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NEW CITY AMERICA AND RENEWING YOUR BUSINESS DISTRICT
NEW CITY AMERICA, is a full service company dedicated to the facilitation and growth of street-based urban business districts. With highly qualified and experienced staff from the private sector, NEW CITY AMERICA provides business district organizations, district management associations, municipal and regional governments, Redevelopment Agencies and local Economic Development Departments the following services:
Those who use their knowledge, leadership and resources are best prepared to compete in this century. Our efforts today will dramatically influence what our cities will look like and live like in the next 50 years. Call 1-888-356-2726 for more information about NEW CITY AMERICA and its successful business district development projects. VISION, LEADERSHIP AND RESOURCES IN REBUILDING BUSINESS DISTRICTS
NEW CITY AMERICA believes that vision, leadership, access to resources, (such as a stable revenue flow) and the element of time and place are the key components to revitalizing neighborhood and urban street-based business districts. Absence of any one of these components will cripple an effort to create substantial, constructive change to a business district. Vision can be proposed by a professional company, a consultant, or developed internally by enlightened business and property owners. Leadership must comprise of a solid group of property or business owners dedicated to renewing their business district. To be successful, the leadership must be private and should not be dominated by government. Access to resources provides the foundation to initiate the process of revitalization. Resources may include use of Redevelopment funds, Community Development Block Grants, state grants, and eventually, a special assessment district whose revenues are used to fund enhanced services are the revitalization strategies of the leadership. Today, in large and small cities throughout the country, business and property owners realize that they must take the first step - organizing themselves - to respond to the changes occurring in the evolution of our urban areas. A
BUSINESS DEDICATED TO ORGANIZING URBAN AND NEIGHBORHOOD BUSINESS DISTRICTS
Since the early 1990's, there has been an explosion in private and public efforts to revitalize older urban, street-based business districts. Historic downtown and urban neighborhood commercial corridors, and urban mixed-use neighborhoods valuable for their setting for human experiences, places of social change and fond memories, are experiencing a renaissance. Due to a variety of economic and social factors, these once popular districts had declined to remnants of their former status after the 1960's. Reinventing older business and neighborhood districts is extremely challenging, though possible, particularly if understanding why and how it should be done. A successful revitalization strategy takes incredible persistence, a focused plan, a knowledge of the district's history and a little luck, based upon time and place. Thousands of hours are spent every year throughout the United States and Canada to develop strategies on how to revitalize historic business districts, but rarely is the question asked why? Why should this be done in the first place? If the question of why is not satisfactorily answered, allocating precious time and resources to how it should be done, or establishing special assessment districts of business or property owners, is putting the cart before the horse. To ensure the greatest amount of participation and to accelerate the revitalization process, establishing a Business Improvement District (BID) or a property maintenance district should only be undertaken in response to a commonly understood problem. WHY
REVITALIZE A STREET-BASED URBAN DOWNTOWN OR NEIGHBORHOOD BUSINESS
DISTRICT?
The following points underscore why
NEW CITY AMERICA believes this business district renewal process is
accelerating in North America today.
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC VALUES —
Some have said that eventually retail shopping in the United States
will be reduced to purchasing goods at either Wal Marts or within
"urban villages". Though simply stated, there is a kernel
of truth in this statement. People are both economic and social beings.
Wal Mart is not meant to be a social destination with a relaxed, people-watching
ambiance, and conversely, historic and neighborhood business districts
are not meant for discount shoppers taking advantage of ample parking.
Each experience satisfies different needs, one social and one economic. Due to increasing pressures of work, rapid technological changes in our personal lives and the communications revolution, our most precious resource - time - is increasingly in demand. Research reveals that people have less time to "shop the mall" or go window shopping, as they have had in the past. The growth of Wal Marts, supermarkets, factory outlet centers, and major discount retailers like Costco, respond to our "economic values" as consumers. But responding to our economic values does not fulfill our needs as social beings; it only allows us to shop for goods as efficiently and inexpensively as possible. The need for people to interact with each other in dynamic social settings is natural. Increasingly, street-based urban business districts are providing the venue for fulfilling our changing social needs. With proper leadership and district management, these districts can provide a clean, safe, attractive and entertaining social scene in which to dine, catch a movie, or simply "people watch".
CONCENTRATED CAPITAL AND HUMAN ACTIVITY — Understanding the role of concentrated capital resources and human activity in any community is fundamental to understanding the need for a revitalized business district. The dynamic life of any successful urban business district depends upon its concentration of human activity and supporting capital resources. Density becomes problematic without corresponding high levels of disposable income. Thus, social density must correspond with capital concentration. On the other hand, no matter how wealthy the neighborhood, residents and visitors will not patronize a business district that appears empty or contains many vacant properties. District Management efforts will help to capture the dollars "leaking out" from surrounding residential neighborhoods. Halting leaking residential dollars and attracting new capital to a business district in the form of investment and new shopping venues, serves as the foundation for stable urban retail economic development. Thus a successful urban or neighborhood business district has both social density and capital concentration.
IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY —Technology has, does, and always will, revolutionize the retail industry. The Sears catalogue of the late 1800s, revolutionized mass consumption practices by developing mail-order and help build the newly created national postal delivery system. This was done at the expense of some main street based businesses and the old general stores. During the 1950's, the passage of the Federal Interstate Highway Revenue Act of 1956, the growth of the home loan industry with its resulting mass production of housing, and the development of auto-based regional shopping malls, all served to transform shopping at the expense of downtown and urban neighborhood business districts. Since the 1980s, Wal Mart, Costco, big box stores, and factory outlet centers have further transformed shopping at the expense of secondary and tertiary malls. Primary malls have survived because they have been forced to re-capitalize and reinvent themselves. Today, QVC, mail order and the Internet offer alternative shopping resources for consumers; albeit they are all impersonal forms of consumption. These new venues eliminate the role that our senses play in shopping. One cannot smell, touch, taste or feel goods bought on-line, through the Internet or mail order. LEGAL AND SOCIAL CHANGES — Since the 1950s, the federal tax code encouraged people to move "out and up" in order to avoid
payment of capital gains taxes on the sale of personal
residences. The concept "out and up" implies that people were
encouraged to move to the suburbs, or out of the City to pay for upscale
housing to avoid capital gains taxes. This, coupled with the massively
subsidized federal highway system, created the foundation for higher
priced suburban housing and outlying shopping malls. WHAT ARE OTHER CONCEPTS THAT MUST BE EMPLOYED TO "REINVENT" A BUSINESS DISTRICT?
Giving priority to order is the best way to imply safety in a neighborhood or urban business district. In this sense, order is more important than law. Order must be based upon and enforced by a organized community, whereas laws are created by and enforced by the government. As a visual society, our eyes can perceive an orderly street immediately. We cannot normally see criminal activity; only the results of it. In thousands of neighborhoods throughout the U.S., the main commercial corridor serves as the "face" of the community. In other words, it is the first thing a visitor or guest sees when entering the community. Many of these neighborhoods are plagued with deteriorating commercial corridors but simultaneously have an excellent stock of residential housing. This imbalance, or blemished "face" brings down the entire neighborhood.
In her thought provoking book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", written in the 1950s, author Jane Jacobs wrote: "Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers." "The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers. He must not feel automatically menaced by them." "The first thing to understand is that public peace - the sidewalk and the street peace - of cities, is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves and enforced by the people themselves". (Death and Life of Great American Cities, page 30). Again, the way to imply safety in a neighborhood or urban business district is to give priority to order. Clean streets, empty trash cans, a well lit area, the lack of street people, and a dynamic and active street life will convey a sense of order and safety in a business district. BUSINESS DISTRICTS AS PRODUCTS — Just as in a business, a business district has assets and liabilities. The business district must be seen as a product to be defined, marketed and sold to a target audience. A business district, just as a business product, is subject to the laws of supply and demand. The district must distinguish itself from other districts or malls because of its own unique assets and resources.
Some business districts have their primary assets based upon their historic or ethnic heritage, some their proximity to a College or University, some based upon the high concentration of a particular good or service, and others by their proximity to a geographic natural resource such as a beach, river, lake, mountain range, or valley. A successful business district will combine all of these assets to make its "product or identity" attractive to surrounding residents, visitors and tourists alike. In this day of commercialization of all things, it is extremely important that a business district reflect the people and community from which it was created. Many previously charming business districts have recently begun to look like "anytown USA" with their chain coffee house, their major bookstore, their corporate clothing retailer - all systematically eliminating what made that business district unique and original. That is, the local restaurants, specialty shops, and professional service providers that wove locally owned businesses into the fabric of the community. Great value exists in locally owned and operated businesses because, as stakeholders, they can be encouraged to become great community leaders and supporters. ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE IN UNDERSTANDING REVITALIZATION —
Knowledge must also guide the efforts to revitalize street-based urban business districts. Successful strategies for revitalizing urban or neighborhood business districts incorporate: 1) the evolution of retail development in the U.S.; 2) the impact of technology in shopping; 3) the changing tax code; 4) the role of order and law; 5) the role of social and economic values on disposable income; 6) changes in planning theories; and, 7) learning from what other business districts and malls do to attract a customer base. In his book "Managing for Results", Drucker discusses the role of knowledge in setting businesses apart from their competition. (In this excerpt, the word "district" has been inserted after each instance where "business" was mentioned.) Drucker's words are very instructive for those involved in managing or planning the revitalization of urban and neighborhood business districts.............. "Results depend not on anybody within the business (district) nor on anything within the control of the business (district). They depend on somebody outside - the customer in a market economy, the political authorities in a controlled economy. It is always somebody outside who decides whether the efforts of a business (district) become economic results or whether they become so much waste and scrap." "The same is true of the one and only distinct
resource of any business (district): knowledge. Other resources, money
or physical equipment, for instance, do not confer distinction. What
does make a business (district) distinct and what is its peculiar resource
is its ability to use knowledge of all kinds - from scientific and technical
knowledge to social, economic and managerial knowledge. It is only in
respect to knowledge that a business (district) can be distinct, can
therefore produce something that has value in the market place." |
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