Core strength | Modest public investment in downtowns can woo big money from the private sector
“Charting the Course” is written by GrowSmart Maine, a Yarmouth nonprofit that promotes and encourages new ways of thinking about Maine’s future.
Since its inception five years ago, GrowSmart Maine has been committed to smart growth — creative forms of development that make our towns and cities more affordable, accessible, vibrant and attractive.
But in the past year, the recession has put the brakes on growth in general. Nevertheless, smart growth real estate developments seem to be more resistant to the downturn: This year, projects that are already under construction in or near the state’s downtown areas — such as the Hathaway Creative Center in Waterville, the North Dam and Island Point projects in downtown Biddeford/Saco, Freeport Village Station and Brunswick’s Maine Street Station — will likely constitute the lion’s share of new commercial and retail space built in Maine.
Downtown developments offer lower commuting costs for workers and their employers (the last four projects in the preceding list are all adjacent to or within a five minute walk of existing or planned stations for Downeaster passenger rail service). They also increase the velocity of money exchanged in local economies, as downtown workers and households are more likely to patronize other downtown businesses like sandwich shops and copy centers. The heightened sense of community on Main Street also offers less tangible productivity benefits, like chance meetings among workers from different firms that promote frequent transfers of knowledge or trade in goods and services.
Sprucing up the downtown
In a business environment that thrives on public spaces, walkable streets and civic vitality, the public sector has an important role to play. Modest public investments in downtown infrastructure — sidewalks, parks, community centers, or shared parking lots — mean big responses from the private sector.
For instance, the city of Rockland recently invested $124,000 in federal community development funds for a façade improvement program for downtown businesses and properties. According to Community Development Director Rodney Lynch, the grants leveraged an additional $134,000 in private investments to improve storefronts for 16 downtown businesses and properties.
These aren’t tremendous sums, but each individual storefront renovation helped to increase foot traffic, which in turn generated positive ripple effects all along Main Street. “It also motivated other downtown property and business owners to undertake façade improvements independent of the city’s façade program,” wrote Lynch recently in a Maine Association of Planners listserv discussion about successful downtown development projects. “Because our façade improvements have been so successful, business and property owners want us to start a second program.”
The improvements also enhance Rockland’s “brand” as a vibrant, interesting place — the kind of place where tourists and residents will be more likely to spend an evening out or to run errands for an afternoon. And the revitalization of first-floor façades will also help fill the second and third stories of Rockland’s downtown buildings with the kinds of small enterprises and households that value the enhanced social and cultural opportunities of a vibrant downtown.
Attractive investments
This kind of success is by no means unique to Rockland. In Waterville, for instance, façade improvements, arts festivals and other micro development initiatives helped encourage developers to take on the multi-million-dollar Hathaway Creative Center project. The Main Street program and the Hathaway project have a mutually beneficial relationship: both contribute to and benefit from the idea that downtown Waterville is an up-and-coming, dynamic place to live and work. Other programs help downtowns and Main Streets thrive from Eastport to Van Buren.
It is important to note that these public investments are exceedingly modest, compared with the expensive demands on infrastructure and public services from more conventional shopping centers, suburban subdivisions and industrial parks built on the outskirts of our towns and cities. The predominant forms of real estate development from the 1980s and 1990s, sometimes derided as “sprawl,” sucked away billions of taxpayer dollars for wider roads, expanded sewers and crowded suburban schools, and created unaccounted costs associated with air and water pollution and increased traffic congestion. Compared with those expenses, the shoestring budgets of downtown economic development programs are a tremendous bargain.
At a time when growth in general is hard to come by, what scant growth we can attract has to be as smart as possible, with minimal demands on public infrastructure and services and maximum positive impact on local economies.
Christian McNeil can be reached at christian@growsmartmaine.org.
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