Category Archives: Downtown Redevelopment

Office Development — We now have all the office space we need

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For several years now, I have been arguing that a New Normal has emerged for our downtowns and that the business operators, landlords, developers and district leaders who do not recognize that they must adapt to that fact are likely to face severe economic losses. My recently reported research on multichannel retailing (see my last blog posting below) combined with some some recent news items about movie attendance, housing and office development have strongly confirmed my argument.  This posting will focus on office development.

For much of the 1970s and 1980s office development was seen as the economic engine that would drive downtown revitalization in such major cities as Richmond VA, Charlotte NC, Cleveland OH, Philadelphia PA, Seattle WA. Los Angeles CA, etc. Office development primed revitalization efforts were also mounted in smaller cities such as  New Brunswick NJ,  (population 55,181) and White Plains NY  (population 56,853) and in suburban communities such as Morristown NJ (population 18,457), and Garden City NY (population 22,371). 

Many of these office driven revitalization efforts failed to achieve their goals and the downtowns had to add residential, retail and entertainment components to their revitalization strategies. Nevertheless, office development has remained a critical revitalization asset for many downtowns.

A recent article in  CoStar’s e-newsletter reported on the major findings of a symposium of office development experts convened by BOMA. A summary of their findings should put downtown leaders on notice:

“We already have all the office space we likely will need…. But to remain competitive, the existing stock of commercial real estate must be reconfigured to keep pace with an increasingly mobile, Internet-connected workforce; ongoing changes in technology, and to support the way companies are structuring their staffs to foster more collaboration and efficiency, while also addressing the values and attitudes of new generations of workers.”


 Increased telecommuting, flexible work schedules, the untethering of workers from desks to enhance collaboration and increase face-a-face client contacts have combined to increase employee density in major office buildings and reduce the demand for office space. For today’s office worker, according to one of these experts, the ideal situation may be:

(W)here you go into the office two or three days per week and work remotely the other days, which reduces our carbon footprint by 20% – 40% and has a huge impact on improved quality of life.”


 The potential negative impacts of the New Normal’s static demand for office space are:

    • Fewer new downtown office buildings will be built

 

  • Existing downtown office buildings that are not configured to meet the new work habits of office workers will have languishing leasing efforts. A lot of existing downtown office buildings may have to be renovated if they are to be competitive
  • Downtown retailers and eateries will have a significantly reduced office worker market because the telecommuters and flex-timers will spend much less time in the district.

 

 

Of course, downtowns also too often suffer from the fact that major office tenants provide incentives (cafeterias, subsidized meals and concierge services) and work pressures to keep their employees from leaving the building at lunchtime. Furthermore, the retailing many downtowns is often too weak to motivate substantial office worker patronage.

 But, there is a potential upside for downtowns that can provide a dynamic, experience-rich environment. As the CoStar article notes:
 

“The lesson for companies (and the investors and building owners who want to have them as tenants) is that younger workers prefer to work in a more dynamic, experience-rich environment, such as an urban- type setting offering different entertainment, cultural and transportation options.”


 Dynamic downtowns will consequently continue to have a distinct advantage in a highly competitive office market, while listless downtowns will probably be weaker competitors than ever.

 The CoStar article can be found at: http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Will-We-Need-Any-More-Office-Space-/134483?ref=100&iid=261&cid=DC6077B43E67ACADB224FF6D0AF89AB6  

N. David Milder 011312

FROM DECAY TO TREASURE: THE HIGH LINE PARK

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For many years an elevated rail line, that ran about a mile between buildings on Manhattan’s west side, sat unused and decaying. It snaked through an area probably made most famous by the title of a Richard Rogers ballet, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.
 
Then a small group of people came up with the stunning  idea of turning it into a park. They managed to make a viable plan, raise money, rally the support of local landlords and obtain city approvals.The result is a unique and hugely popular public space. 
 
The High Line did not spark the area’s resurgence, but it has certainly reinforced it.
 
Across the nation, other projects like Millenium Park in Chicago, IL, and Mitchell Park in Greenport, NY, have taken decayed and even brown field locations and turned them into vibrant public spaces. More communities should look into following suit.
  
The photos in the slide show were taken over an 18 month period.





If you have trouble running the slide show you can go to my web photo album for the High Line at: https://picasaweb.google.com/dmilder/HighLinePark


N David Milder

The Often Slow Pace of Implementation

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Last week we were in Garden City, NY. Back in 1996, DANTH had recommended that the site of a gas station on the very important corner of Franklin Avenue and Seventh Street would better serve the community’s needs if it were redeveloped by a project having retail on the ground floor and residential units above. I was happy to see that our recommendation finally was being implemented (see photo on right).


The fact that close to fifteen years had passed between recommendation and implementation strongly reminded me that downtown revitalizations seldom occur quickly and usually require patience. Some downtowns have been in the revitalization business for 40 or 50 years. For example, the formal revitalization effort in the Jamaica Center commercial district in Queens, NY, started back in 1968. The improvements have been steady over these years, with the total amount of investment attracted to this district totalling well over $1 billion by 1987 and the investment flow continuing on to this day.

