Stores even in car-centric places should consider making entrances more inviting, with seating, etc.

 

A patio furniture set marked for sale is an impromptu seating area at the Smith's Marketplace in Millcreek, Utah.

Retail roundup: nonprofit public market opens in Anacostia | City owned markets | Experience retail

Retail in low income communities.  Eater reports, "A José Andrés-Backed Cafe Named for Marion Barry Opens in Ward 8," that a public market form of business has opened in Ward 8 to sell locally grown produce and prepared foods.  

Marion Barry Avenue Market brings aisles of fresh produce and fast-casual soul food to Anacostia, an underserved community with access to only one major grocery store until now. Named in honor of the late D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, whose life and political legacy is closely tied to Ward 8, the market and cafe debuts to the public on Saturday, September 27. Spearheaded by urban food justice nonprofit Dreaming Out Loud, the project is partly backed by Longer Tables Fund — celebrity chef José Andrés’ philanthropic arm that connects at-risk communities with affordable food options. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner is served daily for pickup and on-site dining across indoor communal tables and a garden patio. There’s also a demo kitchen to host classes around cooking and nutrition. The market is stocked with locally grown fruit and vegetables sold at a sliding-scale price with voucher‑friendly options, too (1303 Marion Barry Avenue SE).

I'm pretty sure I suggested something like this many many years ago, but I can't find an entry.

However, with the news that Starbucks is closing their Anacostia store ("Anacostia Starbucks closure stings, even as some see a neighborhood ‘renaissance’," Washington Post).  WRT the Starbucks closures across the country ("Why Starbucks is closing hundreds of stores," CNN, "This is why your Starbucks just closed," Boston Globe) either the stores are unprofitable or marginally profitable, but even if profitable the return on investment is likely less than the cost of capital. Hence closure.

WRT both the Starbucks story and the Marion Barry Avenue Market, it reminds me of the now 13 year old entry:

-- "In lower income neighborhoods, are businesses supposed to be "community organizations" first?"

Re-reading it, it's damn good, and is on my mind in part because I am working on a piece on how to build an entrepreneurship ecosystem in low income neighborhoods.  

The points made then are equally relevant today in terms of how to provide retail options in neighborhoods that can't support traditional retail business models.

New urbanists and the desire for neighborhood retail/the 15 minute city.  This also comes up for higher income communities and how new urbanists clamor for corner stores ("Bring Back the Corner Store," Planetizen, "Reviving neighborhood stores, CNU)), like the good old days ("The Corner Store: At the Intersection of Memory and Time," Post).  

The problem is that retail business models don't support stocking stores at this micro-scale, where goods can be sold reasonably cheaply.  

The same goes for the 15 minute city.  Retail business models don't work at the scale of a 3/4 mile walking distance, you need to draw on a much larger radius to generate the number of customers needed for success.  

The proof of this is NYC and other large cities.  There, small corner stores work because of the population density, and there are some business cooperatives like Key Foods Group that focus on that market.  Even so, store models needing larger customer bases cluster in the city equivalent of a regional shopping district, like Union Square, with its Whole Foods Market.

I counter always with the example of the Spar business group in Europe (and other countries) which has a system set up to support small stores.  

Similarly, a wholesale business in Poland is set up to support small stores there, as 40% of the shops are run by local businesses (at least in 2011, when I read the story ("The man who bet on tradition," Financial Times).

... For while many Poles were entranced by the prospect of choice and consumer plenty that the new shops offered – a stunning contrast to the empty shelves and shoddy goods that had been a hallmark of communism – many others remained loyal to the mom-and-pop shops that exist in every Polish neighbourhood. Those are the shops that Eurocash supplies with produce and other goods, often on a cash basis.

“We believed in the future of independent retail – that there will always be a space for small shops,” says Mr Amaral, who splits his time between Poznan in western Poland and his native Portugal.

... here are about 150,000 small shops in Poland, the highest number in the European Union, and of that about a third are family owned. In all, small shops make up 40 per cent of Poland’s retail food shops, while supermarkets, hypermarkets and discount shops have about 42 per cent of the market – a vastly different picture than in most other European countries, where big retailers dominate.

If we had wholesaler systems focused on providing items at good prices to small stores, then it could work.  Without that, it doesn't.  That's why you have chains like 7-11.

City owned groceries.  Are suggested for "food deserts."  It's a mistake.  First, because of the wholesale/pricing issue.  Second, because city governments usually lack the ability to be innovative and spry at the scale of a retail business.  Chicago was going to do it and stepped back ("A closer look at Mamdani's proposal for city-owned grocery stores," Chicago Tribune).  Zohran Mamdani has it as a campaign plank ("A closer look at Mamdani's proposal for city-owned grocery stores," Spectrum News).

A comment in the NYC article is off base. The person worked for Whole Foods and used the Department of Defense PX stores (commissary) as an example of nonprofit stores selling cheaply.  But the volume of these stores on military bases exceeds that of large scale supermarkets.  They may have free rent too.  Although the Pentagon wants to drop the business ("Pentagon wants out of the grocery business, asks industry for proposals," San Antonio Express-News).  From the article:

The department also will consider closing "all or a portion" of existing commissaries if a commercial chain has nearby stores that can offer the same 23.7% discount that the military markets provide.

Interesting, because for years low PX prices were a marketing point for enlistment.  But apparently, some of the low costs come from the Pentagon picking up back office costs like ordering. 

Small for profit businesses have a hard time.  So do nonprofits trying their hand at it ("Nonprofit grocery chain Daily Table to shut down operations," Boston Globe).

-- "Grocery stores in cities: the failure of the "15 minute grocery store"," 2023

Cities might be able to make a go of it if they band together and create a common brand, operations systems, and vendor relationships ("Why ask why? Because," 2007) to share across a network of small grocery stores in poor neighborhoods, where they would share the back office systems and negotiate a good or at least better product cost rate with a national food distributor.

