SOME THOUGHTS ON HOW TO STRENGTHEN DOWNTOWN PUBLIC SPACES IN OUR SMALLER COMMUNITIES

Posted on May 15, 2018 by DANTH

By N. David Milder

Introduction

For about 10 years now, I have been advocating in my blog, presentations at conferences and recommendations to clients that vibrant parks and public spaces are more critical than ever to the success of downtowns in our smaller communities. However, more often than I’d like, I’ve had some pushback from folks who argue one or more of the following points:

They already have a public space, and nobody uses it. It’s deader than a doornail, more of a town liability than an asset.
They’re a small town and their market area has a small population, so their downtown does not attract a lot of visitors who might use a public space.
Their municipalities have limited finances, so it is extremely difficult to build a new public space or to significantly improve an existing one. Insufficient financial resources also mean that it is problematic to properly maintain existing public spaces or to provide the staff needed to facilitate the use of potential attractions, e.g., ping pong tables, boules courts, etc.

This article is premised on the belief that there are solutions to all of the above problems and that by incorporating knowledge of them into the designs and management of small-town public spaces, these spaces can be turned into successful and important downtown assets.

Setting Viable Aspirations for Use Levels

At the outset, it is essential to establish realistic expectations. These small-town spaces will never have the visitation levels of major urban public spaces where, for example, Bryant Park in New York can attract over six million visits annually and its neighbor, Times Square, draws over 300,000 pedestrians per day. On the other hand, if meaningfully activated, on days when they are not serving as the venues for events, the small-town parks and public spaces still can attract a significant number of visitors. Annual visitation levels for these small-town venues of 100,000+ are certainly possible and counts as high as 300,000/year have been achieved (1).

Town Green on a summer midweek afternoon, Guilford, CT

At most points in time during the weekday the small-town public spaces may have very few to no users, but this also even happens in large urban parks that still appear well activated, e.g., the Overlook section of Forest Park here in Kew Gardens, NY. However, at several times during the day — my observations suggest lunchtime, after school, and possibly 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. are the most likely times — a successful small-town public space can have a good chance of attracting platoons of users, some of whom are there with different subgroups, while others are alone. Altogether they may number no more than five or six people at a specific point in time, though their numbers on occasion can be substantially higher, e.g., 50 to 60.

Visitors Attract More Visitors. The presence of one small group of visitors helps attract other visitors, who may come at a later point in time. The existing visitors help validate in the eyes of passersby that the park has something worthwhile to see or do, encouraging them to visit as well. (This assumes the visitors’ behaviors are orderly).

To my knowledge, there, unfortunately, are no studies that show how many users a public space needs to project an image of being active, popular and worthy of a visit. But, my sense is that potential visitors make their own subjective judgments about visiting a park based substantially on who they see there and what they are doing.

Small town and market area sparse populations do not have to mean dead, inert and underutilized parks and public spaces if, on non-event days, those spaces attract several platoons of visitors at several times of the day.

Too Often, Public Spaces in Smaller Communities Focus on Just One of Three Necessary Functions

My field observations have led me to conclude that these venues can perform three important and essential functions:

Provide visitors with a green refuge for resting in peace and quiet.
Provide infrastructure assets and programs that stimulate visitors to engage in activities (i.e., to “perform”), many of which also will entertain people watchers visiting the venue. Some examples of such assets are ping pong tables, boules courts, model boat ponds, “reading rooms,” carrousel rides, ice rinks, chess tables, swings, spray pads, square dances, dance contests, etc.
To present events visitors can attend such as movies, plays, concerts, lectures, dance recitals, etc. Event attendees are almost always passive audiences (2).

The Pocket Park in downtown Washington Borough, NJ. This 4,000 SF park is the location for the town’s Farmers Market and several other events, but it has little appropriate seating or shade and no opportunities for visitors to engage in any activities. Its sole function is to serve as a location for events.

A Primary Focus on Events Limits a Public Space’s Potential Magnetism. One of the major problems of underutilized small-town public spaces is that their design and operation are focused on their being an events venue (see photo above). Such a narrow focus, of course, means that the space was probably easier to design. Operational costs are also probably minimized since the venue’s events are probably produced and funded by non-municipal organizations. Programming is offloaded. However, the number of their probable events means that the venue will be inactive on the vast majority of days in any year. For example, if the venue had a relatively robust schedule of events on fifty days, it still would have no events and be inactive on 84% of the days in a year.

The Critical Need for Appropriate Seating and Shade. Another major problem with many of the underutilized spaces is that they fail to provide the prime requisite for adequately performing the green refuge function: adequate seating and shade. If these spaces are to be sticky and keep visitors for any meaningful length of time, there must be comfortable seating for them. Tables and chairs, of course, also encourage visitors to eat their lunches and snacks in the public space. Food consumption and sale is a key to having a successful public space, no matter the size of the downtown or the community.

Too many of the small-town public spaces I’ve visited in the past 10 years lack such seating in adequately shaded areas. Even some of my favorites such as Mitchell Park in Greenport, NY and Central Park Plaza in Valparaiso, IN. (Happily, the situation in Valparaiso was corrected in the park’s second phase of development). On hot days, that can strongly discourage visits from anyone who is not a sun worshiper. What has been most surprising, is that even some well-known designers of public spaces have been among those failing to include anything approaching adequate shade in some of their project designs.

People Need Reasons to Visit Public Spaces on Non-Event Days. Those that provide infrastructure assets and programs that stimulate visitors to engage in activities give people the strongest reasons to visit. They substantially widen the variety of things visitors can do. Many of these attractions are there all day and every day, and they are not scheduled. These attractions also allow visitors to be active participants in the venue’s activities, rather than being just passive audience members. However, public spaces in smaller communities often lack such attractions. They have event programming, but not what may be called infrastructure programming. If a ping pong tables or chess tables were there, visitors might be stimulated to use them. Most often such attractions are not there reportedly because of a lack of financial resources to cover the costs of creating such attractions as well as the costs of the staff that would be needed to operate them, e.g., a carousel, an ice rink, a reading room, a bocce court. However, I suspect that the designers of these public spaces and/or the people who now manage them never considered providing such attractions and were unaware of their power and importance. Rectifying this situation may be the best way to strengthen downtown public spaces in our smaller communities.

A Good Location is Necessary, but Insufficient for Success, and, Importantly, a Location Can Be Improved

The location of a public space is extremely important for a number of reasons. Its visibility to downtown visitors drawn by its other attractions – retailers, eateries, services, government offices, entertainment venues, etc. — will influence how many visitors it will attract. Also, as Olmsted proved long ago about Central Park, and as more recent researchers have proved about other successful parks, parks can have positive impacts on real estate values on proximate properties and impact the desirability of commercial spaces. Where a park is located will determine what it can potentially impact. Far too many small and medium-sized downtowns have located public spaces where they are invisible to most downtown users and where they have a low potential for having significant positive economic impacts. Instead, they should be located, if possible, in what otherwise would be considered as worthy development sites, those that already benefit from significant flows of pedestrian and vehicle traffic and are proximate to other downtown assets.

The Center Street Alley in downtown Rutland, VT is a troubled public space because it is surrounded by buildings and has no visibility from surrounding streets.

In downtown Downers Grove, IL, Fishel Park, and Its Veterans Memorial Bandstand are not visible from Main Street.

Very importantly, a public space’s location also will determine the pool of people who are its most likely users. In urban areas that pool is most easily defined by:

The people who live, work and study with a five-minute walk of the venue (about ¼ of a mile.
Those who visit this area to shop or complete medical or business chores or are staying overnight in its hotels.
Those who are walking or driving by the public space’s location.

In suburban and rural areas, whether we like it or not, the auto plays a much larger role in personal trips than walking. Based on my field observations, I would suggest that in suburban and rural small downtowns, the most likely users of their public spaces are to be found within a five-minute drive of the venue. Within that travel shed, I hypothesize that the propensity to visit the venue has the following hierarchy:

Those who are within an easy five-minute walk, say .25 miles.
Those with a doable ten-minute walk, say .50 miles.
Finally, those who are more than .50 miles from the venue, but within a five-minute drive of the public space.

Learning from Bryant Park. This park in Manhattan has been widely acclaimed for its successful revitalization and popularity after decades of crime induced decline. Though it is located in the largest and strongest CBD in the USA, it’s history is relevant to all public spaces, be they in small rural towns or in large, dense urban areas. It demonstrates a number of very important points related to activating public spaces.

Its Location Gives It Great Visibility and Access to a Huge Pool of Potential Visitors. The blocks surrounding this park are densely filled with high rise office buildings and a large number have ground floor storefronts. Its surrounding streets are jammed with cars and buses. The park’s management estimates that, on an average weekday, about 250,000 people walk by on the sidewalks of the four streets that surround the park; a significant number are probably tourists.

