Downtown St. Paul needs 20,000 more people to thrive | implications for urban revitalization in the post covid city
The first chapter is particularly important in that it puts numbers to the concepts laid out in Death and Life of American Cities.
Note that before the book, there was an article in Fortune Magazine, "Downtown is for people" (pdf). I actually have the original magazine--from an estate sale in Bethesda, found by Suzanne, not me, but it's in DC. Great images.
If I remember correctly, a commercial district (not a Downtown) needs 7,500 people living within a half mile radius to be successful, and if you want entertainment in that district, like a cinema, you need 15,000 residents within that half mile (there's a lot of discussion on how many people you need to support transit, etc.).
But that chapter is in desperate need of a rewrite.First, e commerce has decimated local retail.
Second, social media and other consumption has had a lot of impact on the movie industry ("Poor Box Office Sends 100-Year-Old Theater Chain Into Bankruptcy," Bloomberg).
Smaller districts need more than 7,500 or 15,000 people in a half mile radius to make these districts work.
Third, work from home because of covid and post covid has cut visitation Downtown by 50%. It's wrecked downtown retail and transit. The best Downtowns seem to have recovered at about 50%-60% of their pre-covid numbers.
St, Paul Minnesota thinks it's at least 20,000 more people per day, a mix of residents, visitors and workers ("Wanted: More People! St. Paul city leaders want to bring more residents, workers and visitors to downtown," WCCO AM).
St. Paul city leaders are out with some new goals and strategies for bringing more vitality to downtown and improving the mix of people who work, visit, and live there.
It begins with drawing 20,000 more downtown residents, something President of the St. Paul Downtown Alliance Joe Spencer says is already in play as empty office buildings are transformed into apartments and condos. Spencer says that population growth will in turn drive more amenities.
The plan drafted by dozens of civic and business leaders also involves better connecting downtown's parks and public spaces with new sidewalks and street configurations, and enhancing the downtown riverfront.
Spencer says much of what they want to do is already in play. "We know that when we do these, when we make these kinds of investments, when we build the apartments, they fill up," says Spencer.
"When we build the visitor destinations, they're successful. And we know that we're good at building public spaces." They also want to add 20,000 more jobs, and a 20% increase in visitors downtown.
-- "Downtown Investment Strategy," St. Paul Downtown Alliance
-- St. Paul Downtown Investment Strategy (report)
Which makes me laugh that now Mayor Bowser says she's interested in a fourth term.
You'd think she'd be reticent ("Exclusive: Mayor Bowser says "don't be so down on D.C." after crime spike," Axios) given the city is an outlier in the US in terms of having a serious crime problem ("Can anything stop the DC crime wave?," Washington Post).
The Downtown Action Plan highlights summary is available now, and the full Action Plan will be available in Spring 2024. The Downtown Public Realm Plan is online now.
-- "Now I know why Boulder's Pearl Street Mall is the exception that proves the rule about the failures of pedestrian malls," 2005
Labels: commercial district revitalization planning, cultural planning, sustainable land use and resource planning, urban design/placemaking, urban revitalization
posted by Richard Layman @ 8:31 AM&Permanent Link
8 Comments:
Again, WFH is a choice.
Europe is not doing it.
Cities as we know it will not survive WFH.
Again maybe we need to think of a polycentric urban area rather than the downtown model, but that also limits the entertainment aspect of urban life.
I wonder if DC and their new DMPED director is thinking that the FBI move is now a disaster. Replacing government workers with residents going to be much harder.
Funny you mention FBI. I've been meaning to write a mea culpa for at least a year. Circumstances have changed. For Downtown and Metrorail.
Wrt your "great replacement theory" (I couldn't help myself), absolutely. Plus it will take at least 10-15 years to see results from adding residents. Plus DC's Downtown just isn't that big.
Back to the idea of urban technology as walking based... the public realm plan is interesting but it's not in the least bit a game changer. Haven't read the summary action plan. Looking forward to the full one.