Department stores as experiences. The Wall Street Journal has an article, "Can the French Reinvent America’s Broken Department-Store Model?," on the opening of a branch of the Paris-based Printemps department store in NYC.

Printemps New York is following the European department-store playbook of serving up enough food and drinks, exhibitions and other activities to keep shoppers occupied far beyond the fitting room. The store in Manhattan’s financial district was designed to evoke a luxurious Parisian residence. It more closely resembles a chic nightspot than it does a suburban Macy’s. The new store features an espresso cafe under a green-and-white circus tent, three other restaurants, hand-painted tiles, a champagne bar and spa chairs for mini-facials and head massages.

I think the article misses the point in that experience-based retail at the department store scale is limited to big cities/urban populations, at least in the US.

Department stores in the US have long since shifted to a more utilitarian model with limited pizzazz outside of NYC stores like Macy's and Bloomingdales.

What suburbanite is going to go to a suburban Macy's for a sit down meal, even if British department stores are known for exemplary food options, and when it was a great experience in the past (as a child I ate at the Hudson's restaurant, and on a road trip to Chicago during college, in Marshall Fields' restaurant).

Although apparently one of NYC's best Italian restaurants is in the Herald Square Macy's.

When Downtown department stores close, generally there is a loss in the range of retail experiences in the city.  But many people don't care because they aren't looking to shop so much as they are looking to buy quickly, and move on.

This is a point similar to that of corner stores in New York City neighborhoods.  They survive because of density.  Same with experience-oriented department stores.  They are unique.  A destination.  Appropriate for center cities but not likely to be successful in the suburbs.

Revitalization of the wholesale food Union Market in DC to a consumer focus

Was a major project I was involved in from a grassroots perspective, in the face of an urban renewal focused effort by Ward 5 interests (bowling alley, etc.).  See "Retail planning and the Florida Market" [2009].  I'm reminded because the Washington Post had an article over the weekend about remaining wholesalers ("The last wholesalers of Union Market"), and a couple months ago there was an article about the last original vendor in the DC Farmers Market selling out ("Soko Butcher Shop Takes Over Historic Harvey’s in Union Market," Eater).

Photo: Craig Hudson, Washington Post.

Since then it has been massively revitalized, beyond anything I could imagine.  Mixing apartments and hotels, with food counters and restaurants, with a marked shift to prepared foods.

With the broadening and upscaling of the range of stores and restaurants ("All the places to eat and drink at Union Market" and "D.C.’s Minetta Tavern is an alluring chip off the old block in N.Y.," Post), you could argue that "gentrification of the market" isn't any different than urban renewal.

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Produce vendor Joe Giordano shown in a 1993 Inquirer Magazine feature about peaches. Michael Bryant / Staff Photographer

Cf "A landmark food business in the Italian Market has closed after a century," Philadelphia Inquirer, which discusses vacancies in a similar market there, Italian Market.  

The produce business has changed with competition from supermarkets and other retailers, of course, but more recently has suffered with the rise of delivery, said John Giordano, 64, who started working in the store at age 5 when he got home from kindergarten.

“Our business has moved into wholesale — pizza places, restaurants, and everything like that,” Giordano said Saturday, as he and workers cleaned out the property, setting out boxes of bric-a-brac salvaged from an upstairs apartment to offer to passersby. The garage doors were rolled down, unheard-of on a Saturday.

Revitalization Lessons.  In terms of Italian Market as a whole, it's proof to maintain it as best as possible, you need a manager.  In Union Market, that manager became Edens Realty which bought out one property holder with a preponderance of parcels, leaving Edens with the critical mass necessary to make significant change ("Two years in, Union Market thrives," Post, "Vendor's Game: Meet the Chef Behind Union Market," Washington City Paper).

Urban grocery stores round up

DC is overstored for grocery stores, at least west of the river, while supermarkets in the poorest area ("east of the river") are minimal.  There are so many stores that it's hard to find tenants for all the proposed spaces.  

The Washington Post article, " A developer promised a supermarket for a new neighborhood. Now it can’t deliver," describes how a developer in Greater Brookland wants to cut the size of a previously approved supermarket space by half--likely for a specialty grocer, like Sprouts, rather than a full line store like Safeway or Giant.

NYC proposes city-owned stores in "food deserts" ("New York might experiment with city-run grocery stores. How do they work?," Washington Post). Chicago has proposed something similar. I think that's insane.  Governments lack the capacity to run an operation like a supermarket which requires a lot of skill and ability to pivot--I think of DC's Eastern Market, under management by the local government real estate office as a perfect example because of their failure to act with alacrity.  

OTOH, some public markets like in Baltimore seem to be reasonably well managed.

In Seattle the large multi-store cooperative PCC has reopened a store it closed in Downtown, but with a much greater focus on grab and go and prepared foods ("PCC back in downtown Seattle with a smaller store and downsized ambitions," Seattle Times).

The PCC Corner Market, as it’s called, is roughly a third the size of its 20,000-square-foot predecessor, with a much narrower selection that the co-op hopes will outperform the original store, which closed less than two years after opening after lackluster sales. 

The new format, which focuses on deli, lunch and breakfast items, and lots of grab-and-go selections, essentially replicates what was generating most sales in the first store. Although that store’s deli did a brisk trade, it couldn’t cover the expenses of a full-sized store in the middle of downtown still missing much of its pre-pandemic workforce, Srinivasan said. “It just didn’t pencil.”

The new downtown format, by contrast, is tailored to a lunchtime worker-and tourist-crowd. There is a plethora sandwiches, hot pizza and a salad bar, but fewer dry goods and PCC staples like fresh produce and meat.