About 78,000 people are employed within a 5-minute walk just from the park’s 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas entrance. Also, there are 29 hotels within 0.2 miles of the park. Times Square is within a three-minute walk, while the Grand Central Terminal, Macy’s and Rockefeller Center are both within roughly six-minute walks. This means that the park does not have to bring people into the area and its management can completely focus on the essential task of capturing users from the vast number of people who already are in the area.

A Strong Location Provides a Pool of Essential Potential Users, but the Park’s “Products” Are What Gets Them to Actually Make Visits. Bryant Park’s strong location is what gives Bryant Park access to a very large number of potential users, but it alone could not assure its success. Consider that the flow of pedestrian traffic near the park during its troubled days was probably lower than today’s, but still relatively very strong when compared to downtown locations in other cities. What turned the tide was not the new and renovated office buildings and hotels that have appeared since 1992 — they came after the park became a success– but what was happening inside the park, the new “products” it offered and how they were “packaged.” That’s what drew all the visitors into the park and encouraged them to stay. A superb location was not enough by itself, but it is still damned important.

A Location’s Pool of Potential Users Can Be Made Larger. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, before Bryant Park entered its period of steep decline, the area surrounding it was relatively healthy and successful. The park’s decline made the leasing of office and retail spaces proximate to it far more difficult. Pedestrians intentionally walked on the other sides of the streets from the park or avoided the entire area. The park’s resurgence rectified that situation. Pedestrians returned in abundance to its surrounding sidewalks. New office building and hotel projects wanted to not only be located close to it, but to claim the park’s name in their addresses. For example, the Bank of America Tower proudly proclaims its address to be One Bryant Park. However, the overall success of the commercial spaces near the park as well as the increasing strength of the Midtown CBD also had their own positive impacts on the size and composition of the park’s user pool (3).

The implications of this point can be very important for the success of small-town public spaces – redevelopment and the recruitment of residents, businesses, and nonprofits near these venues can significantly strengthen their pools of potential visitors.

Likely Pools of Potential Users in Smaller Towns.

As with Bryant Park, these pools will most likely be defined by the people who live, work, study and visit within a surrounding area, but that area will be more car trip defined than the densely urban Bryant Park’s. These pools will obviously also have far fewer potential visitors than Bryant Park’s, but then their expected user levels are also far lower.

Residents. Many smaller towns have sparse residential development in their downtown/Main Street areas, though more and more are rightly trying to correct that situation. For example, I did a deep dive into successful public spaces in three smaller communities a few years ago (see the above table). Based on my observations and discussions with local officials, I concluded that none had a significant number of downtown residents, though Somerville was developing a substantial number of new units. This means that most residents probably live beyond an easy walking distance (0.25 miles) of any downtown public space or even a doable walking distance of 0.50 miles. Another challenge is posed by the fact that most adult residents who are in the workforce will be at their employment locations during the daytimes on all five weekdays. For example, here are the percentages of working residents whose jobs are located out of town in three smaller communities:

Valparaiso IN, population 32,000: 64.4%
Somerville, NJ, population 12,100: 93.6%
Greenport, NY, population 2,200: 80.3%.

Events held in a downtown public space on weekends are likely to attract the most adult residents because they are then most likely to be in-town and have free leisure time.

The types of residents who are most likely to remain in town on weekdays are retired seniors (the fastest growing age cohort in rural areas), school children, and at-home parents with pre-school children. Well designed and managed public spaces in smaller communities would do well to offer attractions that appeal to each of these demographic groups, who are likely to visit them at different times of the day.

As Andy Manshel argues so forcefully, in his upcoming book “What Works: Placemaking in Bryant Park. Revitalizing Cities, Towns and Public Spaces,( Rutgers University Press, Spring 2019),” finding successful attractions is largely a matter of trial and error, with much tweaking and recalibration, though greenery, suitable seating and easy access to food and drink are essentials. Below are some ideas about attractions that might be aimed at seniors, school-age children and parents with preschool children. They are offered as some possibilities that might be tried and tested while recognizing that there are probably many other possibilities that might be discovered by talking to members of these three potential park-user market segments:

Seniors: exercise paths for walkers, bicyclists and bird watchers; exercise classes; chess/checkers tables; a “reading room”; a putting green. Seniors are likely to appear in the morning and midday hours.

School-Age Children: playground equipment; bike paths; skateboard areas; soccer/football/baseball field; basketball courts; outdoor hockey rinks; summer camps; after-school supervised activity programs. School children are likely to appear after 3:00 p.m.

Childcare program in Memorial Park, Maplewood, NJ

Parents with Preschool Children: They have a long-demonstrated the need to get out of the house and socialize with their peers. For example, in Maplewood, NJ, and Englewood, NJ, they have turned tea shops and coffee houses into places for them to congregate. In NYC, this often happens in its parks, where the parents’ young children can also be safely entertained. For example, on any nice day just take a walk around any of the playground areas in Manhattan’s Central Park (where there may be nannies instead of moms) or in Forest Park here in Queens. Appropriate seating, amply shaded, and clean accessible toilets encourage the emergence of such social clustering. These parents usually will show up from late morning to late afternoon.

Given that the numbers of potential daytime residential users are likely to be relatively moderate, a downtown public space would do well to cultivate a structured corps of potential repeat users. This can be encouraged if downtown development officials take “location enhancement” steps such as, but not limited to, these:

Develop a community center in or adjacent to the public space that has daytime programs for seniors, kids after school and for parents with preschool children.
Locate senior housing within a very short walk of the public space that does not entail a need to cross a street. The attractions in the public space can also serve as a development incentive for such projects.
Invite any nonprofit that provides after-school programs for kids to use the public space.
Invite nonprofits that have summer day camp programs to use the public space.
If the public space has the needed playing fields, invite youth sports leagues to play on them.
Attract a coffee shop or tea house that can attract parents with preschool children to a location adjacent to the public space.

It is also helpful to avoid a kind of downtown revitalization snobbery. Chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks are often scorned by downtown activists, but in smaller downtowns, they are regularly strong magnets that attract the available daytime residential population segments. For example:

In Gering, NE, the downtown’s McDonald’s is its strongest customer traffic generator. It reported having consistent waves of seniors who are customers in the mid-morning and school children without adult supervision coming in after 3:00 p.m.
In Englewood, NJ, the downtown manager reported, back in the early 2000s, that the downtown’s Starbucks attracted a consistent group of moms with pre-school children in the early afternoons.

Encouraging their opening near a smaller town downtown public space should not be dismissed out-of-hand. Of course, independents that can perform the same functions should be also courted.

The Critical Downtown Workforce. Development density in smaller community downtowns is almost always the result of the agglomeration of businesses. This means that their downtown’s critical daytime population has a lot of people who work in or near the downtown. A very interesting research project done by Ryan and Jin of communities in Wisconsin shows just how significant are the numbers of workers who are located within acceptable walking distances and easy driving times of the centers of small downtowns (4). The above table provides Ryan-Jin data on four groups of smaller towns categorized by ranges of population size: 1,000 to 2,500; 2,500 to 5,000; 5,000 to 10,000, and 10,000 to 25,000. The top four rows of data show the number of towns in each category, the number of people employed within 0.25 miles of the downtown’s center, the number of people employed within 0.25 miles, 0.50 miles and 1-mile of the downtowns’ centers.

Morristown, NJ, has more people who work there than live there. Many visit The Green at lunchtime.

In a seminal article, Larry Houstoun’s analysis of data from the first ICSC study of office workers showed that they basically averaged trips that lasted 9-minutes to and from their lunchtime destinations (5). That trip time included time spent getting out of their buildings and then the time needed to walk from their building to their destination (and vice versa). To bring the Ryan and Jin data more, if not fully, in line with Houstoun’s findings, I have translated those data into downtown employees who have an easy walk to its center, those who have a doable walk to its center, and those who are located beyond a doable walk, but still within an easy drive of the center. I have included the “easy drive” category because my projects in many suburban and rural communities – e.g., Englewood, NJ, Gering, NE, Sherwood, WI –have shown that their downtowns attract a lot of people who are within a 5-minute drive of their downtowns during weekdays.

Even the 143 towns with populations between 1,000 and 2,500 have significant daytime workforces averaging:

400, who are within easy walks of any public space located near the center of their downtowns.
354 who are within a doable 5 to 10-minute walk of such a public space
406 who are beyond a 10-minute walk, but within a 5-minute drive of such a space (and who probably need another four or five minutes to get to and from their cars)

Among these smallest towns, the average workforce pool of potential users totals 1,160. The larger small towns, of course, have larger workforce pools of potential users.

