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The Dispatch wrote
As holidays approach, mayor still looks for ways to pump new life into vacancy-riddled heart of city
Sunday, November 23, 2008
By Mark Ferenchik
In his State of the City address in March, Mayor Coleman announced a “Mile on High District.” It would be an incentive-laden plan to inject life into a struggling High Street. This holiday season, it will be apparent that the plan is off to a sluggish start, mired in a battered economy.
Just two groups are taking advantage of the plan’s tax breaks: the new Barrio restaurant, which will serve Latin fare next year in the old Wendy’s building at Spring and High, and the owners of the former Arby’s building at 45 N. High, who are spending $1.2 million to redevelop it into office and commercial space.
Retail analyst Chris Boring said a survey he conducted in April of the High Street corridor between Nationwide and Mound showed that 40 percent of the space — 80,000 square feet — was vacant. The vacancy rate for the Columbus market is 12 percent.
A retail study in June found 280 stores and restaurants Downtown and estimated spending power to support 450. Downtown won’t become a regional shopping destination again, Boring said, but independent retailers can serve the more than 130,000 Downtown office workers, residents and college students. As the economy improves, he expects to see a wave of retail entrepreneurs composed of retired baby boomers and talented people who lost their jobs start businesses.
Related Stories:
- Downtown Re-Development Moving Forward
- Right-sized Approach to Downtown Retail
- Downtown Retail: Need for area shops ‘unmet’
Mile High Club seems obvious.
CBUS should copy the 3CDC model….
[url]http://www.3cdc.org/[/url]
Revitalizing Over-the-Rhine from Soapboxmedia.com on Vimeo.
[url]http://www.3cdc.org/[/url]
Isn’t that what CDDC already is?
http://www.downtowncolumbus.com/about/cddc-capitol-south
It sounds like the Mile on High initiative is focused pretty specifically on retail development. What I’d like to know is what sorts of incentives are available for the smaller of the small businesses. The two projects mentioned in the article are likely $1Million+ renovation projects, which is great, but if we’re looking for a comeback in small business entrepreneurs, what’s available for someone interested in leasing one of those vacant spots along High and opening a small store?
I guess I should shoot out a few emails. ;)
I’d have to say the one thing missing from downtown is retail. There is many many empty store fronts it’s sad but I think thats what it needs.
Retail alone won’t work, or City Center would still be flourishing. What seems to be needed is an incentive to go to that specific area to shop.
it has to offer a unique experience. the problem with city center was that it was just a regular old suurban mall that happened to be downtown. once that novelty wore off, people realized that they could get the exact same thing a lot closer to their house. this is especially true with tuttle, which is literally a two-story clone of city center for the most part. :?
yea but I would love to have different things to do on High st in down town its so depressing looking .
We need incentives when we have a sweet name like “Mile on High District?”
The thing is that Gay St. is getting the focus and still a WIP. Even though it’s got some good stuff there you have 4 vacant spots right next to High which spills into more vacant spots mentioned in the article. I have to say that as pedestrian and cyclist-friendly as Gay St is it still lacks a connection to another similar kind of street, so it exists as an island. I don’t see why we don’t make High St. more like Gay St., especially since the city seems to have no plans on converting 3rd or 4th Streets anytime soon. A business-friendly street(pdf) is simply more likely to attract businesses.
OT, while looking for who to send articles on business-friendly streets to regarding this plan, I saw that the city website has taken the Columbusite approach by letting pictures do the talking for our city. I like!
^No comprendo. Is High Street a non-pedestrian friendly environment? It was slow and streetscaped last time I checked. Has something changed?
Can’t the problem ever be about economics instead of pedestrians and traffic speed?
If that were the case then why is Easton still packed with stores and attracting more high-end ones?
I’m glad the city wants to improve high street, getting rid of the City Center walkway is a great step towards to that,
but if they really want retail downtown soon, then they probably ought not to be so focused on High Street. Restaurants and Bars I think could do very well on High but they do better with office workers than most Retailers typically do (although there are some that prefer that)
Main and Gay/Broad all have a better chance of getting more retail density than High at this point for a variety of reasons
1) OTE has virtually zero retail, save in isolated spots like Long in King Lincoln. The eastern edge East West Arteries in downtown could help service that area as well as downtown.
2) High Street has too expensive rent for the amount of footraffic it provides downtown. Your first pioneers are not likely to go into the expensive places. From what I hear many of the landlords may not be inclined to rent to indies there anyway.