Other downtowns seem to be overnight successes, but years of unnoticed hard work usually precede their rocketing economic upswings. In the mid 1990s, for example, downtown Englewood, NJ, attracted a significant number of national retail chains and eradicated a 20% retail vacancy rate. Many outside observers noted how quickly this downtown had turned around. Mayors and council members in other NJ communities envied this quick success and wanted to replicate it in their downtowns. Few of these observers knew of the 10+ years of prior planning, improvement projects and coalition formation that enabled Englewood’s “overnight success” to occur. 


One of the most important things that Englewood’s political leadership did was to form a common strategic outlook among the city manager, mayor and city council. This took time to forge and energy and attention to maintain. Unfortunately, many local political leaders in other communities do not understand the need for such a strategic coalition and/or do not have the political time or patience to create them. 


Sadly, the need for a revitalization effort to have some patience can slip into lassitude, inaction and redevelopment doldrums. Then, impatient local political leaders can give the downtown revitalization organization a badly needed kick in the butt.


As a general rule, DANTH recommends that clients treat a downtown revitalization effort as never ending, not something that in a few years they can strike from their To Do lists. Success not only has to be won, but then also maintained.   
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AFFORDABLE DOWNTOWN RETAIL RENTS

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Introduction. As we slowly emerge from the Great Recession the time has come for downtown organizations to work hard on encouraging small independent retailers to seek affordable rents and for landlords to offer them. If they do not, downtown retail will contract and street level storefronts will be occupied even more by financial and personal service operations – or remain vacant for long periods of time.

True, in many downtowns retail rents have declined during the Great Recession, often substantially. In one I recently visited, for example, asking retail rents have dropped from $45/SF to $30/SF and in some instances even $25/SF. But, as we creep out of recessionary conditions, it is critical that in most downtowns retail rents do not regain their unaffordable levels.

In the new normal, small downtown retailers will be facing increased pressures to keep their operations lean and mean because capturing sales from today’s deliberate consumers is far more difficult than from the abnormally free-spending shoppers of the 1990s and 2000s. One budget line item they can focus on is the cost of the spaces they lease for their stores. This is a major long-term business expense and it is important that these retailers do not pay more than they can afford. It is also a business cost where “newbie” retailers dominate those going astray, though badly inept or unscrupulous merchants also tend to pay a lot more than what savvy merchants would deem affordable.

Looking at the other side of the coin, it is also in the interest of landlords to offer rents competent retailers can afford. In the new normal, far fewer stores will be opened by national chains and, among those, a smaller percentage than in the past will be placed in downtowns. Landlords, as a result, will need many local independent retailers to fill their storefronts. This will also be true to a significant degree for those who have built new mixed use buildings with expensively constructed ground floor storefronts. Additionally, as their rents reach ranges considered unaffordable by savvy merchants, the more likely they are to attract incompetent or sleazy businesses and also more likely to have storefronts stand vacant for long periods of time.

A useful formulation for determining an affordable retail rent is roughly 15% of the shop’s annual sales. DANTH’s merchant surveys and personal interviews with merchants over many, many years as well as the work of other firms, such as Urbanomics, found that downtown merchants generally felt that they could afford total rent costs that were 8% to 12% of their annual sales. However, more recently merchants say they are OK with 15%. While there is certainly some error factor present here, 15% is probably plus or minus just a few percentage points off the correct number. The major thrust of the analysis presented below is not affected by this error factor.

In a typical medium-sized downtown, independent retailers with annual sales of $500,000 to $1 million are relatively rare. Most independent downtown retailers would be quite happy with sales in the $300,000 range and joyous with sales around $450,000. Though in large downtowns the sales happiness range can be higher, the 15% rule applies everywhere, so I’ll stick with the retailers in medium-sized downtowns to simplify my argument.

The table above depicts information about:

  • How much rent is affordable to retailers with $250,000, $300,000, $350,000, $400,000 and $450,000 in annual sales. You can do the calculations for higher annual sales
  • How many square feet of space this “rent money” can buy at various prices per square foot.

The table also shows how with increased rents more and more of a downtown’s most successful merchants cannot afford to occupy the amount of space they might even minimally need for their operations. Look at how quickly even “small” spaces in the 1,500 SF to 2,000 SF range become unaffordable. At $40/SF not even a retailer with sales of $450,000 can afford a 2,000 SF; at $50/SF even a 1,500 SF storefront becomes out of reach. Of course, for the $300,000 shopkeeper, that happened at lower rents: a 1,500 SF shop is unaffordable at rents of $31/SF and 2,000 SF at $22.50.

Affordable rents should be tied in with balloon leases, where rents increase at an agreed upon rate as the retailer’s sales grow. Some savvy downtown landlords are already using balloon leases.

To The Groaners. To the downtown managers and Main Street managers who groan that is impossible to deal with landlords:

  • Dealing with downtown landlords and doing it effectively is part of your job. If you are not doing it, start doing it. If you do not know how, learn how. If after all that you still can’t deal effectively with landlords, get another job.
  • Every occupation has jerks; but they also often have a lot of reasonable, effective and even innovative people. This applies to landlords, too.
  • One thing is certain: if you do not try, nothing will happen.