Even though they are likely to be very proximate to the public space, converting them into actual visitors is very challenging simply because most of the time they are in the vicinity, they are busy working. Overwhelmingly, they are most likely to visit during their lunch breaks in the 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. time period. They will need to eat their lunches on their visits – indeed, if the public space is an attractive place to eat lunch, it will attract more of their visits, so they can eat there. This means that for the small town public spaces to capture significant amounts of workforce visits, it should have:

Quality food vendors in or adjacent to the space. They may be restaurants that do take out, fast food eateries, delis, food trucks, food carts, or kiosks. Whatever they are, they need to provide quality products at affordable prices. A public space in a good location will either have such food vendors nearby or be able to recruit them. But a public space poorly located in a fringe or low traffic area will neither have them nor be able to recruit them.
Movable seating and tables in the space where the workers can enjoyably and comfortably eat their lunches.

The workforce users of the public space can be critical pump primers for attracting additional users. Other downtown visitors, seeing them in the public space, may also be lured into visiting it and perhaps also easting their lunches there.

Tourism. Yes, tourism can provide some small town public spaces with a significant number of visitors. For example, Greenport, NY, only has a total of 2,200 year-round residents, who have relatively modest annual incomes. and a daytime downtown workforce of 399, but its Mitchell Park attracts over 300,000 visitors annually. – day trippers from the county and beyond, second homeowners, overnight visitors at its hotels, B&Bs and marina as well as travelers passing through to use its ferries to get to Shelter Island, the Hamptons and the casinos in CT (6). Public space managers in small communities with a strong tourist flow should definitely think about ways to attract them.

That said, care should be taken to assure that the attractions the park/public space offers to attract tourists do not conflict with the attitudes and preferences of local residents. Strong, attractive parks/public spaces are usually important cornerstones of a community’s Central Social District. Nothing should be done to jeopardize that role. Indeed, strong park attractions aimed at local residents probably will also please many tourists.

Still, most smaller rural and suburban communities that I’ve visited do not have significant tourist flows, though their leaders may want to attract more out-of-towners. The focus then should be on local residents and folks who have jobs located in the community. If that is done well, then out-of-town visitors also may be attracted.

Strategically Important: Attractions That Do Not Require Much, if Any, Staff to Function

As Andrew Dane and I have written, there is a large financial toolbox available that small town leaders can use to create attractive public spaces (7). In these smaller towns, substantial financial support from the municipality definitely will be needed and essential for winning outside funding and the use of such important financial tools as tax increment financing. It probably will also be necessary to assure proper maintenance, though responsibility for programming may be given to a non-profit organization.

Recent reports suggest that parks and public spaces are now attracting increased support from philanthropic organizations and wealthy private donors (8). In Valparaiso, IN, for example, a local family recently contributed $3 million for the construction of Phase II of the downtown’s Grand Central Plaza Park.

Strategically, I would argue that the most pivotal challenge for smaller town public spaces is how to create and maintain attractions that stimulate visitors to engage in various types of activities, e.g. eating lunch or a snack, play chess or ping pong, birdwatch, ride a swing, read a magazine or book, etc. The opportunities to engage in such activities are essential if more visitors are to be attracted on non-event days.

For those concerned about how to finance the creation of these attractions and the staff then needed to operate them, there are several possible responses. First, select attractions that are relatively affordable to create and that do not require a lot of staff time, if any, to be operational. Moveable seating and tables, so visitors can eat lunches and snacks, need not be expensive to create and require no staff time to supervise. The same for climbing rocks, adult or children’s swings and chess tables. Spray pads, popular across the nation, may need a little staff time to turn them on and off. (See photos below). These examples are not exhaustive. There are other possibilities.

Some attractions that small town parks and public spaces can have that are relatively affordable to create and do not require much staff, if any, to operate: climbing racks; spray pad; adult swings and chess/checkers tables.

Other attractions may be more expensive to implement and require staff to operate, e.g., a carousel or ice rink. Their operational costs can be covered by sponsorships and user fees. It probably will take some time to attract sponsors and meaningful numbers of users.

Finally, if paying for needed staff is a problem, then perhaps volunteers can be mobilized. Of course, the reliability of volunteers can be a problem. Involving civic groups – e.g., garden clubs, chess clubs, birdwatching groups — to provide them may be one way to alleviate the situation.

ENDNOTES

1) N. David Milder. “Three Informal Entertainment Venues in Smaller Communities: Bryant Park Series, Article 4.” The Downtown Curmudgeon Blog. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2014/12/draft-121414-three-informal-entertainment-venues-in-smaller-communities-bryant-park-4

2) N. David Milder. “Bryant Park: The Quintessential Downtown Informal Entertainment Venue – Part 1.” Downtown Curmudgeon Blog. August 19, 2014. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2014/08/bryant-park-the-quintessential-downtown-informal-entertainment-venue-part-1

3) For more about Bryant Park’s location see: https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2014/08/bryant-park-the-quintessential-downtown-informal-entertainment-venue-part-1 .

4) Bill Ryan and Jangik Jin. “Employment in Wisconsin’s Downtowns.” Center for Community & Economic Development. University of Wisconsin – Extension. Staff Paper, October 20, 2011. https://cced.ces.uwex.edu/files/2014/12/Downtown_Employment_Analysis112111.pdf

5) Lawrence O. Houstoun. “NINE MINUTES TO RETAIL: The Workplace-Marketplace.” Urban Land, December 1989, pp 25-29.

6) See endnote 1.

7) N. David Milder and Andrew Dane. “Some More Thoughts on the Economic Revitalization of Small Town Downtowns: Financial Tools.” Economic Development Journal of Canada, November 2014. http://tinyurl.com/qcbnefh

8) Alyssa Ochs. “Many Things: The Surprising Appeal of Funding Community Parks.” Inside Philanthropy. May 3, 2018. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/5/9/many-things-the-surprising-appeal-of-funding-community-parks

A Critical Question Under the New Normal for Our Downtowns: Can Autonomous Cars Cure Growing Traffic and Pedestrian Congestion?

Posted on April 29, 2018 by DANTH

By N. David Milder

Introduction

A key facet of the New Normal for Our Downtowns is that many of the most important challenges they now face result from their successful growth and increased popularity — not from their failures. Nowhere is that more evident than with the issues of traffic and pedestrian congestion. Meeting those challenges probably means that many of our downtowns will have to develop and operate in new ways. Many observers believe the changeover to autonomous vehicles will have enormous positive impacts on how many of our downtowns operate, most notably in the ways vehicles structure the uses of downtown spaces. Yet, the transition to automated cars probably will be slow, with completion requiring 30 to 50 years. The objective of this article is to explore this transition and some useful actions downtowns might take during this crucial and lengthy period of time.

First, it’s important to be clear about the problems that many experts believe automated cars hopefully will successfully address.

Traffic Congestion Is an Old Problem That Is Now Growing Exponentially in Importance.

By 1908, the term “traffic jam” was already in popular use, so traffic congestion is a problem that has long been with us (1).

It also can be found in towns of all sizes. I remember in the late 1960s sitting in our car for over an hour in a traffic jam just outside the small town of Waynesville, OH, (population under 3,000) because the town’s streets and parking lots could not easily accommodate all the people that wanted to visit its large niche of attractive antique shops. Similarly, in the 1990s, I sat in stalled traffic for what seemed like an eternity in the small town of Manchester, VT, (population around 4,400) because so many shoppers were visiting its many outlet shops. These examples illustrate how successful small towns with strong attractions have long experienced significant traffic congestion problems.

Larger communities, especially in their downtown areas, also have long experienced traffic congestion simply because of their compactness and density – characteristics that give them a competitive advantage. However, under the new normal, their downtowns are now so successful that they are experiencing even higher levels of traffic congestion that threaten their future well-being. As a terrific report on traffic congestion in Center City Philadelphia noted:

“The revival in Center City in the last 30 years has contributed to the problem (traffic congestion), bringing a greater density of development: taller office towers, more hotels, expanding health care and educational institutions, conversion of parking lots, older industrial and office buildings to residential use and the addition of new retail, restaurant, entertainment, cultural and tourist destinations. Greater density means more people at more time times of day animating the (downtown’s) 2.2 square miles….”

“Parking and traffic regulations remain essentially unchanged in the central business district from the era when Center City was a 9-to-5 downtown with two rush-hour peaks. But today Center City is filled with office workers freed from their desks by digital technology, eating lunch and holding meetings in restaurants and cafes. It’s a destination for tourists and shoppers, animated by tens of thousands more residents, students and visitors to medical and cultural institutions. It’s become a place pulsing with vehicular and pedestrian volumes continuously throughout the day and evening hours.” (2).

The tie between a downtown’s economic success and traffic congestion also is demonstrated by this finding about traffic in Manhattan: “Since 2013, as the city’s economy and population increased, daytime speeds in the Manhattan Central Business District (from 60 Street to the Battery) declined by 11 percent” (3).