“I think this model makes a lot of sense,” added Maria Diamond, who works nearby, as she emerged from the store Tuesday. “I think the full store was a lot for this community to support.” PCC’s smaller format, its first, may also reflect moderating expectations for downtown recovery. In June, downtown worker foot traffic hit its highest level since March 2020, when COVID-19 emptied out downtown offices, but is still 66% of what it was in June 2019, according to cellphone data posted by the Downtown Seattle Association. PCC signed the lease for the original store in 2018.

(The Downtown Alliance) Rendering of a new building proposed at Salt Lake City's Pioneer Park, designed to house portions of the Downtown Farmers Market and activate the downtown green space year-round.

Salt Lake proposes a public market building at Pioneer Park ("Finally, a solution for Pioneer Park? SLC, Downtown Alliance to make it a year-round home for the farmers market," Salt Lake Tribune), home to one of the nation's best Saturday farmers markets held during the spring and summer, with an abbreviated winter market following.  

For the same reason that PCC shut their original store, customers wanting prepared foods, not foods they need to prepare. I don't think it will work.

Blocks downtown are big and a lot of the residential buildings are a ways away, so walking won't be that convenient.  

Another indicator of failure being more likely is that is food halls in Greater Downtown only have marginal success ("Food hall in SLC development closes after not getting enough customers, manager says," SLT).

The standalone location of Ruby Snaps cookies, which are sold from the shop and also wholesale.  Photo: Fransico Kjolseth.  Salt Lake Tribune).

For people not living downtown, they will have to pass dozens of grocery stores to get there--there are at least 20 supermarkets within a 3-5 mile radius of where we live plus lots of specialty stores (Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Indian, Japanese, Chinese). 

I do think a plan could work if focused on artisanal food producers like Ruby Snaps cookies ("Dough Girl's new name is a "Snap") or kolaches ("At this Sugar House spot, selling cupcakes then sandwiches then brownies have all failed. Here’s what’s next," SLT).  I say this as one standalone store focusing on brownies shut down about a year ago.

I understand the need for activation, but this isn't the solution.  I do think it could be okay on the day that the farmers market operates, but that's for a few Saturdays per year.

A kind of salvage store chain in Boston, focused on providing lower cost food for lower income patrons shut down ("Local nonprofit grocery store chain Daily Table to close all locations," WGBH/NPR).

Daily Table, a nonprofit local grocery chain in Boston, Cambridge and Salem, is closing its four locations in the coming days. With federal cuts to hunger relief programs, along with the rising prices of food and other challenges dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic, its board of directors decided to shutter the remaining locations after shrinking its footprint earlier this year.

“It’s a very sad day for us because for 10 years we’ve been able to serve communities,” Doug Rauch, Daily Table’s founder and chair of the board of directors, told GBH News. “They counted on us for truly affordable fresh fruits and vegetables — and not just fresh fruits, vegetables, but prepared meals, too.”

For the past 10 years, Daily Table has served neighborhoods across Greater Boston by working alongside each community to make affordable, nutritious food accessible to all. More than three million customers went to the grocery stores, the board of directors wrote in an email to customers.

Also see: 

-- "Grocery stores in cities: the failure of the "15 minute grocery store"," (2023)
-- "Eastern Market DC's 150th anniversary last weekend | And my unrealized master plan for the market," (2023)

Place breaking versus place making: Making people places | independent coffee shops, small business spaces, outdoor spaces

One of the major precepts of Jane Jacobs Life and Death of the Great American City is that cities need "a large stock of old buildings."  

East Ohio Street, Allegheny City, Pittsburgh.

This wasn't because she was a historic preservationist, but because old, mostly paid off buildings were cheaper to rent space from than new buildings ("Big Data Backs Jane Jacobs: Cities Need Old Buildings," Smart Cities Dive, Older, Smaller, Better Measuring how the character of buildings and blocks influences urban vitality, NTHP).

1. Older, mixed-use neighborhoods are more walkable. 
2. Young people love old buildings.
3. Nightlife is most alive on streets with a diverse range of building ages. 
4. Older business districts provide affordable, flexible space for entrepreneurs from all backgrounds. 
5. The creative economy thrives in older, mixed-use neighborhoods.
6. Older, smaller buildings provide space for a strong local economy. 
7. Older commercial and mixed-use districts contain hidden density.  

What she didn't anticipate is that in strong markets, either at the city-wide or sub-district scale, regional, national and international real estate actors would bid up the space and improve it, so that even "old buildings," became the equivalent of flashy and new and not cheap to rent.

Early on when I got involved in commercial district revitalization, I believed that only historic buildings were capable of supporting the kind of innovation that Jacobs wrote about.

But later I came to understand it was more about the building as an envelope.  I came across really cool businesses in 50s and 60s strip centers in Phoenix and West Seattle that were in "modern buildings" but older and cheaper, and that innovation was dependent both on rent pricing and the capacity of the business proprietor to be cool.

Place breaking.  Years ago, charlie commented on how gentrification changes places, business proprietors, businesses, amenities etc.  It's not a new concept but I didn't pay it enough attention.  Recently, I came across the term "place breaking" as opposed to "place making" in terms of maintaining vital and interesting places, neighborhoods and commercial districts ("How might the concept of ‘place-breaking’ challenge and support the practice of place- making?").

For example, there used to be a cheap Chinese quick service restaurant up from Dupont Circle Metro Station, where you could buy dinner, with extra rice, for less than $5.  (Yes, this was the 1990s.)  That space got bought by a national REIT and upscaled.

Supreme Taste is located at the corner of Broadview and Gerrard in East Chinatown. Nick Lachance Toronto Star.

Karon Liu of the Toronto Star makes a good point about how Chinatowns are defined in part by great Chinese BBQ ("This Toronto restaurant keeps Chinese barbecue alive").  That without it the experience and opportunity is lacking.  That's a simple example of place breaking.

