Community revitalization initiatives for smaller communities | marginal attraction of people and commerce even in small amounts makes a difference

Sometimes I'm quick to judge revitalization initiatives as not particularly wide ranging.  But the fact of the matter is that many commercial districts can benefit positively from marginal increases in demand, visitorship and spending even from small projects.

For example Fargo North Dakota has doubled its downtown population over the past 25 years ("St. Cloud aims to revitalize downtown by ‘copying what Fargo did’," Minneapolis Star-Tribune) and Winona, Minnesota, by refocusing its use of its riverfront, has created an arts district ("How an industrial city along the Mississippi River transformed itself into an arts town," MST)

1.  "Glenview buying former Signode campus to control redevelopment," Crain's Chicago Business.  I've often made the point that an RFP isn't a plan, that it is a solicitation for proposals from organizations which may or may not have good ideas.  

Starting with a plan is better than an RFP, it shapes the proposals and what is acceptable, based on an already developed community consensus.

Glenview takes this a step further--maybe a plan would have been enough?--and bought a large vacant industrial property, totaling 56-acres, to be able to shape how it is developed.

Similarly, Monroeville, Pennsylvania considered buying the local failed shopping mall.  Instead, Walmart bought it and is likely to build a retail facility there.

en Sjaaheim, Silas Dingman and Brady Skahen, members of the pop-punk band F-18, perform at B-Side Indie Music Cafe in downtown St. Cloud last month. The performance was part of a night of punk music put on through Project 37, an all-ages and sober music program. (Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

2.  "This central Minnesota city is taking a true punk-rock approach to revive its downtown," Minneapolis Star-Tribune.  It probably won't spur the creation of the next Prince, or the ground up punk rock movement in DC in the 1970s sparked by the teen band, which morphed into Fugazi, but if cities like Austin, Chicago and Seattle have developed programs to support their music industry and the presentation of like music, why not St. Cloud?  From the article:

For years, officials here have been trying to enliven a lackluster downtown beset with empty storefronts, hollowed-out offices and nearly empty sidewalks.

Now some punk rockers are striking a chord. They, along with other musicians and artists, are stepping up in ways beyond what officials have done, adding cultural attractions and events. A new all-ages music venue that opened this past summer — the B-Side Indie Music Cafe — has already established itself as a gathering spot, jumping with punk rock kids one night, with singer-songwriters another.

In the works next door is a community arts space run by the Wirth Center for the Performing Arts. And in the future? Leaders dream of an arts magnet school or art museum.

“I have a three-part plan to revitalize downtown into an arts district,” said James Newman, executive director of the Wirth Center, which has provided music lessons in central Minnesota for more than four decades. “Downtown has so much potential, and I think an arts focus would be a great thing to bring people in.”

... Already sprinkled throughout downtown St. Cloud are several arts spots, including the Paramount Center for the Arts — which hosts musicals, plays and concerts, as well as art classes — and Pioneer Place on Fifth, which offers music and local radio theater. There are also stages at the Red Carpet Nightclub and an intimate venue at Gnarly Bard Theater, which opened last year.

The question is how much of this ends up being focused on people in-market, shifting their interests from something else to music, versus could St. Cloud, 65 miles from Minneapolis, develop as a destination on music?   From the article:

The planned hub is part of a trend playing out across the state as cities work to revamp downtowns with arts and experiences as retail stores struggle to stay open and offices shutter as more employees work from home.

In Winona, leaders have turned the southeastern river city into an arts destination with a concert hall and art gallery expected to open in the next year, as well as prominent festivals celebrating Shakespeare and Beethoven. In Detroit Lakes, an installation of giant wooden trolls brings people to its downtown and then sends them on an adventure to nearby parks and trails. And in Anoka, folks are invited to explore its downtown’s concerts, farmers markets and businesses with a drink in hand as part of the state’s first social district.

It's a reverse of the more typical flow of rural-suburban residents to the city to join a music ecosystem.