In 2017, average traffic speed in the Midtown core of that CBD was 4.7 MPH, not all that much above the 2.91 MPH average walking speed in NYC found in 2006 (4).

Traffic congestion has reached such levels in NYC that city and state leaders have tried (and failed so far) to introduce “congestion pricing” to keep vehicles from entering Manhattan. It has been implemented in London, Stockholm, and Singapore and on a few toll highways in the US such as I-66 in the Washington D.C. area and I-15 in San Diego. In other communities, altering regulations and strengthening enforcement are the major tools to cope with increased traffic congestion.

The table above shows the 25 cities with the worst traffic congestion in the USA, according to INRIX Research. They are located all over the nation. Our most populated cities certainly rank high, but it is also notable that five of these cities only had populations in the 58,000 to 212,000 range – Stamford, Tacoma, Santa Cruz, San Rafael and Santa Barbara – and that three were in the 58,000 to 91,900 range – San Rafael, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara.

It’s Not Just the Downtowns, It’s Also the Roads/Highways That Connect to Them. The economic health and well-being of most downtowns depend not only on the ease and costs of moving around within them, but also on how difficult and costly it is to get to and from them. The frequent traffic congestion found on the major roads leading into them can be very off-putting to those that have to work or do business in a downtown, not to mention those who want to visit for pleasure and entertainment reasons.

It’s Not Just Cars on the Roads – It’s Parking Them, Too. Many of the cars that enter a downtown stay dormant, i.e., parked, for substantial parts of the day. These parked vehicles occupy a significant proportion of a downtown’s land. As one recent report noted: “Parking consumes a significant amount of land, especially in suburban areas where auto use is highest and surface lots are more common than multi-story garages” (5). Shopping malls notoriously dedicate most of their land – about 80% — to the parking and movement of vehicles.

The extent to which downtown spaces are dedicated to auto-related uses depends a lot on how many people use cars to get to and from them. There can be considerable variation. For example, back in 2003 Michael Manville and Donald Shoup noted:

“If you took all of the parking spaces in the Los Angeles CBD and spread them horizontally in a surface lot, they would cover 81 percent of the CBD’s land area. We call this ratio—of parking area to total land area—the “parking coverage rate,” and it is higher in downtown LA than in any other downtown on earth. In San Francisco, for instance, the coverage rate is 31 percent, and in New York it is only 18 percent” (6).

Other observers have noted that: “streets and parking take up 45% of land in downtown Washington, D.C. and up to 65% in downtown Houston” (7). This variation in parking coverage rates means there will be variation in the ability of reduced parking demand to translate into freeing up land that can be put to more pedestrian friendly uses.

Downtown parking structures are also very expensive to build – about $50,000 per parking space – and add significantly to downtown development project costs, while using a lot of scarce and valuable land.

The Obvious Thing That Any Solution Must Achieve. Traffic congestion essentially means that there are too many vehicles in a defined geographic place. The obvious thing that any solution to traffic congestion must achieve is to reduce the number of vehicles in the place of interest, e.g., a downtown. Fewer vehicles means less land need for the vehicles’ movement and parking. That is precisely what many advocates (e.g., Uber, Lyft) claim that a system of automated ride-sharing vehicles can accomplish. However, as will be detailed below, there are substantial reasons to question those claims, especially for the early decades of the transition period. In turn, that can have important implications for the actions municipalities may want to take during those crucial years.

Yogi Berra: “No One Goes There Anymore – It’s Too Crowded!”

Pedestrian congestion is more of an emerging problem. Pedestrian activity can have two faces. On one hand, over the past 15 to 20 years, significant levels of pedestrian activity have become an essential element in our understanding of how successful downtowns and Main Street districts work. The well-deserved and growing attention that downtown “walkability” has garnered reflects the concerns of those active in downtown revitalization about the physical and social conditions that encourage strong pedestrian activity. It is also a de facto acknowledgment of the importance of such activity.

On the other hand, there is ample evidence that pedestrian activities can reach levels that are too dense, induce avoidance behaviors and tarnish the image of a downtown in the eyes of the public. The above statement, by the oft astute Yogi Berra, depicts a growing threat that is present daily in many of our larger downtowns and to lesser extents in some of our smaller cities. The situation here in NYC has become fairly obvious. For example, a headline in a 2016 article in the New York Times blared: “New York’s Sidewalks Are So Packed, Pedestrians Are Taking to the Streets” (8).

While this congestion may happen unsurprisingly in Manhattan on 5th Avenue in and near Rockefeller Center, in the Times Square Bowtie, along Broadway and elsewhere in Lower Manhattan, around Macy’s and near Penn Station, I have been in similar pedestrian traffic jams, though less frequently, on the sidewalks of Austin Street in Forest Hills, NY; Main Street in Flushing, NY, Jamaica Avenue in Queens, and on Fordham Road in The Bronx. Indeed, pedestrian activity has been increasing throughout the city as the table below demonstrates. NYCDOT has been counting pedestrians at 100+ locations throughout the city since 2007 annually in the spring and in the fall. It creates a Pedestrian Volume Index based on the counts at 50 of those locations. Between the Spring of 2007 and the Spring of 2016, there has been an 18.3% increase in pedestrian activity in NYC.

New York is not alone in experiencing pedestrian congestion. I have also observed it in such diverse places as Main Street in East Hampton, NY, Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Newberry Street in Boston and Ocean Drive in Miami Beach.

N.Michigan Ave in Chicago. Too many or too few pedestrians?

How many downtowns are inducing avoidance behaviors and having their images tarnished by too much pedestrian traffic congestion? My suspicion is that it is happening far more often than their leaders and stakeholders either realize or would want. Perhaps this is due to their focus on building up pedestrian activity, so the downtown can be well-activated and have ample users when that focus is no longer needed. Whatever the reason for this disregard, once again, it is the success of our revitalization efforts that creates a new challenge – too much pedestrian activity.

In turn, this situation raises the question of: at what point does the density of pedestrians begin to significantly make walking an irritating, joyless labor and an inducement for avoidance behavior? How much pedestrian traffic is too much? One suggestion is that a pedestrian needs a space envelope of about 1m²(9). My bet is that number has no empirical data about individual behaviors, preferences and attitudes to support it! My stride alone could take up most or all of that space and I am of average height. The most important issue is how much space allows a pedestrian to feel comfortable and safe – not how many of them can be crammed onto a length of paved sidewalk.

Research also suggests that walking speeds are influenced by a community’s population size and level of economic development (10). Consequently, they may be expected to increase as a downtown revitalizes. However, increased walking speed once it crosses an unknown threshold, may deter pedestrians from strolling and window-shopping – activities critical to a downtown’s retail and entertainment operations. Moreover, as anyone visiting Times Square these days probably will attest, high volumes of pedestrian traffic can bring walking speeds down to a crawl.

High pedestrian volumes also can impede strolling and window-shopping. Retailers definitely want significant levels of pedestrian traffic, but if the volume gets too large it can become superfluous or provide too much friction for comfortable strolling and window-shopping or entering/leaving shops. This is reflected in two of my findings about the 34^th Street district in Manhattan:

The highest retail rents were not on the blockfaces with the highest pedestrian counts.
Major retailers seem to appreciate high pedestrian counts close to Macy’s and clusters of other major retailers more than the very high pedestrian counts close to Penn Station (11).

What, then, is an optimal pedestrian flow for retailers? The Traffic Engineering Handbook 2015 (TEH) – citing data that has been in the Handbook at least since the mid-1960s – suggests that pedestrian flows larger than 1,100 to 1,600 people per hour per 22” lane are not conducive to retail activities. On a sidewalk along a downtown commercial street that has an 8’ to 12’ pedestrian zone – as recommend in Boston — that would mean between four and six 22” wide pedestrian lanes (see above table). The TEH’s recommended pedestrian volumes for retail would mean between 4,400 and 6,400 pedestrians/hr in a four-lane zone and between 6,600 and 9,600 pedestrians/hr in a six-lane zone.

However, if we look at the NYCDOT p.m. counts for the 50 locations used to construct its Pedestrian Volume Index, we find that:

9, or 18%, had counts above 4,400/hr
Only 5, or 10%, had counts above 6,400/hr
Only 2, or 4%, had counts above 9,600/hr. (One location is by Macy’s, the other is across from Penn Station.)

The 1,600 people/hr/lane rate seems to result in a very high pedestrian flow even by NYC standards, one that makes me doubt it is conducive to strolling and window- shopping. The 1,100 people/hr/la rate is still relatively high, but probably closer to what is conducive to having successful retailing. More research on this question is needed.

Under the new normal, as more and more downtowns succeed, as more of them have significant levels of pedestrian traffic, more of them probably will have pedestrian congestion problems.

