The New Normal for Downtown Retailing: I. Introduction

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Across the board key Federal officials, renowned economists, and powerful business leaders agree that our Great Recession finally has bottomed out. The latest GDP data support this view. For downtown leaders this is a very appropriate time to ask: “What’s next?” Are we returning to the same challenges and opportunities downtowns faced prior to the recession? Or to conditions similar to those of the earlier parts of the decade? Or are we facing a “new normal”, with its own array …

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Apparently, The Recession Is Not Saving Movie Theater Attendance

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In past blog postings I have argued that movie theater attendance is being significantly eroded by the growing ease of watching movies at home, where — as a Pew survey showed – Americans now watch most of their movies.

But in the first three months of 2009 attendance jumped 13% over the previous year and observers in the news media were claiming that depressions and recessions induce higher movie theater attendance as folks are looking for affordable entertainment. In an April …

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An Audacious Small Town BID

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For over a year now, as a response to our current recession, I have been urging downtown organizations to focus on repositioning their districts for future growth and encouraging them to take on new financial activities.The Washington BID in Warren County, NJ, is a good example of a district organization that is doing this. Also, it is in a town, Washington Borough, with a small population of 7,000 people.The BID is borrowing money from a nearby community bank, Skylands, …

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Downtown Vacancies: Let’s Get Real

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A slightly different version of this article appeared as a Perspectives Column in the May 15, 2009 issue of the Downtown Idea Exchange

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Far too often, concern about the number of empty storefronts in a downtown reaches distorted and needlessly injurious proportions. This was true before our current recession and now it threatens to become an even more serious problem. It’s critical for downtown leaders to view the vacancy rate issue from a realistic perspective.

For example, a few years ago, when …

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Eateries That Help Downtown Movie Theaters

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The Cinemart Movieplex in Forest Hills, NY, benefits from being next to a legendary “sweet shop” with homemade ice cream and an old soda fountain on one side and a cafe that is popular with outdoor dinners on the other.

This kind of “context” enables downtown movie theaters to survive. It makes going to the movies a special event, quite different from watching a flick at home. There is a brief slide show below that shows the movie house, Eddie’s …

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