I've come across a book on the topic, Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City, although it's more about the process of upscaling a place and how its changed.  I do look forward to reading it.

It reminded me of the book It's Hardly Sportin' about Wrigleytown, the commercial district adjacent to Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play.  

The book describes how "capitulating" to night baseball changed the business mix towards nightlife and entertainment away from serving neighborhood residents.

Strip centers.  Unfortunately, strip centers can be a major real estate asset class owned by the same regional, national, and international actors, depending on the market, with costly rents, therefore mostly attracting chain businesses.  But thousands are still independently owned and capable of supporting independent business.

-- Ten Principles for Reinventing America's Suburban Strips, "The Future of the Strip," ULI

IN THE SUBURBS.  Because center city rents trend high, suburban strip centers can be a locus of innovation in the way that the center city no longer is.  You see this a lot in restaurant reviews, for example Tim Carman of the Washington Post and Karon Liu of the Toronto Star write a lot about great restaurants in suburban strip centers.

This strip center in Scarborough is working with the organization plazaPOPS to reallocate some parking spaces to pop up markets.

In Toronto there is also an initiative to work with Strip Centers to improve their place value ("Toronto-area strip malls are foodie havens. Here’s how this project is helping them become places for people, not just cars," Star).

Infographic: Independent Coffee Shops.  I suspect that the cities with a higher density of independently owned coffee shops have a greater amount of independently owned retail spaces still.  It hasn't all been rolled up by the big firms.

Infographic by OnDeck.

Sunset Strip, West Hollywood.  There is a superb article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood and how it has changed with the change of real estate ownership and upscaling of retail concepts so that it no longer has space for "hanging out" the way it did back in the 60s and 70s when it was known for eclectic and electric nightlife, including the club Whiskey A Go Go where The Doors band got its start.  ("Once LA's nightlife epicenter, the storied Sunset Strip has a murky future").  Also see "Then and now: See how much the Sunset Strip is changing," Curbed LA.

Ultimately, the Strip writ large has failed to produce more substantive scenes in recent decades because it’s no longer amenable to supporting a critical cornerstone of subcultures: the lost art of hanging out, where fun also comes with absorbing and exchanging ideas. The raucous venues of decades past lived alongside locales like Ben Frank’s, a now-defunct 24-hour coffee shop, where people could spend time together in a low-stakes environment. “Youth culture, even if it isn’t counterculture, needs people running into each other, physically, in space,” Rupert says. “And that’s not what the landscape of [the Sunset Strip] offers anymore. I can’t think of a single place you could just go and hang out without, like, an $80 bar tab.” 

Interestingly, the City of West Hollywood's Economic Development Strategy report acknowledges the "deficiencies" to small business and nightlife and affordability as the district is "upscaled" and calls for changes. 

Little Saigon in Annandale.  The Washington Post writes about a two mile strop in Falls Church being designated as "Little Saigon" in recognition of the Asian business enclave-cluster there ("East Coast’s largest Vietnamese cultural hub now sits on ‘Saigon Blvd.’" also "This ‘Little Saigon’ shaped their childhood. Now they fear for its future," 2023).

Eden Center in Falls Church, Va., contains the East Coast’s largest concentration of Vietnamese businesses. Local government officials are drafting a possible blueprint on how it might be enhanced. (Valerie Plesch for The Washington Post)

Interestingly, this cluster got its start in Clarendon in Arlington County, when post-war Vietnamese immigrants settled there, because it was cheaper.  This is an example of how later generations of immigrants migrate directly to the suburbs without an initial stop in the center city.

As Arlington implemented its "urban renewal" plan for the Wilson Boulevard corridor, the district moved west into Fairfax County and Falls Church.

There's been a couple year planning process on how to maintain the enclave without losing properties to large scale actors.  Like some of the other planning initiatives mentioned above, the University of Maryland planning school did a workshop and report on how to maintain the centrality of small businesses in this ecosystem ("New Tools for Keeping Immigrant-Owned Shops in Place," Maryland Today)  

Ironically, I remember them doing a similar report about Silver Spring in the early 2000s.  And more recently on the Purple Line corridor (Preventing Small Business Displacement in Six Neighborhoods Along Maryland’s Purple Line Light Rail Corridor, A Long Life for Long Branch: Tools to Preserve Independent Retailers).  It'd be interesting to compare.  (And frustrating, because probably, over 20+ years, the recommendations are pretty similar.)

-- Small Business Anti-Displacement Toolkit, 2024

Bars in Shinjuku’s Golden Gai.Photographer: Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg

Tokyo.  Granted, my only knowledge of Tokyo comes from watching NHK.  But the metropolis, while it has plenty of tall modern buildings and big business districts, maintains a large stock of old and smaller buildings" located in what they call "shopping streets" as well as many districts across the city.  

Japan has both a strong retail chain system like 7-11 and independent businesses simultaneously ("Why 7-Eleven Is a National Treasure in Japan," New York Time).  In other words, Japan allows for a heterogeneous retail sector, partly because of how property ownership is organized, unlike the US where it is more homogeneous and oligopolistic and focused on large property owners.  (Plus, why are their chains like 7-11 better than ours?)

This allows for the creation and maintenance of all kinds of small businesses, although as the way work is organized affects the survival capability of some of these place ("Why Neighborhoods and Small Businesses Thrive in Tokyo," Bloomberg, "Last orders? Soaring costs and declining demand take toll on Japan’s legendary izakaya,").

Microspace and regulation in Tokyo.  The book Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City discusses ground up small business development in terms of microspaces and the regulatory regime which supports them, a regulatory framework that is much different from the US.  From the Bloomberg article:

There is an economic logic to these developments. If you’re developing something at large scale, you want to get a high return. So you’re looking usually at luxury condos, stacked over high-end retail and restaurants, maybe with some anchoring project like an art gallery, and also what’s called POPS, privately owned public space. 