The Auto-Pedestrian Congestion Interaction. Of course, there also are basic relationships between pedestrian and auto congestion. They each can reinforce the other. For instance, dense auto traffic makes it harder for pedestrians to cross streets, while dense pedestrian flows at corners makes it more difficult for autos to make turns. To help cope with this situation in NYC “a new tool has emerged to help increase pedestrian safety: The Pedestrian/Traffic Manager—an individual trained and certified exclusively in the movement and safety of pedestrians in high density areas (12).

Spaces for vehicles turned into spaces for people. Broadway near 36^th Street in Manhattan

Historically, auto traffic and pedestrian congestion also have fought each other. For example, early in the transition to automobiles, wide city sidewalks were reduced in size to provide more room for vehicle traffic. Of late, cities such as NYC, have been doing the opposite, emptying road bed spaces of vehicles to provide more room for pedestrians – see the above photo. Many urbanists believe that autonomous vehicles will enable much more of the street spaces used by vehicles to be converted into vibrant public spaces for pedestrians.

The Promises of the Automated Car Revolution

These are the major positive impacts that the changeover to automated vehicles promises to achieve:

Much safer vehicles due to automation/computerization of driving functions and new safety features.
Reduced CO2 emissions created by the switch to automated vehicles powered by electric engines.
Reduced need for parking spaces created by:
- Reduced private ownership of vehicles means less need for residential parking.
- Increased use of ride for hire automated vehicles for work and pleasure trips means reduced need of parking spaces for visitors to office buildings, manufacturing plants, shopping malls, sports stadiums and arenas, government offices, etc.
Reduced need for land used for highways, roads, and streets because:
- There will be significantly fewer vehicles because there will be vastly increased ride-sharing.
- More, importantly, there will be fewer vehicle miles driven since there will be vastly increased ride-sharing.
- Vehicles will need narrower road spaces because vehicles will be more accurately guided by GPS or road beacon systems.

In 2017, these promises stimulated the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) to issue its future-peering and optimistic Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism (13). In this vision of our urban future, the adverse impacts of automobiles are substantially diminished, and the needs, comforts, and pleasures of people are the engines for urban design. For example, under the Blueprint, people would have more spaces for walking and leisure and vehicle speeds would be so slowed pedestrians could even cross streets midblock! There is much to admire in this vision, but there also are many questions about when and how it might be realized.

Some of the claimed benefits of the automated car revolution, especially when made by people with strong vested interests in it, strain credulity and seem more like marketing puff. Often this puffery also is full of politically tenuous positions. The leaders of Lyft are good examples. As reported in a 2018 article on Verge:

“Lyft’s… co-founders, John Zimmer and Logan Green, have released policy papers predicting the end of personal car ownership in major cities by 2025, and calling for more people to carpool by charging a fee to those who don’t” (14).

With about 263 million passenger cars, motorcycles, lorries, buses and other vehicles now registered in the US, it is certainly dubious that personal car ownership will end in our major cities by 2027. Also, only political naïfs would believe that fining people who do not carpool would not create huge political problems.

More generally, Lyft stresses that ride-hailing could reduce the number of personally owned cars on the roads (15). According to its spokesman: ”Lyft is focused on making personal car ownership optional by getting more people to share a ride, helping to reduce car ownership, and partnering with public transportation”(16). Uber, according to its spokesman has a similar goal: “Uber’s long-term goal is to end the reliance on personal vehicles and allow a mix of public transportation and services like Uber” (17).

Of course, there is another possibility: ride-hailing services will increase the number of vehicles on the road and significantly worsen urban traffic congestion.

The Predictions

The Importance of the Long Transition Period. There is a real need for downtown and municipal leaders to recognize that the transition to autonomous vehicles will take decades to complete (18). Until then, there will be very long periods when roadways will be shared by autonomous vehicles, those that are legacies, and those that are driven, but have lots of hi-tech safety features to protect their drivers and passengers. Even the transition away from gasoline powered vehicles will likely take decades to complete. One of the most important issues for downtown and municipal leaders is when, if ever, will the number of automated vehicles reach the point where they will reduce the need for parking spaces, roads and highways?

Autonomous vehicles will have a relatively small presence in the near future. In its 2016 report, McKinsey concluded that worldwide: “Once technological and regulatory issues have been resolved, up to 15 percent of new sold cars sold in 2030 could be fully autonomous” (19). McKinsey also concluded that by 2050, about 33% of new cars sold worldwide could potentially be a shared vehicle (20). That suggests that the vast majority of vehicles sold 30 years from now will still be of the unshared variety!

IHS Markit looked at autonomous vehicle sales in the 2020 to 2040 period in the Americas (see above chart). It predicted that autonomous vehicle sales in the U.S. would reach 7.9 million units/yr by 2040 (21). Given that annual vehicle sales in the US in recent years have been in the 15 million to 17 million range, it appears probable that most vehicles sold in the US for the coming 20+ years will be legacy type vehicles, though many of their operations and safety features may become automated.

Municipalities and downtowns that forget to take into account the very large number of legacy and unshared vehicles do so at their own economic peril! Yet, the growth of autonomous and shared vehicles will mean that they, too, cannot be ignored.

BP, the big oil company, in its Energy Outlook 2018, sees only 25% of the car sales worldwide in 2040 being electric powered. Even if we allow a 100% or even a 200% error factor to offset any possible BP bias, that still leaves a whole lot of non-electric vehicles being sold – and many more will still be on the road. These data suggest that the ability of autonomous electric-engined cars to reduce CO2 emissions probably will take many decades to reach significant levels!

The BP data are also interesting because they show that the number of passenger vehicle kilometers (vkm) powered by electricity will grow significantly faster than the sales of electric powered vehicles in 2040. This also points out that the numbers of miles/kilometers traveled by vehicles, with and without passengers, probably are far more important variables for analyzing traffic congestion than auto ownership statistics.

The following quote from the Driverless Future report is extremely important. It notes that:” The possibility that millions of car owners could shift to ridesourcing and give up car ownership offers an opportunity to alleviate congestion, provide equitable access to jobs and services, and create development that is more inclusive and sustainable. However, it is also expected that vehicle miles traveled will rise as consumers are exposed to new mobility services. This would lead to more congestion” (22). This illustrates the importance of the vehicle miles traveled variable and its associated data.

The Speed of The Transition Will Probably Vary by the Type of City or Town. The McKinsey study also concluded that: “City type will replace country or region as the most relevant segmentation dimension that determines mobility behavior and, thus, the speed and scope of the automotive revolution” (23). In McKinsey’s view, in the US, regions automated vehicles will have marginal penetration in small towns and rural areas, where private cars will continue to be the preferred means of transportation. However, in the larger, most congested cities car ownership and use is more burdensome and shared mobility has significant competitive advantages and consequent higher probabilities of adoption (24).

Another relevant study, “Driverless Future: A Policy Roadmap for City Leaders”, by Arcadis, HR&A, and Sam Schwartz, argues that the shift from car ownership to using shared automated vehicles will vary according to the strengths of the following variables:

Population density.
Level of car ownership.
Strength of public transit.
Residential density (units/acre).

The above table is constructed from data on page 9 of the Driverless Future report. The analysis of shifts from personal car use for commuting to the use of shared automated vehicles is cost driven. This analysis then ties the shifts with residential unit density. Areas with 0-3 units per acre are deemed now likely to prefer autos for commuting; places with 10-20 units prefer bus transit and places with 30-150+ units per acre prefer rail. The analysis projects that car ownership will probably shift into the use of shared automated vehicles (AVs) to a much greater extent in the NY-NJ MSA, 46% to 60%, than in either the L.A. MSA, 36% to 46% or the Dallas-Ft Worth MSA, 21% to 31%.

The conclusions that the shift from the use of personal cars to shared automated vehicles will be greater in the NYC Metro than in the L.A. and Dallas-Ft Worth Metros, and that it will be lowest in the Dallas-Ft Worth Metro appear to me to be correct. The overall differences on the estimates for the NY and Dallas Metros are 25% for the low estimates and 36.4% for the high estimates. However, to me, there appears to be a number of questionable things about this analysis. For example, the ranges between the lowest and highest estimates of the reductions in personal vehicle ownership in all instances are quite high. That strongly suggests these should be treated as ballpark estimates – valuable if used carefully, but far from definitive. In all fairness, the study’s authors do state conditionally that the MSA in question “could experience a shift of….”

Also, the residential density variable really does not seem to make all that much difference:

For the NY Metro the range for the low estimate across the five residential unit density categories is 37% to 45.7%, a delta of 8.7%. The range for the high estimate is 66.7% to 70.0%, a delta of 3.3%
For the L.A. Metro the range for the low estimate across the five categories is 35.5% to 38.6%, a delta of 3.1%. The range for the high estimate is 44.2% to 46.8%, a delta of 2.1%
For the Dallas -Ft Worth Metro the range for the low estimate across the five categories is 18.3% to 20%, a delta of 1.7%. The range for the high estimate is 25.0% to 33.6%, a delta of 8.6%.

