Eastgate's 2025 Annual Meeting took place on Thursday, May 15, 2025 at Stambaugh Auditorium. We celebrated Eastgate's accomplishments in the past year, including more Mahoning River Dams being removed, strides made in broadband, economic development efforts, and more.
Eastgate Executive Director Jim Kinnick detailed Eastgate’s accomplishments, including the continued efforts to demolish the Mahoning River dams, broadband expansion efforts and housing efforts.
Director Kinnick also spoke about the need to advocate for and participate in the region. “Be a fan of the region,” Kinnick requested of the audience. “Tell our story, be a participant, learn from one another.”
Eastgate presented a new award, the Community Leadership Award to Mayor Catherine Cercone Miller of Struthers and Executive Director Pat Kerrigan of Oak Hill Collaborative. The two recipients were selected because of their “exemplary dedication to the betterment of the community” as stated on the awards themselves.
The event featured speaker Chris Allen, Director of Events and Partnerships at Strong Towns.
Strong Towns mission is stated as: “We seek to replace America’s post-war pattern of development, the Suburban Experiment, with a pattern of development that is financially strong and resilient. We advocate for cities of all sizes to be safe, livable, and inviting. We work to elevate local government to be the highest level of collaboration for people working together in a place, not merely the lowest level in a hierarchy of governments.”
Allen’s presentation is described as: “Talk of a "housing crisis" pervades American cities—whether off-the-charts rents in coastal cities or hyper-vacancy in the Rust Belt. These problems are symptoms of a deeper dysfunction. Over nearly a century, through often well-intended top-down policy interventions, we've turned a complex system that should be adaptive and self-correcting into one prone to a never-ending cycle of boom and bust, crises and overcorrections.
To address the dysfunction at the root of our housing problems, we need to shift our approach. We must move away from a model in which large developers and centralized financial institutions have unprecedented sway over what is built and where, to a more antifragile housing ecosystem in which the bar to entry is low, and every neighborhood can undergo incremental change over time.
A Breaking Out of the Housing Trap presentation will help you understand the root causes of America's interrelated housing crises, and identify some rational responses that your city (and every city) can take.”
The full annual meeting can be watched below.