To landlords and developers who groan that they need high incomes from their new and expensively constructed retail spaces to pay off their loans:

  • You are big boys, you like to brag that you are big boys, so act like big boys
  • You either goofed in your calculations or you really did not understand that in most downtown mixed use projects outside of places like Manhattan and downtown Chicago, etc., the residential and office rents, probably for some time, will have to subsidize the retail spaces. This is especially true of unproven, revitalizing downtown locations
  • Given the current economic conditions your options are really either affordable rents that will diminish your losses or long-term vacancies and continued lack of retail rental revenues

To landlords who believe they should get market rate rents as defined by the highest asking rents they’ve heard about in the district:

  • Your unaffordable rents are likely to produce vacancies, because so few accomplished retailers would be interested, or perpetual churn, because you are likely to attract inept or schlocky merchants who are prone to failing or disappearing
  • This will affect the resale value of your property and this is not a great time for any commercial property
  • Have you really calculated the difference between the income that an affordable rent will yield and the zero dollars you will likely reap from the months your stores stay vacant because you want higher rents?

N. David Milder

Repositiong For The Future During The Great Recession: The Bayonne Town Center

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This posting was updated on 12/10/09.

Bayonne, NJ is the kind of place that folks form deep attachments to. Even when they move away or find another workplace, those warm feelings remain.

Last week I had lunch in Bayonne with an old friend and colleague, the city’s planner. It had been almost a year since I was last in the Bayonne Town Center and I was eager to see how it had held up during the Great Recession. After walking around the district for about an hour and a half, taking photos and shopping in some of the new stores, I was impressed by what I saw. Here was a perfect example of a downtown that, while experiencing higher than usual vacancies, was repositioning for the future by working to attract and create strong new assets.

Back home, I quickly sent Mary Divock, the district manager, an email message saying:

“…during the Great Recession the Town Center managed to make some really strong retail additions that will be even more important as the economy improves. I have attached snaps of the stores I feel are good additions. Most other downtowns I’ve visited recently cannot say the same. You should be proud.”

Here are some of the things I found:

  • A new and popular green grocer
  • ShopRite, located very close to the district, has doubled its size to 70,000 SF. I am hopeful that the district will be expanded to include the ShopRite and other nearby establishments. See: http://www.nj.com/bayonne/index.ssf/2009/12/bayonne_shoprite_re-opens_to_h.html
  • A new shop featuring silver products had opened
  • So had a hearing aid shop
  • Another firm featuring medical equipment had moved from a side street to Broadway
  • GameStop and Petland had opened. According to a report in the Leisure eNewsletter, between 2007 and 2008, nationally, annual household expenditures for pets, toys, hobbies, etc. increased by almost 26%
  • Plans for a nursing home, across from the Bayonne Medical Center, with Class-A retail space on the ground floor had obtained city approvals
  • Plans for adding 14 residential units and renovating the store facades on an existing building were proceeding and there are expectations that some other buildings may follow suit
  • There were more than normal vacancies, but really not that much more and certainly their perceived impact was more than offset by all the new shops. As the economy improves the vacancies will ebb, but the new shops will only get stronger.

After my visit I learned that with the bottoming out of the economy merchants were again applying to participate in the BTC’s Jump Start Facade Improvement Program.

Here are some relevant photos:


An Audacious Small Town BID

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For over a year now, as a response to our current recession, I have been urging downtown organizations to focus on repositioning their districts for future growth and encouraging them to take on new financial activities.

The Washington BID in Warren County, NJ, is a good example of a district organization that is doing this. Also, it is in a town, Washington Borough, with a small population of 7,000 people.

The BID is borrowing money from a nearby community bank, Skylands, to build a badly needed downtown parking lot. Few BIDs, large or small, borrow from banks for capital improvement or program purposes.

The BID obtained a USDA loan guarantee that made the private bank loan possible. This was a smart move and tapped a government source many other BIDs might not have thought about.

Impressively, the BID will bring in a completed project for about half of Washington Borough’s estimated project cost.

I can think of many BIDs around the country that would benefit from emulating the Washington BID’s audacity to assume financial risk and willingness to play a lead role in a downtown redevelopment project. Too many BID managers and board members are straight jacketed by a comfort with reliably safe programs such as street sanitation, security and promotional events. But, by their very nature –and usually by their state’s enabling legislation– BIDs are tasked with economic development roles. Unfortunately, too few perform them.

N. David Milder

Downtown Vacancies: Let’s Get Real

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A slightly different version of this article appeared as a Perspectives Column in the May 15, 2009 issue of the Downtown Idea Exchange

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Far too often, concern about the number of empty storefronts in a downtown reaches distorted and needlessly injurious proportions. This was true before our current recession and now it threatens to become an even more serious problem. It’s critical for downtown leaders to view the vacancy rate issue from a realistic perspective.