The focus on car ownership is questionable. As the BP and Driverless Future reports discussed above indicate, vehicle miles traveled is probably the really crucial variable. Certainly, it is more probative when analyzing the issues of CO2 emissions, road safety, traffic congestion, and the land needed for roads and highways. However, data on the use of personal cars to commute to work may be far easier and cheaper to obtain.

Most importantly, the assumption that the shift away from personal car use will be based solely on economic factors should be strongly questioned. The reasons why only 25% of NYC’s residents use their personal cars to get to work and 52.9% use public transit, while 75.6% of Dallas’s residents drive their cars to work and only 9.5% use public transit are probably far more historical and cultural than economic. These cultural factors are also present in L.A., as well as in such cities as Charlotte, NC, and Columbus, OH. They are why these communities do not have stronger and better utilized public transit systems – it isn’t that these cities lacked the wealth or economic strength.

In such communities, it will not be easy for even cheaply priced rides in shared automated vehicle to overcome the feelings of power, control, freedom, comfort, and even joy, that riding in their own vehicles provides to a whole lot of Americans. For these car owners, the benefits may be worth spending a good deal of money to retain them. Just consider that the average cost of an off-street parking space in NYC is about $400/mo and in Manhattan, as shown in the illustration below, the prices can be a whole lot higher, $600 to $1,000. These car owners have a proven ability to accept an awful lot of financial pain in order to drive to work. Forecasts of their abandoning their own vehicles for cheaper shared rides to my mind lacks similar levels of evidentiary support!

Of course, the implementation of a steep congestion pricing program could make the economic factors much more salient. But, but, but….

Already, in many of our largest cities, less than half of their residents commute to work alone in their private cars: 22% in NYC; 35% in San Francisco, 38.9% in Boston; 49.2% in Seattle and 49.5% in Chicago. The introduction of shared autonomous vehicles into their congested areas seems unlikely to capture customers from those driving their cars. More likely are those already using other transportation modes. Because of that their introduction might actually increase congestion. Some evidence for this contention is provided by a very solid study of the impacts of “TNCs”, a.k.a. Uber and Lyft, on congestion in NYC by Schaller Consulting. While the vast majority of the TNCs’ trips are neither shared nor automated, Schaller’s major findings are still salient because they strongly indicate the types of riders who are prone to be attracted by automated ridesharing services:

“TNCs accounted for the addition of 600 million miles of vehicular travel to the city’s roadway network over the past three years, after accounting for declines in yellow cab mileage and mileage in personal vehicles. The additional 600 million miles exceeds the total mileage driven by yellow cabs in Manhattan.”
“Growth in trips, passengers and mileage is seen throughout the city as TNCs attracted yellow cab riders, those who would otherwise use the bus, subway or their personal vehicle, and people who would not otherwise have made the trip.”
“TNC mileage nonetheless continues to grow rapidly because exclusive-ride trips still predominate, and because most TNC customers are coming from transit, walking and biking. Migration from public transit translates to increased mileage even if the trips are shared.”
“Trip growth in Manhattan has been concentrated during the morning and evening peak periods, when yellow cab shift changes produced a shortage of cab availability, and late evenings and weekends when passengers may prefer the comfort and convenience of TNCs over yellow cabs or transit services”.
“A continuation of TNC-led growth in travel is not a sustainable way to grow the city” (25).

Models, such as the one employed by Driverless Future, predict that the highest conversion from commuting by car to the use of shared automated vehicles will be in many dense urban residential areas where that often will mean relatively few people actually make the change because so few are now using their cars On the other hand, the introduction of many shared automated vehicles into such urban environments may worsen traffic congestion. It may well be, that congestion in Manhattan will only be reduced if shared automated vehicles are only used to transport out-of-town commuters.

Finally, the modeling of, and discussions about automated vehicles have almost exclusively focused on those carrying passengers, but auto makers, such as Ford and even Tesla, see huge market opportunities for those that will deliver freight to companies and purchases to consumers. A major feature of the current retail revolution is the quest to provide at least same day, if not same hour delivery of online purchases. The numbers of these vehicles could rival those used for conveying passengers.

One solution may be limiting freight deliveries to slow, after dark hours, though some businesses definitely will strongly resist. The real challenge is the final 100 yards problem of getting the package from the automated delivery vehicle into the hands of the customer, where after dark deliveries probably will pose a problem. Amazon currently is experimenting with using drones for package deliveries, which may pose still other problems. One way or another automated package delivery may pose major problems for downtowns and cities sooner than the automated passenger vehicles because it may be relatively easy for companies like Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Best Buy, Macy’s or even Uber and Lyft to field fleets of them to meet already proven demand. Downtown and municipal leaders need to keep the regulation of automated freight and package deliveries high on their agendas – and finding the right ones probably will not be easy.

The Sine Qua Non for Solving the Traffic Congestion Problem

It’s been said that our dense urban areas, such as downtowns, have a geometry problem: there is a finite amount of land and a growing number of automobiles that want to use it. Passenger vehicles can vary both in how many passengers they have the capacity to transport and how many they actually do carry. The photo montage below assembled by Jon Orcutt demonstrates that if each only carries one passenger, then the same number of vehicles, occupying the same amount of road space, regardless of whether they are private cars, Uber vehicles or autonomous cars. If all the seats in these vehicles were occupied, then about four times as many people could be transported without increasing the number of vehicles or the amounts of needed road and parking spaces to accommodate them. Those are the basic advantages for the community of ride-sharing/carpooling efforts.

Recent simulations, however, have indicated that for ride-sharing to have meaningful positive impacts, they will have to carry more than the four or five passengers that is the capacity of our average passenger cars. The ride-sharing vehicles will need to carry between 12 to 18 passengers. As one very astute observer has noted: “… governments will need to support the growth and development of fleets of 12- or 18-seat minibuses, to supplement (rather than replace) public transit systems, which they will also need to support” (26).

Riding in shared minibuses may not have as much allure for the riding public as the image of riding alone in a well-appointed automated vehicle. One may also wonder what the images of Uber and Lyft may be once they become fleets of minibuses or what the value of their shares of stock will be.

One also might wonder about the appeal of riding in close quarters with a group of strangers. To many, it may sound like being in the rush-hour in the NYC subway. A 2018 study in Greenwich, England found that survey respondents associated a good deal of potential social discomfort with ridesharing. They felt that a “key emotional benefit to travelling by car or taxi is the sense of control and personal space.” While public transport does not have such spaces, it does have informal ‘social rules’ that are applied. Respondents were “unsure on how such ‘unwritten rules’ would apply to ride-sharing.” (27).

Uber and Lyft are the current major pretenders to the shared automated vehicle service throne, though they are basically still app-initiated ride- hailing operations. So far, the public’s disposition to using them is not favorable. A 2016 survey for Vox found that 53% of its respondents said it was unlikely they would ride in an Uber or Lyft vehicle in the next ten years and 61% reported they were unlikely to use an Uber-style self-driving car service if it becomes available in their area. That is a lot of people who do not want to use the largest wannabe automated rideshare services (28).

A rigorous study by researchers at UC-Davis of their current actual users in seven major metro areas — 4,000 users in the metro areas of Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. — produced many interesting findings:

“In major cities, 21% of adults personally use ride-hailing services; an additional 9% use ride- hailing with friends….”
“Parking represents the top reason that urban ride-hailing users substitute a ride-hailing service in place of driving themselves (37%).
“Avoiding driving when drinking is another top reason that those who own vehicles opt to use ride-hailing versus drive themselves (33%).”

“The majority of ride-hailing users (91%) have not made any changes with regards to whether or not they own a vehicle.”
“Directionally, based on mode substitution and ride-hailing frequency of use data, we conclude that ride-hailing is currently likely to contribute to growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the major cities represented in this study” (29). In other words, the ride-hailing services right now appear likely to make traffic in our cities more congested.

If people are afraid to ride in self-driving vehicles, then they surely will not be ride-sharing in them. A survey done for the AAA in 2017 found that: ‘Three-quarters of U.S. drivers would be afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle, while 19 percent would trust the vehicle and 4 percent are unsure’. Baby Boomers were more afraid (85 per cent) than Millennials (73 per cent), but the latter’s percentage is still very high (30). A year later AAA’s annual survey found that fear levels had dropped to 63 percent (31). However, that survey was completed before the well-publicized death caused by an Uber automated vehicle in AZ.

If ridesharing is indeed the key to reducing traffic congestion, then the strategic imperative for downtown and municipal leaders concerned about this problem must be to devise and implement policies and programs that will sufficiently incentivize the public’s use of fleets of 12- or 18-seat minibuses. Simply getting them out on the road will not be enough. They probably will need to be very appealing in terms of safety, convenience, comfort, and enjoyment as well as price.