-- "Arts as production: The rock music ecosystem in West Seattle," 2022
-- "Ground up (guerrilla) art #2: community halls and music (among other things)," 2011
-- "Under threat: Austin's music industry as an element of the city's cultural ecosystem and economy," 2016 
-- "Leveraging music for cultural and economic development: part one, opera," 2017
-- "Leveraging music as cultural heritage for economic development: part two, popular music," 2017
-- "NBC4 asks if DC can become a concert capital like Nashville, Austin, and New Orleans?," 2019
-- ""Arts district planning" in Arlington County | Many communities don't know the difference between arts as production and arts as consumption," 2021 
-- "Another example of why local culture plans need to include an element on retail/dealing with for profit elements of the cultural ecosystem: Nashville's Tubb Record Shop," 2022

Baek Jae-ho, head coach of the Sangdong High School baseball team.Photographer: SeongJoon Cho for Bloomberg

3.  "High School Baseball Brought a Dying Korean Town Back to Life," Bloomberg.  The rural declining mining town of Sangdong came up with a program to attract new residents, by creating a first-in-class high school baseball program.  From the article:

That passion for the game inspired Cho Yun-hee and Kim Kyung-soo, 1986 graduates of Sangdong High. As part of a group discussing the future of their alma mater, they spearheaded an effort to attract students, mulling and rejecting proposals such as creating a training program for the energy and mining industries. Then in 2022, they hit upon an ambitious plan. The school would offer free baseball training, plus lodging and food for out-of-area students.

But with an estimated cost of 500 million won ($350,000) a year, the proposal wasn’t an easy sell. Opponents viewed the expense as ludicrous for a decaying community, and even supporters questioned whether a ghost town like Sangdong could lure transplants from dynamic parts of the country.

... Baek had his reputation and a straightforward pitch to prospective students: Get top-level training and a chance at the pro leagues for free. That’s a strong combination in a country where team membership fees and private coaching can cost more than 3 million won a month. The school provides equipment, free lunches and helps pay for other meals. There are now 38 students in the program, two short of a full roster after two players were expelled for smoking (the school has a strict one-strike-and-out policy).

Since the program started, population has inched up over 1,000, new businesses are opening and new housing is being constructed.

The long-vacant Palace Theater in downtown Gary. A blueprint for reversing the city’s fortunes proposes using the restored theater as the heart of a new arts district. Photographer: Zach Mortice/Bloomberg CityLab

4.  Smaller but better?  "Can Anyone Save Gary, Indiana?," Bloomberg.  Gary is about 30 miles from Chicago, and has transit service to and from the South Shore Line, the last US interurban commuter railroad service.

Gary was a steel town.  As US Steel faltered but also reduced employment through capital investment, so did the city--US Steel once had 30,000 employees, now 4,000 (remember too the job multiplier effect which is between 3x and 4x, so that's potentially a loss of 104,000 jobs total.  The city has over 7,000 abandoned buildings.

From the article:

The city’s population also peaked in the ’60s, at about 170,000; today fewer than 70,000 live there. Roughly 80% of Gary residents are Black and a third live below the poverty line — about three times the state average.

Especially downtown, the impact of the exodus is shocking. Most of the land within a several-block radius of City Hall — 5th and Broadway, the center of town — is a bleak patchwork of cleared lots and abandoned commercial buildings. It’s the kind of decay only seen when there was once a rapid and focused public investment in infrastructure, followed by immediate wholesale neglect.

But according to a new study by Notre Dame’s Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative, the failure of mega-scaled landmark buildings like the Genesis Center — a typical gambit for struggling cities — isn’t just an indicator of flailing industrial economies. Instead, the size and form of these developments are themselves the primary culprits.

“When you’re in a state of physical collapse, it doesn’t make any sense to build one big building, because what you need to do is take whatever demand exists and spread it out in smaller buildings, so you can actually find a way to illustrate to people that this change has come,” says Stefanos Polyzoides, dean of Notre Dame’s architecture school, which houses the Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative. “One building accommodating a change is not urbanism. It’s architecture.”

This is an excellent point about many small projects having more impact than a single large project.  So Gary is working to engage multiple small developers, and focusing on rebuilding the public realm in the core of the city, and focusing development on the commercial core, and in neighborhoods that are somewhat stabilized but have vacant lots perfect for infill buildings, zoning changes and some money from the state, which seriously restricted the city's ability to generate property tax revenues through various legislative initiatives.  From the article:

But if the city is going to depend on small business owners for its downtown renaissance, there are resources it needs to offer, he says, like business management training. “A lot of times, mom-and-pop business owners jump in the water and learn how to swim while we’re in the water,” he says. “If we’d had avenues for training, then a lot of businesses that had not made it might be able to make it.”

