While downtown Minneapolis struggles, neighborhood commercial business districts find themselves wrestling with the same challenges – vacant storefronts, empty commercial buildings, an image of being unsafe, unkempt, and undesirable.
According to Robert Sprague, a veteran retail consultant, in 1950, 95% of retail sales occurred in city business districts – downtowns and community districts. By 1990, that number had shrunk to 5%. Suburban shopping centers had skillfully captured most of the retail sales that had previously taken place in downtowns.
Downtown experts analyzing why this occurred found one inescapable reason: suburban malls had one huge advantage: unified management. They could create one unified vision for the mall and then have one entity responsible for executing that vision. This let them create environments and experiences that could not be achieved by single businesses alone.
How could city downtowns and business districts compete when they were all individual businesses, each with their own self interests? The answer was the business district management corporation, often funded by a district property tax levy. What do management corporations do?
Management: This may sound simple, but people take for granted that someone is in charge of a shopping mall. No one is in charge of a neighborhood business area. But that changes with a management corporation. Someone “owns” that neighborhood space, someone who wakes up every morning thinking about how to make that place better. They would engage property owners and business owners to come up with strategies to improve a business area, leading to actions, leading to achieving measurable results. The organization would be accountable financially, would recruit and hire staff, and ensure that vendors perform as contracted. In short, the organization would let neighborhood business areas function like a shopping mall.
Maintenance: At a shopping mall, it is clear who is responsible for the space between businesses. With neighborhood business districts, no one is in charge of the space between businesses. That is the space where you get graffiti, trash, dirt, and other things that make a place unattractive. A management corporation would maintain public spaces, making sure the space between businesses was clean, litter free, and in good repair. Maintenance also includes providing an extra degree of safety through street ambassadors or extra police patrols.
Marketing: A shopping mall advertises itself. Similarly, a management corporation would market a neighborhood commercial district. It would develop a branding and advertising program to draw customers into the stores and restaurants in the district. But this marketing would also include recruiting new businesses to the district. Just like a shopping mall recruits new tenants.
But management, maintenance and marketing are not enough to make a neighborhood business area thrive. It also needs experiences that offer Moments, Memories, and Magic. Simply put, humans don’t remember decades, or years, or even months. Humans remember specific moments, like the joy of watching a child being born, are the satisfaction of an extraordinary meal. These moments produce memories that make us want to repeat these moments. And these memories are most powerful when they are magical. At a grand scale, you can think of magical places like Disneyworld or Las Vegas. But neighborhood commercial districts can also be magical by being places that create memorable moments, by being places that people make memories, and by having restaurants and stores that bring joy and magic. They would be the place where, on a Saturday night, our normal reaction would be “Let’s go to Uptown” or “Let’s go to Dinkytown because the last time I was there, I had a wonderful time.” A well-run management corporation would work to make neighborhood districts magical places we want to go back to over and over.
Three commercial business districts in Minneapolis – Uptown, Dinkytown and West Broadway – are large enough to support business district management corporations. But what would it take to create such an organization for each of these districts, or others in Minneapolis? Watch my next column in the Times as I lay out a road map to organize these entitles.
Eric, unfortunately there are no business districts in the Twin Cities that I know of that are doing an excellent job. Pittsburgh has a number of organizations that you might explore – East Liberty Development, Inc. Lawrenceville Corporation; Oakland Planning and Development/Oakland BID; Manayunk in Philadelphia, these are organizations that are doing a good job of business district management. If you contact me I can suggest other organizations.
David,
Thank you for the reply.
I’m very happy to note that you included neighborhoods in the Business District planning.
Something I did not see in your article and I feel is crucial to success
Carin
I’ve been involved in several neighborhood organizations. There’s no consistency in their business support, and several flat out pretended like their business districts didn’t exist. If there’s a neighborhood organization doing an excellent job offering what the author shared, I’d be very interested to know which one.
I appreciate the reader’s thoughtful snd passionate comments. I took the liberty of sending her, by private e-mail, a summary of my work with neighborhood organizations, beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present. If any readers are interested in a bio, please contact me. I will only say that I’ve worked with neighborhood organizations in Minneapolis and elsewhere, numbering in the hundreds.
Funding for these neighborhood organizations largely disappeared when TIF money stopped, and with the 2040 plan. as the reader suggests. What is important to note is that few of these neighborhood business districts had effective and sophisticated business recruiting and retention, marketing and promotion, and “clean and safe” programs. Experience in other cities has proven that these are essential elements of a business district management program.
The “neighborhood organizations” programs that the reader cites, while worthwhile and which engaged neighborhood residents in a positive way, would be of little value today, given the struggling nature of the business districts I mentioned. Other cities have learned from the successful revitalization programs like East Liberty
Development in Pittsburgh, Manayunk Development Corporation in Philadelphia, and Midtown Benefits District in Baltimore. These organizations engage residents, businesses and property owners, secure public and private funding, and attract businesses by creating an environment when business can succeed.
If we want healthy, vibrant neighborhoods we need to ensure that adjoining business districts are clean, safe, attractive and inviting. and that requires management, maintenance and marketing.
Perhaps David Feehan is unfamiliar with Neighborhood Organizations?
It sure sounds like he hasn’t a clue what they do, or what they once did before too much meddling stripped away their funding stream, upended their pipeline to decades of neighborhood institutional knowledge ~ memories of where/how the magic comes from.
Neighborhood organizations are far more than potluck, community gardens and renter support systems. All of which of very worthwhile endeavors!
Each developed their own small area plans which included plans for THEIR business districts (Sadly, that meddling I spoke of earlier ~ includes the 2040 plan which – while talking out of both sides of its mouth – praised small area plans, recognizing their immense value… then swept nearly every small area plan to wayside as incompatible with the 2040 plan (whether it was or was not. No review was ever conducted)
But Neighborhoods and Neighborhood Organizations (NO’S) have not gone away. Even those Organizations who have combined with other no’s are STILL doing the work of shaping their Neighborhoods, assessing their needs and providing support ~ physical and financial in whatever form they have available to them.
Not all NO’S have the capacity to offer low/no interest loans. But many still do.
This feels rather like ANOTHER slap in the face ~ to be overlooked, ignored, dismissed by another City Dept (a city seemingly hell bent on ending NO’S and the tremendous value they bring to our city.
I’d like to see this article rewritten with an eye on what our Neighborhood Organizations bring to the table
And how such contributions might be encouraged, solidified,supported and strenghtened.
THEN, With these new… many vastly experienced partners involved ~ then let’s build up this Community Development Management Team. WITH our Neighborhood involvement!
THAT stands a far better chance of not only improving business prospects but doing so in a way that :
Saves the charm of these Neighborhood nooks
Provides opportunity for REAL community engagement that won’t leave the community feeling ignored
Allows the possibility of reclaiming that “magical memory” of place.
Let’s utilize ALL of our resources on this
That means our NO’s
And our actual citizens who care enough to get involved!