3) Broad/Gay and Main have more established retailers and restaurants. Retail is a follow the herd kind of business, very very few shops will want to be first in an area. We build synergies with our neighbors by drawing footraffic to an area that potentially could be future customers for our neighbors and vice versa. It’s a safer bet to go in nearby an established anchor retailer.
4) Retail follows rooftops, I don’t know the business as well but restaurants are able to do better with workers than retailers usually do. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect downtown workers to be able solely support downtown shops. Retail almost never works very well away from residential areas (although there are exceptions like outlet malls) and even if that isn’t true almost all retailers believe it to be true.
There are more residential possibilities out of the very center of the CBD, where land values are on average very high and you simply can’t deliver reasonably sized condos under 200,000 without heavy subsidization. The east side of downtown in particular offers the opportunity to build lower cost housing, and isn’t subsidized hardly at all. It’s also where the students are, who are more likely to be more reliable although less lucrative retail customers than office workers.
It’s no accident than the Short North and the BD/GV have shops. They are near lots of continuous housing with disposable income and both areas to their credit have a done a great job of attracting tourists. It’s no accident there are shops either on my block downtown, there are three condo projects within two blocks as well as scattered apartments.As well as landlords who are actually willing to rent to independents.
5) Main Street in particular has gained stores while downtown as a whole has been losing stores and hasn’t been incentivized. That shows latent demand that could be tapped. The Market Exchange district was built with no public money/incentives from what I’ve been told and it still has retained most of those tenants. I am biased of course, but I think anyone can count shops (excluding restaurants which require different things) along Main and get more than you would just about anywhere downtown (excluding Gay and Broad which are just as good in potential in my view) It’s not a slam dunk by any means, but would you rather build something from some or none?
6) Grandview yard will be closer to High and thus more competitive with High than Broad/Gay and Main.
High Street downtown has less of these qualities right now than the three streets I mentioned. It’s further away from residential in many spots, it’s expensive, it has and is going to have intense proximate competition for footraffic. Not to mention any shop on high downtown with have to compete with the established shopping areas north and south where footraffic is superior, zoning is friendlier and operational costs are typically lower. The east-west arteries don’t have this problem as much, especially the eastern end of therm. If you enhance what you already have I think you will create neighborhood synergies (which is what I argue what we really need downtown) that will feed over into High street and spur demand over there.
I’m seriously asking. Is High Street an uncomfortable place to walk?
Edit: I think ZHC’s reasons do a lot more to explain the lack of retail on High than “it’s not traffic calmed enough.”
I agree with a lot of what you said, but I think this is probably the most important factor in why new retail development is going so slowly downtown. It takes a VERY specialized business to be the first one to open, and then it takes a dozen more very specialized business to follow before we see more of the standard types of retail that rely more on foot-traffic.
It takes a VERY specialized business to be the first one to open, and then it takes a dozen more very specialized business to follow before we see more of the standard types of retail that rely more on foot-traffic.
Yeah you’ll need to have destination retailers. And they are often primarily driven by rent costs which is partly why High has a problem attracting them despite being being a high (foot and car) volume street. They can access the same customers for cheaper outside downtown, that’s a big part of the problem.
My type of business often is a destination style of retail. You’ll often hardware stores venture further out than most. We don’t need necessarily to have neighbors to survive but it makes a heck of difference even for me. Having a high volume neighbor is a huge boost, when we had Johnson’s next to us that was 120-200 people a day who went right by my store. Having them nearby helped us survive the 90′s. It’s free advertising and people get in the habit of coming to your area to get “things”.
People like to one stop shop, your chances of success as a store are better when your neighborhood offers more choices to consumers to meet that goal.
I’m seriously asking. Is High Street an uncomfortable place to walk?
Edit: I think ZHC’s reasons do a lot more to explain the lack of retail on High than “it’s not traffic calmed enough.”
I don’t think it’s uncomfortable place to walk, though I think it’s far better to bike down the street! Everything is more exciting on wheels :-P
I’m seriously asking. Is High Street an uncomfortable place to walk?
Many times it is. Speeders and loud traffic keep me from it and to a side street. It sucks hearing engines all day. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAA RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Rooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Sounds like you should move to a nice quiet cul-de-sac in the burbs then.
Sounds like you should move to a nice quiet cul-de-sac in the burbs then.
:lol: You sound like Greenhouse.
No, Greenhouse would have said: Sounds like you should move to teh cul-de-sac in teh burbs then.
Anyway, I did a little bit of hunting around online for information about the Mile on High plan and couldn’t really find anything detailing what sorts of benefits and incentives are being proposed for businesses. Maybe I need to hit up teh Mike Brown when he gets back from teh vacation and pester him for teh info.