For example, a few years ago, when I was managing a district, the mayor and I often would go around the block about our vacancies. My protestations that our vacancy rate of 2.6% was very low, and one that most other districts would love to have, were dismissed – the mayor wanted a zero vacancy rate. I tried to explain that a zero rate actually would be unhealthy for the district because it would keep out new business blood and thus make the district stale, perhaps even ossified. This argument, too, gained no traction. And this mayor is a very bright and likeable guy.

Today, many downtown leaders and local politicians are seeing growing vacancies as omens of doom. In past recessions, DANTH Inc. had projects in downtowns where the vacancy rates were in the 18% to 20% range. Looking just at the vacancy numbers is deceiving. High numbers are not a death warrant:

  • Within a year, the downtown with the 20% rate recruited several trophy retailers and substantially reduced the number of vacancies. A few years later it was being cited as a veritable model of downtown revitalization.
  • Similarly, the other downtown reduced its rate to 12% in less than a year and to 6% after 18 months. Today it reports having few vacancies.

A recent canvass of 14 downtowns showed four with vacancy rates of 10% or higher. But:

  • Two of those downtowns had actually reduced their vacancy rates substantially during 2008 from 2007: one dropped to 11.2% from 14.1% and the other to 11% from 15%.
  • Another of the canvassed downtowns reported a 13.3% vacancy rate. On the other hand, it still had at least six new stores open, some of which promise to be strong. Moreover, a supermarket is doubling its size, a new nursing home with new ground floor retail space is about to be built, 14 residential units are being added to the floor above an existing 15,000-s.f. retail space, and McDonald’s will be renovating a 100-plus-foot façade on the main drag.
  • Most of the canvassed downtowns reported new shops were opening, even when the district managers felt the vacancy rates were much higher than they would like.

In the vast majority of downtowns a very significant proportion of the storefronts normally are occupied by marginal operations. Very often, marginal businesses are badly managed and do little to foster a positive image of the district. In a recession marginal firms have a high probability of failing. Some marginal firms are not small – many national retail chains are now out of business because mismanagement put them on the financial brink and the recession pushed them over.

The vacancies that result from this economic pruning can – and I would argue should – be viewed as opportunities. In tough times like these, there still is “creative destruction” and many district managers are reporting that some attractive new businesses are opening. If these firms survive the recession, they probably will really thrive when the economy rebounds.

Many would argue that a district is damaged more by a poor business operator who cannot garner customer support than by a vacant storefront. Let us not take our admiration of small business people to the point where we canonize all of them. By definition, half of the small business operators in this country are below average. The challenge in this recession is to fill the downtown vacancies with as many above average operators as we can. The quality of the existing tenants is more important than the quantity of empty stores!

Now is the time for downtowns to survive and reposition. Consequently, there are lots of better barometers than vacancies for judging how a downtown is doing during our current economic troubles:
• Have shops and eateries adapted to the new market realities so their owners can still make a satisfactory living?
• Are quality businesses opening?
• Are store facades being maintained and improved?
• Is land being quietly assembled for development when the economy rebounds? Better still, are projects actually going into construction?
• Are improvements being done to make the downtown a more convenient place to visit?
• Are investments being made to create terrific public spaces?

N. David Milder

An Ethnic Downtown With Many Retail and Fast Food Chains

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For many years downtown revitalization experts lamented that large, ethnic downtowns — those with lots of African American and Hispanic shoppers — were being avoided by major retail chains.

That is certainly no longer the case. Here, in New York City, one of the hottest retail locations is along 125th Street in Harlem. Many retail and fast food chains are also occupying important storefronts in the outer borough downtowns such as Jamaica Center in Queens, Downtown Brooklyn and Fordham Road in the Bronx. They are also opening in strong neighborhood shopping districts such as Jerome Avenue in the Bronx and and Corona Plaza in Queens.

Below is a list of the national and regional retail and fast food chains that I found on a visit yesterday to Jamaica Center.

I first went to this commercial district with my mother to buy shoes back in 1949, which was toward the end of its “Golden Age.” I continued to shop there occasionally for sports equipment and sneakers until I went away to college in 1958. It was not until the early 1980s that I returned to carry out consulting assignments for Regional Plan Association and the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation (GJDC). Though my involvement in the revitalization of this district ended in the early 1990s, I have continued to visit every few years to take photos and gauge its progress. It’s just two miles from my home office.

The revitalization of Jamaica Center has been a long process, starting back around 1968 with the creation of the GJDC. Over a billion dollars have since gone into the revitalization of this commercial center, paying for such things as the re-routing of a subway line (E train), tearing down an elevated line, building York College, the construction of a one million SF Social Security Building, new court buildings, building a terminus for a monorail link to JFK, etc.

By the early 19980s the quality of the retailers was ebbing and this trend culminated with the closing of two major department stores, Macy’s and Gertz. White shoppers from the northern and western parts of Jamaica Center’s trade area stopped visiting, choosing instead to drive east to the shopping malls in Nassau County.