Transit needs to go the extra mile now.
https://wwww.septa.org/fares/partner-programs/
https://www.inquirer.com/real-estate/commercial/market-street-east-struggling-sixers-arena-20240318.html
Philadelphia’s Market Street East searches for growth and renewal — with or without a new Sixers arena
Chinatown activists contend that putting an 18,500-seat arena on their doorstep will ultimately destroy the neighborhood.
What’s certain is the Sixers’ proposal has people debating, analyzing, and dreaming about the future of Market East.
One new study said the corridor needs lots of help, and another indicated that not much is on the way: In downtown Philadelphia, 66 big real estate projects are proposed, under construction, or recently completed — but only one on Market East, the arena, which even if approved would not open for seven years.
“I don’t need a study to tell me that Market Street East is in extremis,” said John Connors Sr., president of Brickstone Realty, as he ticked off a list of businesses that are closed or moving. “That’s what we’re dealing with on the ground.”
Still, despite its privations, the city’s traditional Main Street holds strong assets: unrivaled access to rail, subway, bus, and speed-line service; gorgeous, historic architecture; parking lots and vacant stores that, while unsightly, offer prime land for new construction.
In 2026, ready or not, the street will be tasked to fulfill its role as gateway to the Independence historic district and hotelier to out-of-town guests, with millions of people expected to take part in the FIFA World Cup, the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, and the gala celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday, the Semiquincentennial.
“We need a big vision,” said Phil Goldsmith, a former city deputy mayor and managing director. “The issue should be Market Street East and what should be done for Market Street East. To say, ‘Let’s pop this arena in there,’ and not look at other solutions, doesn’t seem to be a strategic way of looking at things.”
Market East has so many challenges that it’s hard to know where to start. Maybe with the one that nobody saw coming, the one that stalled what looked like an unstoppable revival.
In spring 2015, the city and its development partners embarked on a top-to-bottom, $420 million transformation of the sagging, 1970s-era Gallery mall. Buoyed by $90 million in public support, the flashier Fashion District would draw national chains and top brands while driving additional development.
On Market East and elsewhere, the pandemic emptied office buildings, cut transit ridership, and lowered foot traffic.
“It’s going to be very, very challenging to bring people back,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, a UCLA information-studies professor who examines how remote work is changing society. “It’s a huge issue for everyone from retailers to those who care about public spaces.”
But many employees don’t view saving downtown Philadelphia as part of their job descriptions. For them and millions of Americans, commuting to work in an office, once a daily facet of middle-class life, has come to seem expensive and time-consuming.
About 35% of those whose jobs can be done remotely now work from home all the time, up from 7% before the pandemic, according to the Pew Research Center.
At Jefferson Station, atop of which the Sixers plan to build, one of every four weekday commuters — who bought lunches, grabbed snacks, shopped, and stayed after work to meet friends at restaurants — has vanished.
Overall ridership on SEPTA regional rail and subway lines is down more than 40%, bus ridership off 25%.
The impact of those missing people is punishing: in the Market East area, 23.9% of office space was vacant at the end of last year, higher than Philadelphia as a whole, according to commercial real estate firm CBRE. The number of residents, visitors and workers in Center City was 83% of the pre-pandemic level in November, according to the Center City District, which works to enhance the vitality of downtown.
All of that has left Market East struggling for air. And uncertain from where the next breath will come.
“We might never return to the five-day workweek,” said Eric Klinenberg, a New York University sociology professor who studies the effects of the pandemic. “That poses some existential challenges for central cities.”
The ailing Fashion District, a property key to Market East, is three sheer, inward-facing blocks.
“We need to rethink the whole thing,” said Akira Drake Rodriguez, a University of Pennsylvania scholar who studies the politics of urban planning.
Despite its walls, she said, Market East could be brought to human scale, made less institutional and more engaging by adding elements that attract people: courtyards, pocket parks, residences, new businesses. Rodriguez sees the option of mall or arena as a false choice, proffered by billionaire sports owners seeking profit and city leaders lacking foresight.
The route needs small things, like planters, trees, hanging baskets, and places to sit. And it needs big things, the Sasaki report said, like a civic plaza, which could be encouraged by redesigning the corners at the intersection of 10th and Market.