The Probable Persistence of the Multi-Modal Regional Traveler

The essence of suburban communities is that their residents are relatively dispersed and, perhaps outside of their downtown or Main Street areas, walking to destinations is rather difficult, while they lack public transportation, so residents are very car-dependent. To a lesser, but still significant extent, the same can be said of some the suburban-like neighborhoods found in some of our larger cities. In fact, many of them actually started out as suburbs.

A study of Lyft and Uber in Austin TX found that when these two ride-hailing services were briefly kicked out of town, their riders returned to using their own cars. According to Robert Hampshire, lead author of the study: “The takeaway isn’t so much that Uber and Lyft reduce the need to own a car, but rather they limit how often people use a car they already own…. A large fraction of these people already had a car and just weren’t using it as much” (32).

These Uber/Lyft riders and car owners in Austin are “multi-modal” travelers within their region. My impression is that too many of the studies about autonomous car impacts neglect looking at the significant numbers of residents in neighborhoods and towns in metropolitan areas who have long been “multi-modal” travelers. I previously have written about the situation here in the outer boroughs of NYC:

“44 percent of the households in both the Bronx and Brooklyn have cars, while 64 percent do in Queens. Even in Manhattan, where garage spaces can cost ($1,000+ per month) and in several of its zip codes over 40 percent of the residents walk to work, 23 percent of the households own cars. The car-owning residents in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens tend to be tri-modal from a transportation perspective. They walk a lot to local destinations — perhaps longer and more frequently than anywhere else in the US — and use subways, buses, and even commuter rail to get to work. But they are extremely likely to use their cars to travel to any other types of destinations “ (33).

Residents in many of the suburbs in the NY-NJ- NYC- Newark MSA also are multi-modal travelers. Take Maplewood, NJ, for example, a town with roughly 24,4000 residents, among whom about 57% are in core creative class occupations. The town has a direct commuter rail connection to Manhattan and Newark. Among its residents who are in the labor force about 56% commute to work alone in their personal cars, but:

30.9% commute to work via public transit (mostly by rail).
8.0% worked at home.
1.2% walked to work.

I would bet the family farm – if we had one – that almost all of these employed Maplewood residents who do not use a vehicle to commute to work also are in households that have one or more automobiles. If they didn’t, they would find it very difficult to get around town, much less do comparison shopping or visit major entertainment venues in other communities (see table below).

While commutation trips may offer the best opportunities for people to give up the use of one of their cars, strong arguments can be made that:

The degree to which that might occur will vary and certainly be less than 100% (see the discussion of the Driverless Future study above).
Residents in the suburbs and in neighborhoods outside of large city cores make many trips to non-work-related destinations. The use of vehicles shared with other people going to these non-work-related destinations may often not be comfortable or desirable while being the sole occupant of automated vehicle operated by a ride-hailing service might not be very affordable. Personal cars will remain for them the best transportation mode, even among those who stopped using them to commute to work.

Can you really imagine taking a shared vehicle with 10 to 18 passengers to transport you and your shopping bags home after a weekly shopping trip to a large supermarket or a shopping trip to COSTCO? And what about traveling home after shopping trips to a large mall or big box store? Think also about going to a play or concert at a venue that is within a 30-minute drive in a shared automated vehicle that has numerous stops to pick up and discharge passengers? That scenario brings to mind the “airport shuttles” I’ve used to get to my hotels on a few business trips. They were cheaper than taxis, but much more time-consuming and aggravating because of their extra stops. They also were not all that comfortable, but then that holds for taxis, too.

Now some would say that the shopping bags could be delivered by another automated vehicle. Indeed, one of the quickest and largest adoptions of automated vehicles probably will be the fleets of them used to deliver packages. Their numbers initially may well grow faster than their use by passengers because many fewer decision-makers will be involved and they will have a clarity of purpose and benefits. Nevertheless, using AVs as an adjunct to shopping trips to brick and mortar stores to transport the purchases would mean two vehicles would be used on a person’s shopping trip instead of just one.

I live in Kew Gardens, NY, a community that the USPS, in its usual wisdom, divided across two zip code areas. The 11415 area contains only Kew Gardens residents, while the 11418 area has mostly non-Kew Gardens residents. The density of residential units in 11415 is 25.2 units/acre, in 11418 it’s 11.4 units/acre. In contrast, the posher and much more affluent 10021 zip code in Manhattan has a residential unit density of 114.7/acre. Kew Gardens was built as a suburb of Manhattan and even with its many apartment buildings it still retains many large single-family homes and many suburban characteristics. Those who know NYC well, know that many neighborhoods in the outer boroughs share these suburban characteristics. One of them being that many residents are multi-modal travelers within the region.

The above table lists three of destinations we go to with some regularity by car because reaching them via public transportation simply takes too long and involves transfers that are too often “iffy.” I used my Uber app on a Thursday mid-morning, to see what it would cost for them to then take us to these destinations. Uber’s shared ride services were not available for me, so I selected the Economy option. The prices for these trips, presented in the above table, are plainly unreasonable. $133.40 (plus tip?) to get and from Jones Beach?

I’ve read that prices for Uber rides can be expected to go down, especially in shared automated vehicles that probably have 8+ passengers. Do I really want to go on this automated mini-bus with my cooler, beach chairs, and umbrella? Or would I rather have my own vehicle? Moreover, how much cheaper would the ride be? Even 50% less would not be enticing. Furthermore, without a driver, how would sanitation and order be maintained within a shared vehicle?

Here in Kew Gardens and neighboring Forest Hills we can reach Manhattan via the Long Island Rail Road and several subway lines. Unless traffic congestion is severely reduced and automated shared vehicle ride costs are very affordable, I doubt that many residents will use the shared automated vehicles to commute to Manhattan. However, many residents live more than a half-mile from the subway and LIRR stations and use a bus or car service to get to and from them. Uber-type services may be able to capture some of these commuters. However, the fact that the city now charges just one fare to riders who use the bus and transfer to the subway probably severely limits that penetration. Before that program was instituted, fleets of private vans – shared but not automated vehicles — brought subway riders from southeastern and western Queens to Jamaica Center’s subway stations. The one-fare program significantly reduced van ridership. The poor frequency of many bus lines in outer borough neighborhoods, on the other hand, makes Uber and Lyft attractive. Interesting that the UC-Davis seven-city study discussed above found that the Uber-Lyft operations were complementary to rail transit, but hurt buses and taxis.

Back in the 1950s, our apartment complex had a car service that would take tenants to and from the subway. I can envision several condo buildings in our community that might in the future have their own automated “station car,” probably bought second hand, to perform this chore – if the city would give its permission.

Maplewood and many other towns and cities in the NYC Metro Area are in situations very similar to those described in Kew Gardens (see table above). They have commuter rail stations with parking lots filled to the gills with the cars of commuting train riders. Ridesharing automated vehicles may be a way to deflate the demand for these scarce station parking spaces and perhaps put the land to better uses. Summit, NJ, is already experimenting with using Uber to forestall the need to build additional parking capacity. Municipal leaders in such communities should definitely be exploring this possible use of shared automated vehicles to reduce station area parking.

In Chester, NJ, (population about 1,500) Alstede Farms runs a free shuttle between it and the NJT station in Gladstone, NJ, as well as to the Historic Main Street Chester area during the summer months. In the Denver Metro Area, the City of Englewood (population about 34,000) has a free trolley that transports riders to 19 stops connecting CityCenter Englewood, businesses in downtown Englewood, and the medical facilities in and near Craig Hospital and Swedish Medical Center. Note that the Englewood shuttle does not impact on how their riders come to Englewood, but helped them move around the tows more easily while there. Many other suburban towns may want to explore the potentials of similarly using shared automated vehicles as shuttles between major commercial nodes, though there are sure to be financial challenges and require strong corporate sponsorship.

Whether or not the shared automated vehicles can be used similarly as shuttles to make it easier for suburban residents and visitors to get to and from their downtowns is another issue.

Municipal leaders responsible for such suburban communities and suburban-like neighborhoods in our larger cities must realize that these places are not like Manhattan, Center City Philadelphia, downtown Chicago or downtown Boston where a lot of non-commuting destinations are within easy walking distances and car ownership is relatively low. Too many of their residents’ non-commuting trips are unlikely to be adequately served by shared automated vehicles for probably decades to come – if ever – and they will probably need to have a personal vehicle at their disposal. This strongly suggests that, for the foreseeable future, multi-unit residential buildings probably still will need parking capacity of about one space per unit.

As noted above, parking consumes a lot of land in suburban communities, especially when they have large workforces arriving weekdays and/or large shopping malls within their borders. The ability of shared automated vehicles to reduce the amount of suburban land used for parking is not clear. Yes, they probably can reduce the amount of land needed for rail station parking. While a lot of shopping mall land is changing use simply because some malls are closing, it is doubtful that high percentages of shoppers will rideshare to retail stores.

