“Our Future Main Streets: Inclusion, Flexibility, Experience” (12/14) Recap + Video
As the Covid-19 pandemic has forced cities to open their streets into laboratories of shared use, what have we learned about the Main Streets that form the downtown cores of our communities? What is the future of the storefront, sidewalks, and public spaces in these small, urban ecosystems? How are ground floor occupancy models shifting towards experiential programing and community spaces? How can we design our Main Streets as more inclusive places that nurture a diverse business ownership?
In this webinar we heard from a range of folks involved in the design of our future Main Streets, including Lindsey Wallace of Main Street America; Zoraida Lopez-Diago of the Scenic Hudson’s River Cities program; Mayor Steve Noble of Kingston, NY; Rusul Alrubail of the Parkdale Centre for Innovation in Toronto; and Kristin Diotte, Director of Planning, Zoning and Community Development in Schenectady, NY.
As a companion piece to this webinar, Future of Small Cities Institute founder Reif Larsen has written a primer on the future of Main Street in The Globe & Mail, "The Death and Life of Small North American Cities." Some of our speakers appear in the article! (Trouble accessing article? PDF here.)
We first heard from LINDSEY WALLACE of Main Street America, a nonprofit that is focused on sustainable, community-lead, place-based economic development with 1,600 member communities across the country. Main Street America's comprehensive approach to economic development focuses on four points: economic vitality, design, organization, and promotion. Ms. Wallace pointed to a few national trends, including the fact that 4.54 million new businesses were opened in the U.S., an increase of 56% from 2019. The rise of the somewhat problematic term "Covidpreneur"—highlights the uneven recovery of the economy: some people have taken advantage of new opportunities, while many have lacked the capacity to pivot or adapt to these challenging times.
On Main Streets, we are seeing that times of unrest also tend to be times of innovation and entrepreneurship.
One of Main Street America's areas of focus is on the place-based design of Main Street corridors.
In some small cities, we are seeing more affordable properties along Main Streets, though this is not true everywhere. "Despite the rise in e-commerce, the consumer mindset throughout the pandemic has been to support local and small businesses," said Ms. Wallace.
In the Hudson Valley we have seen a rise of outside home buyers and rampant real estate speculation, but Ms. Wallace pointed to research nationally that over 70% of local businesses were started by community residents not from outside recruitment activities. She stressed that small cities need to have a comprehensive approach to developing their Main Streets, mindful of incentives and relocation grants, housing shifts, office shifts, and adjacent support services, like shipping, printing. There was a lot of cross talk in the Q&A stream about the role that AirBnB plays in Main Streets and small cities.
Ms. Wallace also touched upon place-based considerations and how to design the built environment to support Main Street development. She mentioned parklets, open streets, pop-up shops, colocation of businesses and third place development. To support these efforts, Main Street America has produced a series on Promoting Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Commercial District Design for AARP's Livable Communities.
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Scenes from the newly opened Pershing Avenue Neighborhood Farm in Poughkeepsie.
ZORAIDA LOPEZ-DIAGO, director of Scenic Hudson's River Cities Program, began with a question:
Is there more than one Main Street in the community where you work or live? Which one do you most frequent? Why is that?
The River Cities program starts with the premise that an equitable, sustainable, healthy, and livable Hudson Valley must include cities that reflect the voices and visions of their residents. "We wanted to learn more [from residents] about their concerns and desires for the communities and their concerns and desires for their families and the features of the cities that they loved." said Ms. Lopez-Diago. "We heard a few things. We heard about the need for clean, healthy food. We heard about the need for good jobs, and the needs for safe neighborhoods close to open space."
Ms. Lopez-Diago highlighted their recent work on Pershing Avenue in Poughkeepsie, a block that was formerly red-lined, where Scenic Hudson recently helped to launch the first commercially sanctioned urban farm in Poughkeepsie. Community groups and citizens can lease plots for free.
Mapping street-tree absence in Downtown Newburgh, NY.
How we can put the voices and the visions of longtime residents in these communities at the forefront of these conversations? And how can we not only have them at the table, but how can we have them at the head of the table to really help frame decisions and to frame the paths forward in our work?