Many of the other neighborhoods in the trade area had African American households with relatively high annual incomes for Queens. Cambria Heights, for example, recently had a median household income of $69,030, while the median income for Queens was $49,780. Many of the residents in these neighborhoods were civil service workers and teachers, often in dual income households. Though large numbers of these residents passed through Jamaica Center each weekday to use the subway on their trips to and from work, they, too, avoided shopping there because the retailing had come to focus on low income and teenage markets and the area had developed a reputation for street crime and drug use and sale. Nevertheless, the pedestrian traffic along Jamaica Avenue continued to be a “beehive of activity” and some of the merchants were doing $s/SF that rivaled those of retailers in some of Manhattan’s best locations.

I was greatly encouraged by my recent visit and feel that the end game, the “take off” phase of Jamaica Center’s revitalization is in sight. The primary reason for my optimism is the recent announcement of a major project that will bring over 300 market rate housing units into the downtown, with a number of similar projects on the drawing boards. Another reason is that the retailing’s strength now seems to be more than shops featuring “urban wear,” with chains having a strong middle class appeal opening, e.g., Home Depot, Marshall’s, Zale’s, Nine West, Old Navy. The teens will still shop in Jamaica, but now their parents might as well.

The changing nature of the district’s retailing is also, in my opinion, reflected in the new store facades that have been built in recent years. They are much more attractive, with smaller signage, a better sense of proportion and though the colors used might offend some with Main Street design sensibilities, they are often still very pleasing.

Another indicator of this district’s strength is that commercial rents along Jamaica Avenue recently have reached as high as $150/SF for choice locations.

In the list below I have noted some of the chains that were open in Jamaica Center and have since closed. It should be noted that all of these closures involved chains that were having overall problems.

At the end of the list I have provided a link to a web-based photo album that contains photos of Jamaica Center’s retail chains.

National and Regional Chains in Jamaica Center January 25, 2008

Payless (2 stores)
Gothic Furniture
Quiznos Sub
UPS Store
Java’s Brewin
Game Stop
Burger King
Taco Bell
Pizza Hut
Dunkin Donuts
Subway
McDonald’s (2)
Duane Reade
Walgreens
Sleepy’s
Footlocker Kids (converted to Kids)
Zale’s
Nine West
Radio Shack
Marshall’s
Conway (2)
Home Depot
Fabco Shoes (2)
Footco USA
Jimmy Jazz
Toys ‘R Us (closed, chain in trouble)
Kids ‘R Us (closed, chain in trouble)
Wertheimers (closed, chain in trouble)
Jennifer Convertibles
Rainbow
Ashley Stewart
Tick Tock
Dr Jay’s
Vim
Modells
Cookie’s Department Store
Porta Bella
Strawberry
Parade of Shoes (closed, chain in trouble)
Youngworld
Athlete’s Foot
Shoppers World
Old Navy
The Children’s Place
Gap (closed, chain in trouble)

THE DOWNTOWN CRIME PROBLEM REDUX?

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Is crime again becoming a crippling problem for our nation’s downtowns?

For decades after WW II, crime and the fear of crime first fostered downtown decline and then impeded their revitalization. Happily, since the early 1990s, the crime problem seemed to be abating as violent crime statistics nationally dropped steadily and significantly. This drop in crime was accompanied by reduced fear, increased pedestrian traffic and nighttime activities in downtowns revitalized by:

  • Residential and commercial growth
  • A population trend that reduced the size of the crime-prone age cohort
  • And police departments adopting new and far more effective strategies.

However, the FBI just announced an increase in violent crimes for the second straight year, an occurrence that signals the first continued spike in homicides, robberies and other serious offenses since the early 1990s. This spike is especially noticeable in medium-sized cities and cities located in the Midwest. In large cities such as New York, the crime rate continues to decline.

What is unknown at this time is how this recent uptick in crime has impacted on downtown districts.

The Down Side.

As the introduction of crack cocaine led to a major surge in violent crimes between 1985 and 1992, so the growing use of Methamphetamine — a..k.a. Crystal Meth – appears to be associated with higher crime rates. The Crack Meth problem also appears to have taken particularly strong roots in the Midwest and in small and medium-sized municipalities – localities that trended toward not having major crack cocaine problems.

Many of these same municipalities are reporting the growth of street gangs, especially those having national organizations, such as the Crips, Bloods, MS-13, etc. There is a strong correlation between the growth of Crack Meth use in a locality and the growth of street gangs, since the gangs often are heavily involved in the sale of this drug. There have been some reports of these gangs being active in poor or marginal commercial districts, where they intimidate shoppers and scare and extort local merchants.

There also has been a rise in retail crimes by well-organized rings of professional thieves. While most of the crimes in the larceny/theft statistical category have declined since 2000, shoplifting has increased 11.7 percent.[1]

The Bush Administration’s reduced funding for police departments has had a big negative impact on the police departments in small and medium-sized cities, where, according to the legislative counsel for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the loss of “one or two or five police officers can make a real difference.”[2]

Nationally, there has been an increase in the teenager/young adult population, the age group most prone to committing crimes and acts of violence, especially in low-income disadvantaged areas.