 We’re not saying it’s all bad. There are reasons to have those kind of projects, but there are things that corporate urbanism can’t easily bring to your city like a sense of community, spontaneity, idiosyncrasy, surprise that really make our cities flourishing and exciting places to be.

... This is going to sound wild to anyone who lives in the US, but for any two-story rowhouse in Tokyo, the owner can by right operate a bar, a restaurant, a boutique, a small workshop on the ground floor — even in the most residential zoned sections of the city. That means you have an incredible supply of potential microspaces. Any elderly homeowner could decide to rent out the bottom floor of their place to some young kid who wants to start a coffee shop, for example.

... Of course, regulation at all different levels figures into that. It’s this incredibly dry topic, but actually how you regulate small business and spaces changes everything about the emotional color palette that your city can paint with. In Tokyo, for example, small businesses get a lot of interesting tax incentives. Liquor licenses are extremely cheap and easy. A liquor license in an American city can sometimes run up to $500,000. You’re not going to have a little four-seat, mom-and-pop bar for the locals. So those regulatory and policy choices that we make fundamentally determine what our cities are going to feel like.

Fullerton, California.  Is one of many cities ("Fullerton’s ‘Walk on Wilshire’ to permanently close at end of month," Orange County Register), small and large--Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, etc.--that are ridding themselves of street closure initiatives focused at providing business opportunities for restaurants and commercial districts in the face of covid and restrictions on how many people could be in a business at any one time.

A deadlocked vote by the Fullerton City Council means the city’s popular downtown promenade, Walk on Wilshire, will close permanently at the end of the month. Wilshire Avenue will reopen to vehicular traffic.

The 200-foot street closure on Wilshire Avenue west of Harbor Boulevard began in 2020 to spur outdoor dining during the peak of the pandemic. The road was closed to vehicles to create outdoor dining spaces intended to help local restaurants at a time when California imposed indoor dining restrictions and people were looking for more social distancing options. Over five years, the City Council extended the temporary street closure multiple times while launching a pilot program to permit business owners to rent and build parklets on the street space. A majority of Fullerton residents seemed to support the street closure, according to a city survey. Large crowds of residents urged the City Council to continue the program in October and again in January.

Still, a majority of the several restaurants along that stretch of Wilshire Avenue declined to participate in the parklet program due to its associated costs. Restaurants needed to lease street space from the city to build a parklet. Jung and Valencia argued it would be too expensive for the city to continue the program permanently. A staff report said the city invested $90,000 in the temporary partial street closure and would need to spend up to another $250,000 for a permanent closure. Staff estimated the city would recoup $60,000 per year in annual lease revenue from participating businesses.

A view along the tree-lined Wilshire Avenue from the intersection of Harbor Boulevard in downtown Fullerton Fullerton on Thursday, January 28, 2021. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG).

I wrote a piece back then, "From more space to socially distance to a systematic program for pedestrian districts (Park City (Utah) Main Street Car Free on Sundays)," making the point that cities and commercial districts should have been focused already on making spaces attractive to potential customers--place making instead of place breaking.  But that it was good to take advantage of covid in terms of changing retail business practices.

Sadly, by going back to a focus on privileging the car, cities are diminishing one of their key potential competitive advantages--walkability.

-- "What is the competitive advantage for the post-covid city? Doubling down on place values" (2022)

-- "Pedestrianization of Newark Avenue in Jersey City"  (2022)

21 years later H Street NE commercial district is still dirty

I've been amazed at how much cleaner Salt Lake City tends to be compared to DC.  

For example, a few years ago, I walked from Manor Park to Columbia Heights and back, and picked up and disposed of over 500 recyclables...

This is a query on Reddit DC, looking for people to help clean up H Street NE.  

As chair of the H Street Main Street Promotions Committee back in 2003 this is something we did too.  I wrote about it in a couple entries:

-- "Every Litter Bit Hurts," 2005
-- "Community cleanups (and other activities) as community building and civic engagement activities," 2011

I would say it gave me a much better ground-based appreciation about the nature of the trash.  In DC commercial districts, it's pretty typical for trash to flow into the first residential block on either side of the street.

So clean up programs should include the abutting residential areas where appropriate.

It also illustrates that commercial district revitalization is a never ending effort.  Perceptions of public safety are shaped by cleanliness, the presence of graffiti, etc.

-- "Updating the post The "soft side" of commercial district revitalization," 2006/2016

Decades ago, DC used to pay people to clean the streets of commercial districts, but that program ended when the city was in bankruptcy.

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This article is interesting.  Back when I did Main Street commercial district revitalization work, I used to make the point that small cities and big cities often missed the point when approaching their work.  A big city wasn't all downtown.  The neighborhood commercial districts are more akin to smaller town commercial districts.  Therefore small towns can learn from neighborhood commercial districts in cities and vice versa.

This article about commercial district revitalization in smaller towns across Minnesota illustrates the point ("From Owatonna to Red Wing, Minnesota's small downtowns see resurgence," Minneapolis Star Tribune, archive.ph copy).

Why drug stores don't have housing above/aren't mixed use buildings

 GGW has a piece, "CVS stores that should have apartments above them, ranked."

This store is in Baltimore but the same point pertains.  The second story is fake.  That's a common tactic for chain stores who get complaints that the building isn't tall enough, that it could be mixed use.

I wrote about this 10 years ago ("Beyond matter of right: incentivizing preferred types of development").

It's because of Real Estate Investment Trusts ("Problematic outcomes as real estate investment trusts buy more "high street" retail real estate," 2015).  Some specialize in drug store properties.  They don't want them encumbered by anything else.  Just the drug store.  So properties that would be good for mixed use aren't used that way, because it's not part of the business model.