Over in Newburgh, Scenic Hudson engaged with a number of community organizations and heard a continued desire for the city to grow its street-tree canopy. Working with a range of partners, Scenic Hudson created a series of maps that overlaid street-tree absence over housing density and underserved neighborhoods, allowing them to pinpoint a few target blocks where they would focus their work.
Ms. Lopez-Diago also touched upon the historical factors in their work in Newburgh, including a legacy ofurban renewalin the city and the entrenched realities of racist displacement of black and brown citizens.
Broadway (left) and Liberty Street (right)
In Newburgh, there is also a tale of two Main Streets: Broadway and Liberty Street. Ms Lopez-Diago demonstrated how a simple literature search showed that the vernacular around the two corridors was completely divergent. For Broadway, the article headline read "Is Newburgh really the worst place in New York State?" while for Liberty Street, the headline was "Liberty Street ups the ante on drinking, dining, and shopping options."
What happens when you don't reconcile with the [historically racist] dynamics that have been created? And what can we do to kind of help shrink the gap [between these neighborhoods] that sometimes feels like it's increasing all the time?
When planting street trees Scenic Hudson's placed a critical emphasis on local community engagement and involving each resident of a block in process in order to promote longterm community buy-in for the project. This took time and energy, but their investment in people paid off. When the street trees were being planted, one local neighbor had a barbecue, another neighbor was playing music, and another provided cake. Scenic Hudson and their partners are also offering ongoing programming around how to care for their streets trees to cultivate ownership—this is not a one-and-done project.
It's really important when we think about Main Streets and the streets off of Main Streets, how do we work side by side communities, how do we engage not only business owners or homeowners but how do we also engage renters in these neighborhoods?
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STEVE NOBLE, Mayor of Kingston, NY, talked about how while Kingston has only 24,000 residents, it is the only city in Ulster County, and so draw upon the 180,000 rural, semi-rural, and small-town residents to utilize the city's amenities and streetscapes.
Like many communities in New York, we've suffered from a lot of changes in our socio-economic demographics—our population has about 19% below the poverty line. We've struggled as city, but we're working to change that by making investments in areas that have not seen investments before.
When it comes to revitalizing downtowns, Kingston has a particular challenge as it must contend with three distinct urban core areas in a relatively small area—Uptown, Midtown (Broadway), and the Rondout, each with its own set of needs, flavors, and histories. "We as a city believe that to survive, we need a lively and sustainable city, one that cares deeply about its residents, and one that does everything that it can to stop the displacement of residents both now and in the future," said Mayor Noble.
Mayor Noble concentrated his presentation on Midtown Kingston, the area with the highest poverty rates, the lowest access to quality education, and the fewest jobs available to residents. It's also the area where many black residents were displaced to following Urban Renewal campaigns around the city.
He highlighted Energy Square, a new sustainable, affordable housing project built in partnership with RUPCO at the sight of a former bowling alley. The building offers 57 affordable units as well a mixed-used ground floor space occupied by the Center for Creative Education, an arts-based organization that supports after school and enrichment programs for local youth.
Kingston was one of the first cities in New York State to receive a Downtown Revitalization Initiative Grant for which they were awarded $10 million, to which the city added another $70 million from both private and public funding sources. This money went to everything from streetscape improvement to new housing and business ventures.
"We realized that in order to be successful, we needed to really plan carefully for our future," said Mayor Noble. The city has created an Open Space Plan, a Climate Action Plan, and a Rezoning plan using form-based code. Outdated zoning laws, an often overlooked area, have historically segregated cities and held back a lot of communities from moving forward with mixed-use development.
As part of a major streetscape project, the City of Kingston put Broadway on a “road diet and installed bike lanes.
The city has also taken a deep look at its infrastructure projects, and in particular has invested in the Broadway corridor, a four-lane road originally designed, in Mayor Noble's words, "to divide the community." The city improved green space, calmed traffic along the corridor by putting putting Broadway on a "road diet," and added bike lanes as part of its ambitious Kingston Greenline project.