Also nationally, there are growing numbers of released prison inmates and their recidivism is likely to result in many crimes.

Newspaper articles on the recent crime surge have focused on criminal events in poor and often “ethnic” neighborhoods, which often are located near downtown areas and sometimes in them. As a recent major study found, “Downtowns are home to some of the most and least affluent households of their cities and regions.”[3]

While some of the newspaper articles mention the meth drug connection, others focus on a new and extremely disturbing aspect of this heightened violence – it’s seemingly arbitrary causation. For example:

“And while such crime in the 1990′s was characterized by battles over gangs and drug turf, the police say the current rise in homicides has been set off by something more bewildering: petty disputes that hardly seem the stuff of fistfights, much less gunfire or stabbings.

Suspects tell police they killed someone who ‘disrespected’ them or a family member, or someone who was “mean mugging” them, which police loosely translate as giving a dirty look. And more weapons are on the streets, giving people a way to act on their anger.

Police Chief Nannette H. Hegerty of Milwaukee calls it ‘the rage thing.’”[4]

Arbitrary violence is almost impossible to predict and consequently almost impossible to avoid. It is very fear inducing.

On The Upside.

In the 1980s I directed a major study for Regional Plan Association on how the fear of crime is generated and how it strangled the outer borough downtowns in New York City. A major finding was that the fear of crime did not so much thwart visitation rates – people still had to use the subway connections, courts and hospitals — as it induced a huge amount of pedestrian avoidance behavior and that significantly reduced the number and strength of the multi-purpose trips that are the sine qua non of healthy downtowns.[5]

More recently, as my wife and I have traveled across the nation over the last 10 years, visiting such places as Boston, Chicago, Charlotte, Miami, Midtown Manhattan, Pasadena, Philadelphia, Portland (OR), San Diego, Santa Monica and Seattle, we have been struck by significant evening downtown pedestrian flows, where people seemed to be walking free of fear and not feeling the need to take precautionary measures. Unfortunately, I could not find any statistical evidence to support our “field observations.”

I could offer numerous anecdotal reports of our experiences, but here are just two:

  • Since returning to NYC in 1980, I have often walked, after dark, from Times Square down 7th Avenue to Penn Station to catch a LIRR train home. During the 1980’s and much of the 1990’s, Times Square was a physically frayed, fear inducing area, but walking down 7th Avenue, desolate but for the drunks, drug users and homeless was even worse. Street savvy pedestrians were ever vigilant, watching darkened spaces and scanning who was behind them. Today, Times Square is awash in new development and again the entertainment capital of the world, jammed with pedestrians day and night, and a favorite of tourists. Now, after dark, there is a steady pedestrian flow on 7th Avenue, overwhelmingly comprised of Average Joes and Average Janes, with the quality of life issues greatly abated. Pedestrians are no longer constantly looking over their shoulders. Some even window shop.
  • We love to visit Center City Philadelphia at least once a year because of its superb restaurants, cultural amenities and “walkability.” On our first visit, in 1985, we drove one Saturday evening down Walnut Street to Rittenhouse Square. The street was devoid of pedestrians as was the rest of the downtown we drove through. On recent visits we’ve walked to several restaurants on Walnut from our hotels on Logan Square or East Market Street. On these visits, with its numerous restaurants and bars and nearby hotels and cultural facilities, Walnut always had a significant amount of nighttime pedestrian activity, overwhelmingly by “respectable people”

Back in 1987 I argued that downtowns could reduce the fear of crime if they were designed and developed to make visitors feel that they are interesting and attractive places where “’respectable people’ like themselves tend to frequent.” The key to the emergence of such downtowns was the development of a dense, compact multi-functional core area that would combine residential, office, retail and entertainment functions. Such core areas would be conducive to significant flows of law abiding pedestrians during both day and evening hours.

Today, most of the successful downtowns I visit have such multi-functional cores, These downtowns are often referred to — with some hyperbole — as “24 hour” activity centers, because commercial and cultural activities as well as pedestrian traffic are present during daylight and evening hours.

Entertainment Niches. Vibrant entertainment niches containing restaurants, watering holes, movie theaters, concert halls and/or legitimate theaters have enabled many downtowns to attract substantial numbers of evening visitors, who are not afraid of strolling and window shopping after dark. This is true for large downtowns such as Midtown Manhattan , Center City Philadelphia, downtown Chicago and the Gaslamp District in San Diego as well for smaller downtowns such as New Brunswick, NJ, Englewood, NJ, Old Pasadena, CA, Manayunk, PA

Residential Growth. Also contributing to this “after dark” resurgence has been the growth of downtown residential populations. In her recent study, Eugenie Birch also found that:

““During the 1990s, downtown population grew by 10 percent, a marked resurgence following 20 years of overall decline. Forty percent of the sample cities began to see growth before the 1990s. While only New York’s two downtown areas and Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Diego saw steady increases from 1970 to 2000, another 13 downtowns have experienced sustained growth since the 1980s.”

