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12 Strategies That Will Transform Your City’s Downtown

John Karras of UrbanScale.com offers 12 strategies that can transform your city’s downtown into a thriving urban district.

Quicken CEO Dan Gilbert wants to use his company’s downtown Detroit headquarters as a catalyst for redeveloping the city’s core, with streetcars, wider sidewalks and pedestrian-friendly plazas.
Quicken CEO Dan Gilbert wants to use his company’s downtown Detroit headquarters as a catalyst for redeveloping the city’s core, with streetcars, wider sidewalks and pedestrian-friendly plazas.
Rock Ventures
Does your city have a long-range downtown plan?

Does your city have a downtown development corporation, a downtown alliance, or similar non-profit organization that is focused solely on promoting downtown as a destination for businesses, residents, and development?

Does your city have public policies (like tax abatements, grants, and other special incentives) to promote downtown development?

Hopefully, you answered ‘yes’ to the questions above.  But even if you answered ‘no’ to each question, and your city doesn’t have any official program in place to help make your downtown a more vibrant urban place, there are still lots of strategies your community can pursue to improve the urban vitality of your downtown.  That’s what this post is all about.

Below are 12 strategies that can transform your city’s downtown into a thriving urban district.  For each strategy, you’ll see a concise explanation of how the strategy will make your downtown more vibrant and one or two examples of cities that have successfully implemented the strategy.

By the way, if you’re interested in reading more about the importance of downtown to your city, please see my 3-part blog series on The Most Prosperous Downtowns of the 21st Century where I analyzed how the downtown areas of the 100 largest cities have fared over the past decade.

Vibrant Downtown Strategy #1

Turn one-way streets into two-way streets.

Why?

One-way streets are great if your only goal is to channel traffic through your downtown, but they are bad for pedestrian activity and retail opportunities.  Two-way streets create a more comfortable pedestrian environment and have been shown to increase property values.

There is a good reason that the Main Streets that sit at the urban core of small towns and cities across the U.S. are almost always two-way streets.  From Wichita, KS to Charleston, SC, cities across the U.S. are realizing the benefits of two-way streets in their urban cores.

Vibrant Downtown Strategy #2

Establish a regularly occurring public event with showcasing downtown merchants, music, and food.

Why?

Ongoing public events help drive positive awareness of your city’s downtown.  Bringing people from your entire city downtown on a regular basis, once a week or even just once a month, serves to make citizens aware of the unique amenities that exist in the central part of their community.

Events like a weekly farmers market (like the Union Square Farmers Market in NYC) or a monthly art walk (many cities have a “First Friday Art Walk” like the one in Denver) can draw thousands of people to your downtown on a regular basis.  And many of these people do not live or work near downtown, so by creating the event, you can expose a wider portion of your community to the unique assets located in your urban core.  These citizens are then more likely to visit downtown for shopping/dining/entertainment on other occasions and are more likely to consider living downtown or perhaps locating their business downtown.  An added benefit of these types of events is that they engage local merchants, artists, and entrepreneurs, helping to make these businesspeople champions for downtown revitalization.

Vibrant Downtown Strategy #3

Create more land for development (landfill into a body of water, remove land from a floodplain, take back land from a freeway, etc).

Why?

If you could literally expand your city’s downtown by creating more land area for new downtown development, you would jump at the opportunity, right?

Well, if your city is one of the lucky ones that sits next to an ocean, you might be able to use landfill to expand the land area of your downtown, as New York City did with its Battery Park City neighborhood in Lower Manhattan.  In fact, Battery Park City was built on 90 acres of landfill created from more than 1.2 million cubic yards earth that was excavated from the original World Trade Center site.

But this isn’t the only way to create more land for development.  How about that floodplain land in your downtown?  You could make some infrastructure investments that take some of that land out of the floodplain, opening up more acreage for downtown development.  That’s what Austin is doing with its Waller Creek project, a major initiative that will rejuvenate the currently underutilized waterway that runs through the eastern section of the city’s downtown.

Or what about that massive freeway that runs along the edge of your downtown?  You could tear it down and build a park in its place like Portland did in its downtown.

Or you could sink it and cover it with a park like Dallas did.

Or you could sink it and cover it with a park and a convention center like Seattle.

Vibrant Downtown Strategy #4

Make under-utilized public land available for private sector development

Why?

All types of government (federal, state, and local) own real estate assets.  Sometimes these “assets” are not doing any good for the government entity that owns them or for the community they sit in.  Structures like vacant government office buildings, abandoned power plants, and other obsolete public facilities in your city’s downtown are often prime candidates for redevelopment by the private sector.

Check out how Austin is using its defunct Seaholm power plant as the centerpiece of a new mixed-use downtown development.

Or, take a look at what the private sector has done with a former elementary school in Portland, turning it into a hotel/microbrewery (this one is not downtown-specific but illustrates the strategy so well, I had to include it).

Vibrant Downtown Strategy #5

Consolidate regional economic development partner organizations into a single downtown location.


Why?

It may seem like an inconsequential decision but the location of government offices and community-serving organizations matters.  This is even more important for organizations that interact with the outside business world like chambers of commerce and economic development organizations.  Of course, public decisions to place jobs downtown are beneficial, but in this case, we’re talking about the image that is portrayed to the outside world.

What type of message do you think it sends when a city’s economic development corporation is located in a big-box strip center, or when the local chamber of commerce is housed in the upstairs of a convenience store?  (Yes, I’ve actually seen both of these examples in the wild!).  Take a look at what San Angelo, TX did.

San Angelo’s regional economic development partners chose to a construct a new consolidated facility in a strategic central city location to help spur further downtown revitalization.  And the added benefit from this decision is the synergies gained by housing several cooperating organizations under a single roof.

For #6 - #12 please visit John Karras' site UrbanScale.com

 

John founded urbanSCALE.com to empower urban planning and economic development professionals with the knowledge and tools needed to make their communities more vibrant. John is also the creator of the urbanSCALE Rating System, the first comprehensive measure of how urban a city is on a scale of 1 to 10.