"In the end, we realized that in order for us to be successful in any of this work, we needed to be able to do this with the community. We wanted to be able to bring our community together both virtually, but also in person when we can," said Mayor Noble. The city created a robust website called Engage Kingston, an exercise in civic transparency designed to enable residents to give critical feedback on community projects and make efforts to give voice to those who have traditionally not taken part in this kind of dialogue.
That's really I think the key part of what we've tried to do—make investments in a city and in in areas that have traditionally been under invested. This is not in our historic district, this is not in our waterfront. This is where most of our community that words displaced 50 years ago. This is the place where we are investing our future.
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The Parkdale Centre for Innovation at 1464 Queen Street West
RUSUL ALRUBAIL, Founder and Executive Director of Parkdale Centre for Innovation in Toronto, Canada, described the needs she identified in her community when she started the Centre five years ago. "We are at risk of leaving behind generations of people from the innovation economy," she said. Ms Alrubail launched the Centre in 2017 to model what inclusive innovation should look like.
Parkdale is the kind of distressed neighborhood we see across the world—a fifteen-minute streetcar ride from downtown Toronto, Parkdale is one of the most underrepresented neighborhoods in the Greater Toronto Area, with 38% living in the lower income bracket. The neighborhood is composed largely of immigrants and refugees, with many unhoused individuals as well.
When I launched my own business, I went to an incubator called Mars, [but] there were very few people who looked like me, being a woman of color—and it often feels very very isolating and so people come to the Parkdale because they're looking for that sense of connection and work.
Ms. Alrubail described how one of the biggest gaps in support is for entrepreneurs—especially women entrepreneurs—in the early stage of their business. "At Parkdale, we provide incubation programming, acceleration, mentorship and access to an ecosystem of engaged partners," she said. "This is so important when you're just starting out."
Parkdale offers mentorship, incubation, and an ecosystem of engaged partners to early-stage entrepreneurs.
The physical location of the Centre, on the corner of a busy Main Street, is a critical part of the organization's success. The Centre is functioning like another ground floor space, while offering a suite of valuable community and business support structors.
Over the last five years, the Parkdale Center has assisted 250 entrepreneurs and over 3000 community members and organizations in the Greater Toronto Area—30% come from Parkdale itself. The Centre also offers a location-based marketplace on site that helps small retail businesses sell their goods as well as a kids program for young innovators.
We often get asked how do you diversify entrepreneurs? I think one of the answers is that [our Centre] is women led, and we all look like the people that we support. We are close to the communities that we support.
Parkdale Centre's new forthcoming platform "CanadaInnovates.org"
The Covid-19 pandemic has been felt acutely in neighborhoods like Parkdale, which often lack safety nets for small businesses and entrepeneurs. In response to the pandemic, the Centre started the 1464 Project, which focuses on local business recovery and rebuilding efforts. "The project helps articulate a unified and longterm effort that is spearheaded in collaboration with committed stakeholders across the vertical and socioeconomic ecosystem," said Ms Alrubail. "A system that supports the local and Main Street economy."
Parkdale Centre also developed an online platform during the Covid-19 pandemic to support local entrepreneurship in priority neighborhoods called CanadaInnovates.org—the pilot is launching in the new year. The platform will take the Centre's local programming and offer it to other underrepresented areas in Canada. "This has always been a critical part of our mission," said Ms. Alrubail. "To extend our mandate beyond our local neighborhoods, to Canada and beyond."
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Schenectady streets at the turn of the 20th century & in the 1950s, showing the shift towards cars, away from pedestrian culture.
KRISTIN DIOTTE, Director of Planning, Zoning, and Community Development for the City of Schenectady, gave us a wide ranging portrait of the city's history of manufacturing, urban renewal, and now conscious, inclusive redevelopment not just in the downtown corridor, but in the surrounding neighborhoods as well.
She began by showing us a before and after photograph of how much Main Streets changed over the course of the 20th century, away from pedestrian culture to the automobile as the dominate force in the landscape.