This influx of downtown residents is important for several reasons:

  • Downtown residents, in Jane Jacobs’ terms, take “possession” of the area they live in; they help make sure it is properly maintained and kept safe
  • More residents help create a built-in demand for many retailers and entertainment functions. They can be especially important for the attraction and development of good restaurants
  • More downtown residents help create a more interesting and safer environment after dark. Directly and indirectly they increase the flow of law-abiding citizens, which in turn serves to reduce the fear of crime

While Birch’s study focused on the nation’s major downtowns, the NY-NJ-CT metropolitan area offers numerous examples of significant growth in residential units in smaller downtowns such as White Plains, Hoboken, Morristown, Cranford, Englewood, South Orange, New Brunswick, Rahway, Livingston, Garden City, etc.

Police Strategies. Downtown security also has been greatly improved by police departments deploying one of more of the following strategies:

1. Community Policing. This usually involves more foot patrol officers who build relationships with the people on their beats, garner better information about criminal activities and problem-solve specific community crime issues

2. Broken Windows. Based on the famous 1982 “Broken Windows” article by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in the Atlantic Monthly that argued:

‘If disorder goes unchecked, a vicious cycle begins. First, it kindles a fear of crime among residents, who respond by staying behind locked doors. Their involvement in the neighborhood declines; people begin to ignore rowdy and threatening behavior in public. They cease to exercise social regulation over little things like litter on the street, loitering strangers, or truant schoolchildren. When law-abiding eyes stop watching the streets, the social order breaks down and criminals move in.”

A broken windows strategy tries to remove the “signs of disorder” such as broken windows, dirty sidewalks, loitering, public use of drugs and alcohol, prostitution, etc.

3. Comstat. Uses computerized mapping of crime reports to identify “hot spots” of criminal activity. These hot spots are then analyzed and the local police units are tasked to deal with them and evaluated on their ability to succeed.

The 24 Hour Downtown and New Policing Vs The New Crime Wave

How are the 24 hour downtowns coping with the new crime wave? Are the new residents and greater evening pedestrian flows helping to deter criminal activities and/or keeping the fear levels low? How effective are the new police strategies against the new crime wave? Are downtowns experiencing a recent surge in crime and fear doing so because they have not used the above mentioned revitalization and policing strategies or because these strategies have failed? These questions need to be addressed and answered – and quickly – so the downtown revitalization community can take appropriate remedial actions. Perhaps the International Downtown Association can work with the National Institute of Justice and academic experts such as George Kelling to create, fund and execute the necessary research project.

[1] Joel Groover, “ORGANIZED CRIME Retailers combat growing number of professional shoplifters,” Shopping Centers Today ,October 2006

[2] Dan Eggen, “Violent Crime Up For Second Year: Some Point to Cuts in Federal Funding,” Washington Post, Saturday, June 2, 2007; A01

[3] Eugenie L. Birch, “Who Lives Downtown,” The Brookings Institution, November 2006

[4] Kate Zernike, “Violent Crime Rising Sharply in Some Cities,” New York Times, Feb.11, 2006

[5] N. David Milder, “Crime and Downtown Revitalization” Urban Land , September 1987, pp. 16-19

BEING A DOWNTOWN CHANGE AGENT: Facilitating Change for Downtown Business Operators

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Small Business Operators Are Slow To Adopt Changes

At conferences and other events where downtown managers congregate, the conversation at some time usually turns into a group therapy session focusing on the seemingly intractable, but certainly dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors of downtown business operators and landlords. Some of the dysfunctional behaviors raised might include deteriorating facades and signs, poor market research, lousy merchandising, “wrong” business hours, inadequate customer service, high rents, poor building conditions, harmful tenant selection, etc. Many readers, I am sure, know the rest of the litany.

Many downtown managers also consider it almost impossible to “re-educate” most downtown business operators and landlords or to otherwise induce them to improve their business behaviors. Years ago, based on my own management experiences and field observations as well as reports from friends managing downtown districts across the country, I came to a kind of Bayesian subjective probability estimate that only about five to seven percent of downtown business operators and landlords can be retrained or otherwise induced to innovate.

However, more recently, based on my program development experiences in the Bayonne Town Center (NJ), I have come to believe that significantly more downtown business operators can be induced to change, if, and this is a critical if, downtown leaders, acting as change agents, can help make it easy for them to change.

How To Get Existing Merchants To Renovate Their Facades?

About four years ago I took on the management of the Bayonne Town Center Special Improvement District. The previous executive director had done a great job of getting a highly respected architect, Walter Chatham, to write design guidelines, which were then adopted by the city as an ordinance. The city was offering then, as it still offers today, strong financial incentives to stimulate façade and storefront renovations in the district: a shop with a frontage of 25 feet can get a grant for as much as $10,000; a corner shop can get up to $15,000. However, while new businesses in the district were improving their facades, none of the existing street-level business operations were doing so, though many storefronts badly needed renovation. Officials in city hall as well as the Town Center board of directors could not understand why the city’s generous financial incentive package was not stimulating more façade improvements in the district.