“It’s an incomplete street that pre-pandemic was slowly moving in the right direction,” said Paul Levy, who recently retired as chief executive of the Center City District.
If the arena is built, Levy said, the key will be “not to treat it as a one-time event, but to treat it as the trigger, and the leverage, to improve a street that’s absolutely important to the prosperity, vitality and jobs in the city.”
Connors subsequently worked on renovating the Wanamakers building and the SEPTA offices at 1234 Market, and turned the old City Hall Annex into what is now the Notary Hotel.
Four decades on Market East taught him two important lessons:
First, change is slow, but it’s constant.
In the 1980s he helped create the Market Street East Improvement Association with G. Stockton Strawbridge, the business and civic leader who envisioned the route as a grand European boulevard. Today, improvement-association companies that constituted a Mount Rushmore of business elite — Strawbridge & Clothier, Wanamakers, Stern’s, the Rouse Co., PNB, PSFS — are dead and gone.
Second, cataclysmic events like pandemics carry profound consequences.
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Market Street East: A Place for All
https://centercityphila.org/uploads/attachments/clo68fahc05t8m2qd2t5s4ycp-mse-vision-plan-2023.pdf
Klinenberg, the New York University professor, has hope for change on Market East and places like it — not immediately, but eventually.
He sees the pandemic continuing to exert its impact, evident in diminished downtowns. Many people remain wary of crowded subways and buses.
Everyone’s irritable. But at the same time, he said, people are rediscovering the basic human desire to connect in person.
Cities encourage that, offering convenient, quality restaurants and bars, and promising the joy of unexpected interaction, like bumping into an old friend on the street. Meanwhile, business managers worry that empty offices are making their teams more isolated and less creative, and some signs indicate that younger workers miss building relationships with mentors.
All of that could bring more people into cities.
The Fashion District never got out of the gate. The Target at nearby 11th and Chestnut closed in 2023, citing poor performance. Wawa shuttered its store at 12th and Market over crime concerns.
The Marshalls at 10th Street closed, and so did the Burger King. District Taco couldn’t make it.
To Connors, a Sixers arena is not just desirable but critical. He asks: Does anyone see another company ready to spend $1.55 billion on Market East?
At a time when the transit systems that make the street attractive are struggling for income and riders, Connors said, the Sixers aim to fill train cars with people who will drink, dine, and spend in Center City.
“East Market Street is a ghost town after five o’clock,” said Connors, now chairman of the improvement-association that Stockton Strawbridge once led. “And that’s not always been the case. And shouldn’t be the case.”
The future was supposed to be sunnier. In the early 1960s the city government projected that Philadelphia’s population would rise through 1980, reaching about 2.2 million. And that the majestic department stores that defined Market East were permanent, the challenge how to best move shoppers from building to building.
In fact the city population was entering a historic decline that ended only in 2008. The department stores were already dinosaurs, fated to perish not in a blinding flash but to limp into extinction, one after the other, harried by the flight of their customers to suburban shopping malls.
Snellenburg’s closed in 1963, Lit Brothers in 1977. Gimbels moved to the new Gallery and died there in 1986. Strawbridge & Clothier disappeared in downsizings and Wanamakers became a Macy’s in 2006.
In the face of that upheaval, Connors said, Market East set about reinventing itself, turning historic buildings into offices and retail space. Now it needs another way forward.
One possibility may be experiential retail, which aims to give customers unique, immersive experiences, a trend delivered by the same pandemic that hollowed large-format stores.
What, he asks, could be more experiential than a world-class arena? Or more inclusive than basketball and music?
“Moving the needle in a city the size of Philadelphia is really hard to do,” Connors said. “If we miss this opportunity, it’s not going to come around again.”
A big challenge facing the Sixers is how to create activity at the arena on days when no events are scheduled.
To do that, they’re working on plans for the public, street-level floor, an open, pass-through space that will include escalators to the seating levels and access to SEPTA transit.
That space will support restaurants and stores, and the mix will be key, the Sixers say, because the area will need to perform several functions — draw visitors, serve commuters who want to grab a bite, and welcome fans arriving for events.
