Downtown Silver Spring gift card

Downtown Silver Spring gift card
Originally uploaded by rllayman.

When I lived in the Detroit area, the then extant Farmer Jack's supermarket chain (since driven into the ground by management post its acquisition by A&P) used to have a radio commercial with the tagline "The competition knows us, you should too."

Well, DC needs to know its competition. (It's why I say that the fact that DC does better than Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, etc., is irrelevant, because our competitors are Arlington County, Alexandria, Bethesda, and Silver Spring, and now, the National Harbor in Prince George's County...)

This gift card is being launched by the Downtown Silver Spring business district, and was mentioned in the Silver Spring Singular blog.

A couple nights ago I had a long conversation with a journalist for a community newspaper about urban revitalization in all its nuances.

I mentioned that one of the major learnings of the Main Street approach, which was actually gleaned from Corning, New York, which in 1974 hired a "downtown" manager, is that even though the businesses and the properties are individually owned, without the kind of master leases that shopping centers have (which dictate common behaviors such as hours and merchandising) neighborhood and downtown commercial districts need to be managed and marketed as a "district"--just as a shopping center is managed and marketed as a single unit.

And the skills required to do so are generally outside of the knowledge and skillset of the average independent business owner.

Index Keywords: urban-revitalization