One more thing about retail

Something to remember is that commercial district revitalization goes in stages. Generally, the first stage is around restaurants and nightlife. Restaurants help build sampling of our commercial districts when there isn't much there otherwise. (See this blog entry: "Richard's Rules for Restaurant Driven Revitalization" as well as this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer about Camden, "Camden pub helping riverfront development.")

It is only after people feel extremely comfortable and familiar with coming out into once almost abandoned commercial districts that retail can develop. Everybody eats--so restaurants get more transactions and often larger transactions than other retail. E.g., the U.S. household spends $50/year on books, and not in one location. So it's difficult to make a bookstore work in our commercial districts, unless it's part of a wider set of revenue streams--i.e., people call Busboys and Poets a bookstore, but frankly, it's a little book nook in a cafe-restaurant. That's fine though. The book portion would be hard to support otherwise.

Similarly, how much money does the typical household spend on clothes and where do they spend it?

We talk about leakage (that communities spend X amount on various retail categories, most of the dollars are expended out of the neighborhood), but not about how people shop. Because they don't understand it, they don't understand retail and how it works.

I.e., on Barracks Row, there aren't more than 15 non-food retailers (excluding groceries and restaurants-carryouts, and services). In the Brookland commercial district it's the same thing, we have 14 non-food non-service retailers, and that includes galleries. And people buy art less frequently than they buy books...

With the kind of criticism leveled against H St. yesterday, I think this is the point we have to make. Retail redevelops in stages. And you need lots of people in order to support individual retailers. And it's hard to make specific kinds of retail work (such as clothes) in neighborhood shopping districts that don't experience a high amount of out-of-neighborhood patronage.

From the Inquirer article:

The pub isn't the only restaurant downtown, but at quitting time, the professionals go home and the healthy number of lunch spots go dark. There have been other trailblazers, such as the 20 Horse Tavern in the port district, which brought white-tablecloth dining and a dinner menu back to Camden.

But the Victor's Pub might be the most important restaurant in the city right now. It's the type of place boosters have always said the waterfront needed - a keystone to the development envisioned there.

Think Baltimore's Inner Harbor or Hoboken's waterfront. Imagine nightclubs and bistros and upscale shopping, a promenade filled with pedestrians strolling the Delaware's edge. At night. In Camden. America's twice-designated "most dangerous city." A successful pub makes it "a lot easier to sell the location to entrepreneurs," said Tom Corcoran, head of the Cooper's Ferry Development Association, a nonprofit dedicated to development in Camden.

He pointed out that naysayers had questioned the wisdom of every other amenity brought to the waterfront - the marina, the aquarium, the Tweeter Center and the Victor Lofts.

"Everyone said, 'No one's going to come to Camden,' " Corcoran said. "Now it's restaurants. 'Who's going to come to a restaurant in Camden at night?' Every time we have to prove the same things." For Dranoff, the developer of Philadelphia's Symphony House, Venice Lofts and the Left Bank, there's nothing left to prove. The toehold of development that once was the waterfront has reached a "tipping point," he said.
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Not that long ago, less than 5 years, that's what people said about DC. Have you been on 7th or 14th Streets lately? On a Friday or Saturday night on H Street NE?

Rain or shine, warm or cold, people are out and about in Downtown DC.