Jane Jacobs was not in favor of large projects at the expense of smaller, which is discussed in the book Cities: Back from the Edge. 

Elkhart still has a thriving downtown.

5.  Elkhart, Indiana.  The Notre Dame program is also working with Elkhart, and the article contrasts revitalization there versus Gary.  

Elkhart has had more success because of a strong philanthropic community, a lesser problem in terms of abandoned buildings, better capitalized locally-based businesses, and a stronger industrial base, centered on RV manufacturing.  From the article:

Working with other family-owned businesses, as well as the public sector and philanthropic support, Weaver has seen $250 million invested over the last six years in Elkhart’s River District, a mixed-use live-work neighborhood at the confluence of the Elkhart and St. Joseph Rivers. 

So far, the effort has produced hundreds of new residents, a 1.5-mile riverwalk, five parks, and 40 new businesses; a new and lively urban place. “The only way I’ve seen this successfully executed is to slowly build confidence by incremental development,” Weaver says. “I think what Notre Dame has set up is a playbook for communities to think about redevelopment in a way that’s hyperlocal to them.”

Notably, the equity invested is from the community itself, he says. “Nobody is coming to save Elkhart,” says Weaver.

"Hotel Elkhart Named Top Restoration Project in Indiana," HospitalityNet.

Investing in yourself, rather than seeking a savior from outside pushing a large project is key.  From the article:

In some ways, Elkhart is in a different boat than Gary: It has a strong philanthropic community and an intact industrial base.

It’s home to Patrick Industries, which is the leading manufacturer of the ever popular RVs.

Weaver’s ability to finance urban development is closely tied into this dynamic. His firm also develops industrial facilities, and Weaver says the returns for building a “a big dumb box” can be 20%. For his civic work in the River District, it’s paltry 3%.

And he’s not sure building quality urban places outside of major metropolitan areas is going to be an attractive investment for investors any time soon. “I don’t know that we’ll ever be in a situation where the best outcome for the community is the best outcome for the developer in the short term,” he says. “There’s a conflict. I think it’s very difficult to build buildings that enhance civic pride, that put the community first, and provide a short-term superior return.”

While the article discusses structural racism as an issue in Gary, which is majority black at 72% of the population, it doesn't discuss how Elkhart is 62% white.  

This gives the city an easier path forward than Gary ("Elkhart looks to spark downtown revitalization with $40M amphitheater," Inside Indiana Business, "Elkhart officials approve 2 development projects to reimagine city," WNDU TV," "Elkhart," BusinessView). 

Gary's waterfront.  Despite the decline of the steel industry generally, and the reduction in workforce at the US Steelworks in Gary by 70%+, the Gary Steelworks is still the largest steel plant in the world.

Another advantage is that while Gary has the shore of Lake Michigan as an asset, it's occupied in part by US Steel, while Elkhart is able to leverage its riverfront ("Revitalization of the Elkhart River District," Landscape Architecture). 

In a way the comparison between the cities is unfair, in that Elkhart never really crashed the way that Gary did.  According to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, most of Elkhart's downtown is historically intact, and designate.   

Elkhart County is the number-one tourist destination in the state, primarily because of the Heritage Trail, a 90-mile journey through Amish farms, shops, small towns, and urban areas. Free CDs guide visitors past Elkhart’s 1924 Elco Theatre, the Midwest Museum of American Art, and the RV Hall of Fame and Museum.

Elkhart River

 Another attraction in Elkhart is the National New York Central Railroad Museum, which highlights the importance of railroads to the city’s and the country’s development. Elkhart was a vital link between East and West during the country’s growth, and the city is a natural home for this museum, since its rail yard is among America’s largest. The museum includes a replicated stationmaster’s office and a restored 100-year-old freight house complex containing displays and hands-on exhibits.

That makes a difference.  It reminds me of Pontiac Michigan, a majority black city in a county, Oakland that is majority white.  But the County didn't realize it had an obligation to assist the city in substantive revitalization.

-- "Pontiac Michigan: a lagging African American city in one of the nation's wealthiest counties," 2022

Marginal increases in population can have an extranormal impact.  

6.  The above-mentioned downtown residential development program in Fargo, North Dakota (Downtown in Focus Action Plan, Fargo Core Neighborhoods Master Plan).

Block 6 Apartments, Campbell Properties, Fargo, North Dakota.