Drug stores that are in mixed use buildings are in those in those buildings because of different kinds of business relationships.

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I remember talking about this with a planner from Takoma Park.  At the New Hampshire Avenue/University Boulevard intersection is a big Walgreen's.  It actually is part of a large parcel, and Takoma Park wanted to buy it or have an interested developer get it.  Walgreen's didn't even know it was a multi-building parcel and they had no interest in selling it to a third party, only a REIT.

Department stores are an "urban technology" built for walking not driving

State Street Shopping District, Chicago, 1984, Chicago Sun Times photo.

There is a letter to the editor in the Post "Save an endangered species: The American department store,"  responding to the article "Macy's and other department stores are an endangered species," opining about the difference between department stores in European cities like London and Paris.  

It completely misses the point.  Those are walking cities.  For the most part we don't have walking cities in the US.  We have car cities.

-- "Responding to retail decay in Friendship Heights (DC/Montgomery County, Maryland)," 2023
-- "Friendship Heights and the production of retail decay," 2020
-- "Urban decay and sprawl: one community's gain at the expense of another's," 2011
 -- "A brief lesson in "incentivizing" supermarkets and department stores," 2007 
 -- "Why it's okay to give tax increment financing to department stores but you still need to think long and hard about where you put your money," 2007 
-- "Turnabout is fair play: why Topher Matthews/GGW is wrong about TIF incentives for a departmentun store in Georgetown," 2012

Plus center city downtowns in the US aren't the same kind of shopping draw as they were 50+ years ago, at least for larger cities--lots of smaller cities in the US and Europe are seeing their retail districts decimated.  For the most part, suburbanites are content shopping near home.

But what a difference between a downtown store and suburban mall location in terms of quality store offering.  

The DC Downtown Hecht's was a grand store.  And it paled by comparison to Macy's in Herald Square in Manhattan or in Union Square in San Francisco or in Downtown Chicago.  Or the city-based stores, like Hudson's in Detroit, from our youth.

Suburban mall stores tend to be dingy.

====

From the San Francisco Chronicle, "Union Square once was the center of San Francisco. Now it’s off the map," 

The terrain in the retail zone centered on the actual Union Square, an area that, for decades, was the busiest downtown retail district outside New York and Chicago, is in sorry shape.

... There’s been ample attention to the empty spaces within the no-longer-Westfield shopping mall, from the former Nordstrom on down, and the numbing procession of “for rent” signs along Powell Street that offer a bleak welcome to cable car riders. To me, though, the 200 block of Sutter Street tells a story even more grim. 

Of the 15 retail spaces on the block, 12 are vacant. Two “store closing sale” signs are taped near the door of one shop front, and judging from the emptiness within, they’ve been there awhile. Across the way, there’s a “support small business” sign in the window of a falafel shop with the slogan “Where food takes flight.” Indeed it has; the space sits empty. 

.. The numbers downplay the sense of desolation. One vacant space that Banana Republic occupied from 1997 until last year stretches for nearly half a block. This isn’t a precarious fringe block, either. Nearly all the buildings are gorgeous masonry, built in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. Banana Republic’s former flagship with its arched grandeur began life as the White House, a department store that opened in 1908 with a design by architect Albert Pissis and closed in 1965. 

... San Francisco has changed immeasurably since “everyone” visited Union Square on a semi-regular basis, whether they were looking for a night on the town or a place to buy the basics. Now the happening neighborhoods are Hayes Valley or Dogpatch or the Mission, depending on your inclination. Tourists are as likely to visit Haight-Ashbury or the Castro as Fisherman’s Wharf. 

Presidio Tunnel Tops and Crane Cove Park offer connections to the bay that would have been inconceivable in the 1990s — when the arrival of Yerba Buena Gardens, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and an expanded convention center prompted another planner to comment to the Chronicle how the changes along Mission Street and directly south “will really shift the center of gravity.”

Also see "Behind the Macy’s closure: ‘This is a Union Square problem. Not a San Francisco problem’" 

“Union Square doesn’t need to exist in the modern framework of local consumer demand,” said Christopher Thornberg, an economist and founder of Beacon Economics. He said with fewer people going downtown for work in San Francisco’s urban core, big shopping centers like Union Square don’t make economic sense. 

“This is a Union Square problem. Not a San Francisco problem,” Thornberg said. He said San Francisco’s low unemployment rate, and hyperactive venture capital sector, mean “it’s a great economy. It’s just that this economy doesn’t need a Union Square.” 

More broadly, he said, the same market forces that brought down Sears and JCPenney were now converging on Macy’s bottom line, delayed only by the “crazy surge in post-pandemic spending” once social distancing and other restrictions were lifted.

Learning from Las Vegas: Round 2 | Planning for Activation and Transformational Projects

Learning from Las Vegas is a famous book in architecture studies about post modern architecture

WRT my point about governments doing things and charlie's counter that mostly it's not about governance but growth independently of the local government, even in blue states, there's a great article, "From Sin City to America’s sports capital: Las Vegas is transforming itself again. What do the glitz of Formula One and the Super Bowl mean for the city’s future – and for the workers building it?," in the Washington Post about how Las Vegas is leveraging sports as another way to further activate the city, by keeping adding attractions.

The Sphere, created by Madison Square Garden Company, is an entertainment venue just east of the Las Vegas Strip. (Bob Leal/Courthouse News)

In the past few years the Raiders NFL team moved there, The Sphere attraction opened ("The Sphere mesmerizing Las Vegas months before opening," Courthouse News Service), and the Oakland A's baseball team just got approval to follow the Raiders ("The Oakland A's are relocating to Las Vegas after MLB owners approve the move," NPR).