While I quickly ascribed this situation to the typical change -adverse way I believed small downtown business operators behaved, my intellectual curiosity and feeling of management responsibility led me over the next year to talk informally to many merchants about why they were not improving their facades. Here are the surprising conclusions I reached as a result of those discussions:

  • A lot more merchants than I expected were interested in improving their facades. My rough estimate would be somewhere between 20% to 25%, not my expected 5% to 7%.
  • Merchants who owned their buildings were more apt to be interested in renovation than those who leased their spaces. This was understandable since they had more to gain and one less decision-making gatekeeper to deal with
  • Almost no one had any idea of what kind of new façade they might want!
  • No one felt they had a good idea of how much a façade renovation might cost!
  • Few knew an architect or contractor who might help them! Most small business people will not have architects or contractors in their social networks. They often work long hours and lack the opportunities to establish such contacts on their own
  • There was wide spread concern about getting city approvals for their projects!
  • Almost everyone knew about the city’s façade improvement financial incentives.
  • A minority of those interested in doing a facade improvement felt that even with the city’s financial incentives, they still could not afford to renovate
  • Most of those interested in improving their facades felt that, with the city’s financial assistance, they probably could afford to renovate. They were not moving forward because they did not know how to proceed and lacked the time and energy to remedy this situation!

Facilitating Change

As I mulled about these findings some research I had done in 1989 came to mind. Back then I was trying to find out why manufacturing firms were moving out-of-state from the Bronx, a borough of New York City. My research indicated that:

  • These firms were successful, expanding and needed more space

  • They were too small to have a real estate specialist on staff
  • Management was too busy with their growing business to look for a new location
  • They often need specialized training for their blue collar workforce
  • They had concerns about high crime
  • Recruiters from out-of-state economic development organizations had come in and offered turn-key solutions that included low-cost new space, manpower training, low crime, etc. The recruiters made it very easy for the Bronx firms to move to their states. In other words, the recruiters had facilitated change.

A program that could facilitate change seemed precisely what was needed to unleash façade improvements in the Bayonne Town Center.

The Jump Start Façade Improvement Program

Consequently, I designed the Town Center’s Jump Start Façade Improvement Program sm.

This program provides each participating business operator with the following products and services:

  • A well-known architect in the field, Margaret Westfield of Westfield Architects visits with them to listen to any ideas they might have about their new façades
  • She comes back several weeks later with a rendering of their new façade, cost estimates for the improvement project and samples of the materials that should be used
  • The façade design, because it is done by one of the Town Center’s architect’s in conformance with its design guidelines, has assured acceptance by the city
  • The Town Center’s staff, if necessary, helps participants with the paper work for the city’s incentive program and provides them with contact information about contractors who have done successful façade projects in the district.

Of the five storefronts in the initial round of the program, two renovations have been completed and three are in process, with completions expected by August 2007. A second round of Jump Start has been completed recently. One entire building façade has been renovated; action on six other storefronts is awaited.

The slide show below shows three of the improved building facades, before and after their renovations.


The Kick Start Building Renovation Program

Based on the success of the Jump Start program, the management of the Bayonne Town Center leaped at the opportunity to obtain a technical assistance grant from the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) to create the Kick Start Building Renovation Program sm. Kick Start is aimed at stimulating district landlords to renovate the upper stories of their buildings and create market-rate residential units.

The CPC is a very large and successful nonprofit that uses CRA funds from over 80 banks and insurance companies to fund housing projects in NY, NJ and CT.

The Kick Start “treatment strategy” is again to facilitate change, this time by having the CPC’s architect-engineer provide each participating Town Center landlord with a feasibility study that describes how many residential units might be built on their property, the types of units that should be created and cost estimates for the project. The CPC also will be ready to finance feasible projects. Furthermore, because of the CPC’s reputation, it is anticipated that the feasibility studies will help ease their associated renovation projects through the city’s permissions and approvals process.

At the time of this blog posting, Kick Start is underway, but none of the three initial feasibility studies have been completed.

Facilitating One Change Can Help Facilitate Other Changes

As consultants have long known, developing a client’s trust and confidence in you and your firm is essential for having your recommendations implemented. Downtown managers, when acting as change agents, face a similar challenge with the business operators and landlords in their district. The Jump Start Program has helped to significantly increase the trust and confidence that district business operators and landlords have in the Town Center’s management team. This is true even among those who have not participated in Jump Start, but knew what happened in it. This has stimulated not only interest in participating in Jump Start and Kick Start, but it has also made some landlords more willing to work with us on business recruitment and redevelopment projects.

Some Additional Observations

My experiences with Jump Start strongly suggest that money, while not a negligible factor, is certainly often not the prime factor that impedes change and innovation among small downtown business operators. Knowing what can be done and easy access to needed professional assistance are also very strong factors.

The city’s permissions and approvals process also can have an enormous impact on downtown change and innovation. The Town Center has city legitimated design guidelines and its architect determines whether or not submitted designs are in accordance with them. The Town Center is thus able to provide designs for renovated facades that are guaranteed to be accepted by the city. This factor alone reduced anxieties about delays and escalating costs among the participating business operators.