroger Building.  There’s a nice grassy median on the Parkway (and it’s been greatly improved recently thanks to the Cincinnati Park Board).  When we first moved our offices there I never saw many people on Central and I certainly never saw any dogs.  Then, as condos and apartments began to appear, so did the dogs. 

Enter the Puppy Metric.

And I began to realize that the health of an urban environment can, in part, be measured by the number of dogs: the puppy metric.

Lots of different types of people who live in urban environments have dogs as I know from my trips up and down the elevators in our apartment building in NY.  People with dogs don’t just live in the suburbs with a fenced back yard.  They live in downtowns too and we need to encourage them to do so.  Yeah, the health of an urban core can be measured by office occupancy rates, condo sales, retail turn-over, number of restaurants and bars and arts, culture, sports and entertainment offerings.  But the health of an urban core can also be measured by the puppy metric.  So let’s focus on growing that metric and making downtown as welcoming for dogs as it is for people.  Remember, sometimes the dogs are more interesting.