Around six years ago, the Las Vegas Golden Knights hockey team launched, in an arena that was built by the private sector before there was a commitment by the NHL.  This past summer, the team won the Stanley Cup.

Williams driver Alexander Albon, of Thailand, drives during the final practice session for the Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix auto race, Friday, Nov. 17, 2023, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Then there's Formula 1.  Not my thing, but it's the thing for enough people, especially rich people.  

The Post article is great about how it came about (also see "Tickets, times, transportation and community outreach among issues F1 must fix in Las Vegas," AP).

There's a great sentence about LV being the city that always says yes. 

It’s construction noise, but it’s also the latest last gasp of a city that always says yes, the sound of Las Vegas, after a century of wagers, going all-in on perhaps its biggest gamble ever. 

It's related to my point about transformational projects action planning including a willingness to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves, that work within the framework of a creative master plan, about taking advantage of serendipity.

But it's also relevant to my point about how destinations usually need constant refreshment and management to remain interesting and relevant.  

Wrt hotels, LV is the king of building, demolition and rebuilding of constantly larger hotel-casino projects.

This is an issue with Baltimore's Harborplace on the Inner Harbor ("Initial plans for Harborplace to include residential tower and retail, commercial space," WBAL-TV).  

What does a Louisiana seafood restaurant concept have to do with the Chesapeake region?

It was cool in the beginning, then became a place mostly housing chain establishments.  The Baltimore riots didn't help.  

Nor did the company that bought it (and lost it through foreclosure) which owns/ed similar types of "festival marketplaces" ("Rouse and Festival Marketplaces" from Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America's Salesman of the Businessman's Utopia) but really doesn't know how to run them except through imposing homogeneous retail, taking away anything special about the property.

A new owner of Harborplace aims to revive the site.  But the problem with capitalism is that other property owners elsewhere in the city, like Canton, continue to invest in making their places great, making it that much harder for Harborplace to compete--although it has a waterfront location, which should trump any other location.  

But at the end of the day, the problem is not unlike that faced by Eastern Market or H Street in DC--there are lots of alternative destinations.  Like many other cities, Baltimore has too much in the way of developable space, making it hard to focus.

Similarly, other festival marketplaces like Faneuil Hall in Boston and the South Street Seaport in New York City ("Seaport District reinvents itself with dining, shopping and a dose of history," NY1 News) have the same issues of the need for refreshment.  Over time, local visitorship drops off.  And those places have a lot more visitors and residents than Baltimore.

Note that scale wise, the Fremont District, different from the big hotel-casinos on the strip, with more older buildings and a more human scale, is probably more analogous to festival marketplaces than the LV Strip or adding super large scale attractions ("A new tourist destination to revitalize a declining downtown," UNLV thesis).

U2's residency at the Sphere is incredibly successful ("U2's First Batch of Shows at the Sphere Generated Nearly $110 Million in Ticket Sales," Billboard.)

Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Bram van den Berg of U2 perform during opening night of U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere on Sept. 29, 2023 in Las Vegas. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

From the article:

U2 wrapped the first leg of the U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere residency on Nov. 4 with unprecedented box-office results. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, U2’s 17 Sphere shows in Las Vegas grossed $109.8 million and sold 281,000 tickets. 

Opening night at Sphere was Sept. 29. U2 played another show the next night, 12 more in October and three in the first week of November. The gross and attendance figures average out to $6.5 million and 16,500 tickets per show. The average ticket price across all shows was $390.97. 

U2 is scheduled to play eight more shows in December, kicking off on Friday night. There are 11 more dates lined up between Jan. 26 and Feb. 18. The 19 shows on the books could generate another $120 million, pushing the residency to about $330 million in less than five months. Only Dion’s A New Day… would remain ahead in terms of all residencies in Boxscore history.

The only thing is few bands can pull this off.  U2 is one.  Although LV has tons of successful concert residencies.  They tend to be in much smaller spaces, and much less multimedia intensive.

Conclusion.  Even though Las Vegas has gambling, big conventions, and almost 40 million visitors per year, it doesn't take its position in the leisure, hospitality, convention, and gaming business for granted.

When it comes to destination development and management, Las  Vegas is a city of constant redevelopment and reinvention  ("Robert Lang, who helped reshape Southern Nevada’s economy, dies at 62,"Las Vegas Review-Journal). 

It is an outlier when it comes to urban management, which in Las Vegas is a "partnership" between the private sector, the city and other nonprofits like the tourism board, the State more generally, as well as the Nevada Gaming Commission.

A follow up on the H Street article: Learning from Philadelphia | More sophisticated daypart, retail, cultural, and experience planning

-- "H Street NE nightlife district, failing?"

One of the problems with nightlife districts in DC is that retail wise they are unbalanced, focused on the night (not like how Wrigleyville by the Cubs Stadium changed once the Cubs moved from daytime to night time games; the retail was pushed out by taverns etc., see It's Hardly Sportin').

The problem is that even though we talk about restaurant or sports events patrons (like attendees of baseball games) also spending money on retail as part of their trips, increasingly people aren't interested in doing so.  It's why entertainment districts like Navy Yard and The Wharf in DC have pretty limited retail separate from the eating and drinking.

It might be that more neighborhood embedded districts, like Eastern Market ("Eastern Market DC's 150th anniversary last weekend | And my never realized master plan for the market") or H Street have a better shot at developing the retail offer.  But it has to be very focused.  And the advantage of people walking to and from transit stations (this benefited the small Upshur Street district on the 800 block in Petworth) has been diminished by the decline in transit use because of post-covid WFH.

Note that last weekend was Celebrate Petworth, the annual community festival.  It's much smaller than the H Street Festival, which is now the largest street festival in DC.  But maybe more attention needs to be paid to smaller events, and figuring out how to leverage the big festival for retail, not just eating and drinking.