My interest in looking at this from an urban planning perspective is how do we increase the access between these different main streets and urban centers? We know that investing in quality of life, mobility, and public space are known generators of economic and social capital.
At one time Schenectady was a major manufacturing hub, with over 95,000 residents in the 1930s. During WWII, GE had over 30,000 employees in the citythat "lights and hauls the world." But in the latter half of the 20th century, the shrinking of the city's major manufacturing industries led to the decline of about a third of the city's population, deteriorating Main Streets, and the closing of many storefronts.
How does one begin to repair this urban fabric? Ms. Diotte pointed to railway underpasses as one area where the city has made an effort to revitalize dormant corridors.
We've been looking at a way to reactivate these spaces and reclaim them as as places that could actually connect these disparate parts of the city, utilizing immersive technology and storytelling to bring light in to these spaces and reconnect them to some of the histories in Schenectady that aren't often represented.
Ms. Diotte showed us some of the red-lining maps of Schenectady that divided up the city based on race and class, and which were used to justify mass demolitions in the city, including the ill-conceived Town of Tomorrow project near City Hall, which resulted in 22 square blocks being leveled without ever being redeveloped or rebuilt—its absence can still be felt in the downtown today.
Ms. Diotte also discussed the ethnic neighborhoods that these urban renewal projects razed: "These neighborhoods tended to be more self-reliant because there's an inter-dependent social network that really supported a livelihood and the quality of life... it's a kind of cooperative energy to the way that business was done. You can still see that in some of our neighborhoods," she said. " But at the same it's a challenge because a lot of these areas were disinvested in so much that it really takes a lot of thoughtfulness to stabilize the fabric that's left."
Proctor's Theater was part of a larger downtown redevelopment spearheaded by Metroplex.
Things begin to turn around in Downtown Schenectady in the early 2000s with the formation of Metroplex, a development authority which utilized county sales tax to invest in revitalizing the downtown core—a unique and highly productive economic development arrangement for the city. Metroplex's work has been particularly evident along State Street. This coincided with the $40 million redevelopment of Proctor's Theater, which provided a cultural anchor for Schenectady's State Street an in turn led to more storefront, commercial, and residential redevelopment.
Beyond State Street and the downtown corridor, Ms. Diotte brought our attention to some of the peripheral neighborhoods which have their own series of corridors. Albany and Crane Streets flow into the downtown, while Main and Craig Streets connect these two neighborhoods. Many of these streets are marked by vacant spaces; very few are pedestrian friendly and often feature high-speed car traffic. Despite this, these corridors are where many residents still get their amenities.
The Main-Craig Street connective corridor is an example of often-overlooked "Secondary Main Streets" that surround small cities.
The city completed a Complete Streets Linkage Study to look at reactivating these corridors. "So the idea was to really look at this transverse connection and engage communities in identifying the effective ways that these corridors could be reinvested in, given all the disinvestment that happened for a number of decades and left things in a place of high need," said Ms. Diotte.
The city held a series of design workshops and events before anything was actually designed to get feedback around what the community's highest priorities were and to understand how people were actually using the street and the kind of improvements they would like to see.
"In an area where you have 40% of households that don't own a vehicle, prioritizing cars becomes less important. You have to think about ways to look at bike lanes, more green space and street trees," said Ms. Diotte.
Along Crane Street, the city has worked with a NY Main Street grant to do facade improvements in a neighborhood that has traditionally struggled with cycles of disinvestment. A large streetscape redesign at the intersection of Crane and Main is also proposed, to be paid for with an innovative mixture of state funding and a Community Development Block Grant—harnessing diverse funding sources in a hallmark of small city development.
We're thinking about how to create upward mobility in our communities and exploring models for cooperative ownership and community wealth. This type of reactivation relies on ideas coming forward from residents in the communities.
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In the conversation with the group of panelists we touched upon both how to bridge the often divergent needs between the various types of Main Streets that we see in our communities and also highlighted some of the more innovative storefront and ground floor spaces and the ways that storefronts are utilizing sidewalks as a threshold space.
You can download the Q&A Stream here.
To see the full video of the event, click on the video image below.