7.  Tulsa's Remote program to attract "work from home" tech workers by providing small relocation grants ("The economic benefits of paying workers to move," Bloomberg).

8.  Paducah's artist recruitment program, which has helped to revitalize neighborhoods near downtown, attracting artists and businesses, in part because of Paducah's Interstate highway connections to other Midwestern cities with summer art fairs where artists sell their goods ("In Paducah, Artists Create Something From Nothing," NPR). 

The Mississippi Crossings development on the Mississippi River in Champlin. (Leila Navidi/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

9.  Champlin Minnesota's riverfront revitalization ("Twin Cities suburb turns forgotten Mississippi riverfront into a key attraction," MST).  The city has worked to leverage its riverfront since the late 1990s and it has taken 20+ years of steady effort to come to fruition.

(Stillwater, in the far suburbs of Minneapolis worries about overtourism, "Scenic Stillwater draws festive crowds. How much tourism is too much?," "Remade Stillwater riverfront could bring new parks, boat launch, picnic space and fishing piers," MST).

10. "A mountain-bike boom brought growing pains. But these mining towns now embrace their new identity," Crosby and Ironton, on the decline with the close of mines, shift their economies to outdoor recreation and tourism ("Iron Range to spend $5 million on mountain biking trails," MST, 2018).

James Brainard, the mayor of Carmel, Ind., poses before the last of the buildings filling up City Center.Alan Greenblatt/Governing

11.  Creating a center in suburban towns.  Not revitalization per se, but "vitalization" of otherwise residentially focused communities ("Twin Cities suburbs seek destination status with new downtown plans," "St. Louis Park’s West End bucks the trend with one of area’s lowest vacancy rates," MST).

Carmel, Indiana, a traditional suburb of Indianapolis, realized it needed to create a downtown to spur growth ("Meet the Mayor Who Totally Transformed His City," Governing Magazine).  

It's been very successful, so another suburb, Fishers, is doing the same thing ("How Fishers is bringing people out of cul-de-sacs," "New 'urban village' is the latest development in Nickel Plate District south of 116th Street," Indianapolis Star), "Fishers announces plans for $122.5M in new downtown developments," Indianapolis Business Journal).

Somalis in Minneapolis.  

12.  Immigrants moving to languishing communities ("Immigrants as in-migrants and community revitalization") such as 

• the Somalis to Minneapolis-St. Paul ("Somalis finding their place in Minnesota," CNN)
• Latinos to Iowa ("This Iowa meatpacking town didn’t always welcome immigrants. Then the high school started a mariachi band.," Des Moines Register) and many other places ("$11M Plaza de Sol development will bring food hall, small business incubator to St. Paul’s East Side," MST)
• Portuguese and Brazilians to East Coast towns
• Haitians in Ohio don't eat cats and dogs ("An Ohio City Faces a Future Without Haitian Workers," New York Times, "Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up," Guardian)
• Cape Verdeans in Boston, etc.

Threat to immigration as a revitalization augur.  This is under threat though because of the Trump Administration's anti-immigrant agenda ("The Bay Area’s ‘Little Kabul’ once welcomed Afghan refugees. Federal cuts are changing that," San Francisco Chronicle, "'Now, there is fear everywhere’: How Trump’s immigration crackdown has permeated R.I.’s smallest city, home to a big Latino population," Boston Globe, "Chicago ICE Raids Keep Customers at Home in City’s Latino Retail District," Bloomberg, "Minnesota’s Ecuadorian community is flourishing, but its future is uncertain," Sahan Journal).  From Bloomberg:

For Marco Rodriguez of Dulcelandia (Spanish for “candy land”), the raids are a double whammy. Costs for the family business he runs had already gone up by at least 25% due to tariffs, he said, and now the raids are keeping shoppers away during a peak season. Sales across his four shops in Chicago are down more than 50% this year. 

“On the corridor itself, all businesses have been affected, everyone’s feeling it,” Rodriguez said in an interview Wednesday at the chain’s shop in Little Village. “We’ve seen a drop, especially during these times, these last couple weeks, with what’s going on.”

... Fear of raids in Little Village’s two-mile retail corridor led to foot traffic falling by as much as 30% compared with the prior weekend, according to Jennifer Aguilar, who heads the local chamber of commerce. That’s exacerbating financial troubles for the 400 or so businesses in the area, she said.