Quick Stats Website Pages

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An essential part of a successful business recruitment program is making it easy for “walk-in” prospects to find the information they want about your downtown and its available business locations. Today, the first thing that these potential walk-ins probably do is conduct an information search on the Internet, looking at the websites of the municipality and local economic development organizations. Unfortunately, too many of these websites do not provide the information these business prospects need or they have it buried so many layers down that it is hard to find. The result is that many tenant prospects are turned off by their frustrating search experience and they then shift their attention to other communities where they can easily find the information they need.

DANTH, Inc.’s Quick Stats Website Pages can help your organization remedy this situation by:

  • Assembling the types of information downtown business prospects are most likely to look for, whether they are professional corporate site locators or small independent operators
  • Creating a single summary Quick Stats webpage where essential information points (e.g., population, income, office workers, parking, cinema patrons, traffic counts, etc.) are provided and can be quickly digested
  • Providing links on the summary Quick Stats page where the prospect can go to obtain more detailed information about a particular point
  • Providing types of useful information that goes beyond the usual census data and cannot be obtained easily elsewhere
  • Providing a “how to” guide for small independent operators
  • Formulating and providing your downtown’s business location value proposition.

You can view the Quick Stats Page we did for the Morristown Partnership here.

A Quick Stats project is affordable and provides a big bang for your buck. For more information, contact David Milder at 718-805-9507 or [email protected].

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Small Downtowns Succeed Not By Growing A Lot Bigger, But By Becoming A Lot Better

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Posted by N. David Milder

Introduction

My work, a few years ago, on two small towns with populations under 2,800 has reinforced my feeling that our understanding of what makes a downtown successful is dominated by a paradigm that, while suitable for large districts, just does not seem to be as applicable to small or medium-sized downtowns. I fear that attempts to impose that paradigm on smaller downtowns have led to many dreadful revitalization strategies and plans. In this article I will work toward formulating my view of what the paradigm for a successful small downtown might be, hoping this exercise will stimulate other economic and community development professionals to follow suit.

The Successful Large Downtown Paradigm

Successful large downtowns, according to my understanding of the dominant paradigm, which I described in my 1987 article on downtown crime, have the following characteristics (1):

  • High Multi-functionality. They are multi-functional with a mix of attractive retail shops, restaurants, bars, coffee houses, professional offices, corporate offices, government offices, hospitals, courts, rail and bus stations, hair and nail salons, gyms and spas, museums, cinemas, concert halls, theaters, public spaces, residences, hotels, residential buildings, etc.
  • High Density. These functions are clustered in a dense, compact area and a lot of the development is vertical
  • High Pedestrian Traffic. The multi-functionality sparks a lot of multi-purpose visits and pedestrian trips. The district’s density and compactness help make them comparatively short and easy
  • High Energy and Fast Pace. The density and wide choice of activity venues combined with the strong pedestrian flows, stimulates a sense of high activity and fast pace that at times is even deemed electric or exciting.

Trying to Apply It to a Small Downtown

Size is the defining difference between large and small downtowns. Since multi-functionality and density have almost definitional associations with size, they may be expected to be lower in smaller downtowns. Similarly, pedestrian traffic may be expected to be much lower in smaller downtowns because of reduced multi-functionality and density as well as probably smaller trade area populations. Levels of energy and pace can also be expected to be low in small downtown since they are dependent on multi-functionality, density and pedestrian traffic. However, saying all that leaves little or no basis for explaining why a small downtown is successful and not just small: it has, almost by definition, far less density, multi-functionality, pedestrian traffic, far less energy and a much slower pace that the largest downtowns. What is it then that makes a small downtown successful?  Applying or trying to tailor the large downtown paradigm to the small certainly does not seem to get anywhere meaningful.

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Crime Downtown: Does Anything Work?

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Editors’s note: The Downtown Curmudgeon is very happy to welcome Lawrence Houstoun as a guest columnist. Larry is well known for his two books on downtown BIDs as well as for his many articles on a wide variety of downtown subjects ranging from housing and office workers to public spaces and bicycle ridership. I think you will find his column on downtown crime — as is usual with his writings — thoughtful,  provocative, well written and worth reading. Without further ado, here’s Larry:

Crime Downtown

In the 1970’s, many of the  business centers of America’s older cities had reputations for widespread crime. The media–news as well as fiction– contributed greatly to the scary reputations. One evening TV news director was said to set priorities with this slogan—“If it bleeds, it leads”. As customers and businesses abandoned the traditional places to shop and run their businesses a great deal of commercial real estate was marked down and / or abandoned. Few believed that central business districts would ever recover. Long neglected buildings, dimly lighted blocks, empty stores—all contributed to the negative images of America’s downtowns.  Various remedies were suggested.

In reviewing the types of measures tried, this article focuses on business improvement districts (BIDs) which are functioning in 1500 downtowns in North America. Their mission is simply to strengthen economically the business prospects of private enterprises  operating in a shared environment. Business led boards of directors share the costs and set the priorities. At that time, no priority ranked higher than reduction of crime and fear of crime.

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So…Surprise! You have a lot of suburban creatives…

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Posted by N. David Milder

Introduction. Within the economic development community considerable attention has been focused on young, hip knowledge workers and artists. These young hipsters are part of what Richard Florida has termed the Creative Class. Nationally, they have been drawn in recent years to very dense urban areas that they have helped revitalize, from both residential and business perspectives. It is for these reasons that many economic development organization (EDO) leaders have based their revitalization strategies and business marketing programs on the attraction and growth of these “young creatives.”

However, Florida’s definition of the creative class is in terms of occupations, not age. The occupations Florida uses to define the creative class are from the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC):

  •  Super Creative Core: Computer & mathematical; life, physical & social science; architecture and engineering; education, training and library; arts, design, entertainment, sports, media
  •  Creative Professionals: Management occupations; business & financial operations; legal; healthcare practitioners & techs; high-end sales & sales management
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So You Don’t Have a Lot of Hip Young Professionals…

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Posted by N. David Milder

Introduction

For over a decade Richard Florida and Joel Kotkin have dueled over the proper way to analyze regional economic growth and their conflicting political and urban/ suburban preferences. They do agree, however, on one very basic and critical point: in today’s world, economic growth is very dependent on knowledge and geographically will tend to flow to areas where the knowledge workers cluster. (1)

Unfortunately, many within the economic development community have come to have a disproportionate amount of focus on and regard for one type of knowledge worker, the young hip urban professional. Too often communities feel unable to secure their economic futures because they have few young hip professionals or are led into futile attempts to attract them. Frequently overlooked are other assets that these young hipster deficient communities do have and that could be leveraged into economic growth.

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