It's even harder with the effect of e-commerce.  That being said, taverns and other nightlife establishments, hair salons, and medical marijuana dispensaries is unbalanced.  The Main Street commercial district revitalization program needs to have an active program of retail recruitment and support, and work to get area residents to patronize the retail.

WPVI-TV in Philadelphia reports on how the Center City District BID works on these issues ("Things to do in Center City Philadelphia: District seeing continued growth as number of businesses approach pre-pandemic levels").  Note that the Center City BID is one of the best in the country in terms of addressing such issues.  But the district has also had a lot more legacy retail and restaurants compared to sub-downtown districts like H Street NE.

From the article:

... Philadelphia ranks fourth in the country in the average daily number of pedestrians downtown -- behind New York City, Chicago and Boston. Those average daily numbers are considered a big deal for places like the Christmas Village at Love Park, which is filled with small businesses that are open every day through Christmas Eve. 

"A lot of small businesses don't necessarily have brick-and-mortar retail stores, so events like this are a significant source of their income," said John Oleski, owner of Kylie's Canine Treats. 

The CCD annual retail report is filled with promising signs of continued growth. Action News has been going through some of the new data and found that foot traffic in the heart of Center City reached 83% of 2019 levels, while residents reached 126%.

But the "neighborhood" Main Streets don't have the kinds of resources as a downtown focused BID like Center City.  They need more sophisticated technical and other supports from the city's planning office and small business office. 

Separately, Philadelphia is investing in Jeweler's Row to increase patronage ("City leaders plan changes to Jeweler's Row to attract more tourists in Philadelphia," WPVI-TV).  Part of the aim is to attract tourists visiting nearby Independence Hall, the National Park focused on the story of the American Revolution.  

Although it's tough to get those types of visitors to spend significant money on retail.  So called "cultural heritage tourists" are more focused on consuming places not things.

A big lesson from covid is that cities need to invest even more in their commercial districts, rounding them out as more balanced from retail and restaurants to include events and other experiences.

-- "From more space to socially distance to a systematic program for pedestrian districts (Park City (Utah) Main Street Car Free on Sundays)," 2020

Again, what is required is a much more sophisticated approach to daypart, retail, cultural, and event planning.  

It's tough in DC because there are so many smaller districts in DC outside of Downtown.  There are tons of Main Street programs, but they are more focused on events, less on planning and active business recruitment, although what I suggest in the Eastern Market piece:

Develop a premier food and retail business development/entrepreneurship program to identify and train potential business operators, to help them develop robust concepts, and to link them with space, financing and vendor support.  Complement this with business development services for existing businesses, and recruitment of existing businesses.  I would open this to anybody, whether or not they aim to open businesses in the Eastern Market district, Capitol Hill, or DC.  (I suggested something like this to the DC Main Street program in 2003, but it was too ambitious for them to understand.) 

The aim of course is to help businesses develop and be successful and to locate them in the Eastern Market district. That includes improving the merchandising abilities of the existing vendors.

Such programs and relatedly, business plan development and competitions, should really be run at the scale of a city.

Retail store development.  In terms of nurturing, growing and expanding strong retail concepts I have this piece, "Designing Brand Identity," although this table is updated, in the 2009 blog entry, "Retail and Restaurant Check Up Surveys." 

There's also a story in the Washington Business Journal, "After two decades, Old Town Alexandria's The Shoe Hive hasn't just survived — it's thrived and branched out," about a shoe store in Alexandria.

My experience in DC is that this is hard.  Some people have developed good, replicable concepts that surprisingly can work in more than one retail district.  

But they don't necessarily have the skill set to pull it off, and to differentiate between places it is more likely to work and less likely to work.

One example of such a store is Lou Lou Boutiques, which started out in Virginia horse country and now has 12 stores along the East Coast (I think some have closed, that at one point they had more than 13).  

Once it became successful, developers and retail lease brokers sought them out to open stores.  Probably with a good bit of tenant incentives--which are good, but if it's a bad location in terms of the store's business model, aren't enough.

Over the years, visiting various commercial districts, I've come across a bunch of great stores that had the ability, but not necessarily the capacity, to expand.

More on retail success.  "Why ask why? Because" (2007) was a response to criticism of the Main Street program when some businesses failed on the Brookland commercial corridor.  The point I made was that business failure needs to be understood not merely a declarative statement, and that a business support program can only do so much.  

The article outlines what a journal article called "retail mixes" but what I prefer to call retail store subsystems (using the concept of organizational subsystems as discussed in Social Psychology of Organizations by Katz and Kahn).    To the three mixes outlined in the article:

• goods and services
• communications
• physical distribution

I added:

• store operations

with the aim of helping retailers create more robust and successful business concepts and models.  The reason that the stores failed in Brookland had to do with weak systems and business models mostly, but also some certain stores needing a larger customer base (a/k/a "retail trade areas") than was proximate in the neighborhood.   From the entry:

The Rosenbloom article discusses the Trade Area Mix, linking broad market demand to the possibility of store (and commercial district) success: 

1. Trade Area Geography: the geographical extent of the trade area
2. Trade Area Demand: the level of consumer demand within the geographically delineated trade area
3. Trade Area Heterogeneity: the mix of consumer market segments within the trade area and the diversity of consumer demand for products and services. The greater the demand, the higher degree of heterogeneity, characterized by more offerings.

When someone says "That store closed, the X commercial district is a terrible place to do business," the reality is a lot more complicated. Was it the owner [and management]? The concept? The commercial district? The property? Access to capital? 

And it's not either/or, it can be and/and/and... For example, the Brookland commercial district has some significant spatial and access issues. Just like I write about "intra city sprawl," commercial districts need to ensure intensity and critical mass.