“Someplace that people have a reason to go to and want to go to,” said Alex Kafenbaum, senior vice president and head of development for Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Sixers. “An experience on event- and nonevent-days and every day of the week.”
People will come to an area that’s intriguing and safe, he said. The Sixers’ proposal includes hiring safety ambassadors, adding security cameras, and upgrading street lighting. A restaurant or small business can afford to open nearby if it can count on huge crowds at specific times, he said.
Five years after the arena’s opening, he expects, the boarded-up storefronts in the middle of the street will be gone, high-rise, mixed-use residential remaking the corridor. He anticipates a new Thomas Jefferson University science building, and even that the infamous “Disney hole,” the giant dig-turned-parking-lot, will be transformed.
“You don’t get that without what I’m doing,” Adelman said. “You don’t encourage investment, risk capital, banks, financial institutions, to put money there until they believe it’s a solidified, safe place to put capital. And we’re taking the risk capital with a billion and a half dollars.”
For three hours the ideas flew, more than a hundred people gathered at a forum to suggest what besides a basketball arena could go at 10th and Market: a library, high school, public pool, garden, playground, health clinic, night market, art space, apartments, shops, or maybe a community center where seniors and children would be welcome and safe.
The Fashion District’s early focus on outlets like Century 21, Burlington, and Primark was the right fit, Berne said. Century 21 closed in the pandemic, but the others remain a bright presence, attracting customers by offering treasure-hunt shopping that promises brand names at lower prices.
“That’s the space Market East could still occupy,” Berne said. “There’s still a lot of enviable retailers in and around that Fashion District. Saying, ‘Let’s put an arena on part of that,’ it felt like waving the white flag.”
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/opinion/brandon-johnson-could-transform-chicago-bears-sox-casino-plan-opinion
Opinion: A new downtown stadium offers Mayor Johnson a transformational opportunity
3/20/24
Mayor Brandon Johnson and all parties interested in the Loop, including the Bears and the White Sox, should pause and look for a collaborative solution on a stadium proposal that will be mutually beneficial and good for all of Chicago.
And while the horse may be out of the barn on the casino, if at all possible, I would throw that into the mix, too.
While Chicago is not ailing in the same way as other Rust Belt cities such as Cleveland and Detroit, we can take a page from their books with respect to urban planning.
Both cities, facing dying central business districts a couple of decades ago, worked with their professional sports teams to locate new stadiums in the heart of their respective cities. This resulted in spin-off entertainment venues such as restaurants, nightclubs and related retail.
Business and real estate organizations in Chicago are concerned about the slow post-pandemic recovery of the Loop. Only 56% of the people are returning to the office in Chicago post-pandemic, lagging some peer cities. The impact on commercial, retail and dining sectors is apparent, with vacant storefronts and foreclosed office buildings.
While well intended, the mayor’s recent infusion of more than $1.5 million in grants from the Small Business Improvement Fund to businesses in the LaSalle Street corridor is not the answer to revitalizing the Loop on a long-term basis.
What is needed is sustainability, and this can only happen with attractions that stand the test of time. It is fair to say that sports teams and stadiums that can double as entertainment venues can do this, as reflected in the success at venues such as the United Center and Wrigley Field.
While goods provided by retailers are a key component of the Loop's economy, the internet has clearly accelerated a decline in this sector. If people did not shop online before COVID, they certainly are now.
... It may turn out, after study and analysis, that the aforementioned ideas are not practicable.
However, not stepping back and looking holistically at the need for a revitalized Loop and a new stadium or stadiums may be passing up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our great city.
So go for it, Mayor Johnson. This very well could be your defining moment. Invite the parties of interest into a big tent. Along with your staff, include the teams, Loop property owners, the Illinois Sports Facility Authority, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, the Commercial Club of Chicago, affordable housing advocates and current Loop residents, to name a few stakeholders. Have your staff use the resources of the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Civic Federation. This is a great opportunity for you to lead and transform the city in a way that will benefit current and future Chicagoans.
Michael D. Belsky is a former mayor of Highland Park and an expert in urban policy and public finance.
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