A number of suburban downtowns, e.g., Englewood, NJ, and Great Neck Plaza, NY, have found that parking structures are badly underutilized even before any significant appearance of Uber, Lyft or shared autonomous vehicles. Their potential patrons strongly prefer surface lots, and/or they deem the location of the garages to be too peripheral. Futureproofing these garages –- i.e., making it feasible to convert all or parts of them to other, non-auto related uses -– probably would have been a good idea, but not because of the impacts of shared automated vehicles.

if the suburban roads are not badly congested and the job site has ample parking, why would workers switch to shared automated vehicles on their commutes? The price differential with using personal cars would have to be awesome. Of course, a good number of suburban roads are badly congested – e.g., Rte 1 in NJ between Trenton and New Brunswick and Rte 9 through Boston’s western suburbs. However, overcoming the dispersion of rider residences may be a significant limiting factor. To get into your own car to travel to and park at a rideshare pick-up point may not seem either appealing or logical to many potential suburban users. The alternative of having the vehicle makes numerous pickups also does not seem likely to be attractive to riders. Ridesharing programs have been around for decades and the reasons they did not become far more popular probably still have significant applicability today when envisioning automated ridesharing systems.

But, We’re Driving Fewer Miles and Millennials Don’t Like Cars

One of the arguments frequently offered to support the contention that Americans will easily adapt to automated vehicles is that they are driving fewer miles. Although this was true during and briefly after the Great Recession, in recent years Americans are driving more than ever before – see the above chart on vehicle miles traveled (VMT). In 2016 Americans drove a record number of 3.22 trillion miles on the nation’s roads…, up 2.8 percent from 3.1 trillion miles in 2015” (34). It was the fifth straight year of increased vehicle miles driven.

Moreover, projections by the Federal Highway Administration suggest total VMT by all vehicle types will grow on average 1.07% annually through 2035. However, the growth will slow significantly between 2035-2045 to bring annual growth rate for the entire 30-year 2015-2045 forecast period to 0.78%. This would be quite a moderation in the annual VMT growth rate from the past 30 years when it grew at an average rate of 2% — but it still would be growth (35).

Closer to 2010, Millennials were seen as an urban loving, car and driving hating, experience wanting, under-employed, relatively poor and burdened with large student debts, non-nesting, non-home buying age cohort. Surveys also showed them to be the most likely to use app-summoned ride-hailing services such as Uber and the most willing to ride in driverless cars.

Today, our understanding of the Millennials is changing as their life situations have significantly altered. They are now the largest age cohort. With time and age, they have become better employed, are earning more money, and have started to nest. That means they are marrying, having children and buying homes and cars. The Millennials were deeply impacted by the Great Recession with it forcing them to defer nesting and buying homes and cars for many years.

Moreover, as a Zillow survey found: “Almost 50 percent of millennial homeowners live in the suburbs, while 33 percent live in an urban neighborhood and just 20 percent live in a rural area” (36). That means that about 70% of them will live in relatively low-density population areas where cars are an essential means of getting around for even everyday chores. Even back in 2014, a survey found that 80% of Millennials surveyed said that they plan to purchase a vehicle in the next five years (37). According to a report in Forbes, Millennials are buying cars in significant numbers: “…(M)illennials, now the largest generation in the U.S., bought 4 million cars and trucks last year, second only to the baby boomers, according to J.D. Power’s Power Information Network” (38)

The rural Millennials are unlikely to have a strong propensity to use shared automated vehicles. The propensity of newly nested suburban Millennials to use such vehicles is unknown at this point in time. The key question is if their assumption of a more traditional lifestyle correlates with more conventional needs and attitudes relating to transportation modes. On one hand, my observations of Millennials now living in the suburbs suggests that they are strong advocates for well-activated downtowns and that suggests that they may make their own imprints on their suburban communities. Yet, they cannot avoid being effected by the significant dispersion most suburbs have,

Looking to the Future States of Traffic and Pedestrian Congestion

Shared automated vehicles provide no silver bullet solutions to these problems and if not properly implemented that can actually increase their severity.

The need to have a successful ridesharing system composed of minibuses capable of carrying 12 to 18 passengers means attracting sufficient users probably will be a huge challenge.

Too little attention is being paid now to the probable problems that will emerge during the long transition period when legacy, driven and automated passenger and freight/package carrying vehicles will share our roads.

A real challenge is that for the traffic congestion in our center cities to be reduced it is primarily the car use of their non-resident regular users that must be changed. That means huge jurisdictional and political problems.

There are real dangers that civic leaders will buy into the shared autonomous car dream too early and make premature moves on reducing parking space requirements or attempting major street and road redesigns. Small scale projects, such as using shared automated vehicles to take suburban commuters to their rail stations, will probably be most appropriate for several decades. Huge freeing of parking and road spaces for repurposing and improving a downtown’s walkability and public spaces are also unlikely for several decades, if ever.

Concern about the safety of a vehicle’s passengers, passengers in other vehicles and pedestrians should be a primary focus now and until automated systems are proven not just in test/experimental situations, but by years of actual full implementation. The Uber traffic accident in AZ showed a shameful lack of public sector concern. The appropriate regulation of the industry will be difficult to design and implement. The baby needs real care, though we don’t want to drown it in its bathwater.

ENDNOTES

1) See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/traffic

2) “CENTER CITY REPORTS: KEEP PHILADELPHIA MOVING” produced by the Center City District, the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation and the Central Philadelphia Transportation Management Association, pp1-2. https://centercityphila.org/research-reports/2018congestion

3) “Mayor’s Management Report,” City of New York, September 2016. Figures are for fiscal year 2013 and 2016. Cited in Bruce Shaller. ”UNSUSTAINABLE? The Growth of App-Based Ride Services and Traffic, Travel and the Future of New York City,” p.18.) http://www.schallerconsult.com/rideservices/unsustainable.pdf

4) For auto speed see: Fix NYC Advisory Panel Report, January 2018, p.7. http://hntb.com/HNTB/media/HNTBMediaLibrary/Home/Fix-NYC-Panel-Report.pdf . For NYC pedestrian speed see: Rachel Pincus. “Yes, Your Sidewalk Etiquette Could Be Better.” CITYLAB Aug 28, 2015. https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/08/how-to-share-the-sidewalk/401660/

5) DRIVERLESS FUTURE: A POLICY ROADMAP FOR CITY LEADERS, by Arcadis, HR&A, and Sam Schwartz http://driverlessfuture.webflow.io/

6) Michael Manville and Donald Shoup, People, Parking, and Cities, Access, Number 25, Fall 2004, p 7 http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/People,Parking,Cities.pdf

7) See endnote 5, p.12.

8) Winnie Hu, “New York’s Sidewalks Are So Packed, Pedestrians Are Taking to the Streets.” The New York Times. June 30, 2016. http://nyti.ms/29dy7m3

9) See endnote 2, p.4.

10) Eric Jaffe. “Why People in Cities Walk Fast.” CITYLAB, Mar 21, 2012 https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/03/why-people-cities-walk-fast/1550/

11) N. David Milder. ”34TH Street: A Fabled Shopping District and Window on the Future of Downtown Retailing.” Downtown Curmudgeon. April 15, 2017. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2017/04/34th-street-a-fabled-shopping-district-and-window-on-the-future-of-downtown-retailing

12) Ileanna Pappas and Janet Campbell. “A New Breed of Pedestrian Advocate is Making City Streets Safer for Everyone.” Planetizen, Sept. 13, 2013. https://www.planetizen.com/node/65198

13) It can be downloaded at: https://nacto.org/publication/bau/blueprint-for-autonomous-urbanism/

14) Andrew J. Hawkins “Lyft thinks we can end traffic congestion and save $1 trillion by selling our second cars: Do we really need that second car?’ The Verge, Jan 10, 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16870732/lyft-traffic-congestion-car-ownership-ces-2018

15) AP. “Studies are increasingly clear: Uber, Lyft congest cities.” https://www.apnews.com/e47ebfaa1b184130984e2f3501bd125d

16) Ibid.

17) Ibid.

18) N. David Milder. “Let’s Get Real About: Self-Driving Cars. Social and Political Engineering Will Also Be Required.” Downtown Curmudgeon Blog. Sept 7, 2017. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2017/09/lets-get-real-about-the-supposedly-imminent-nirvana-of-self-driving-cars

19) McKinsey Auto 2030 Report Jan 2016, p 11. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/disruptive-trends-that-will-transform-the-auto-industry

20) Ibid, p.9.

21) Kate Gibson. “Forecast: Autonomous-Vehicle Sales to Top 33 Million in 2040. The Drive. 2/21/18. http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/17298/forecast-autonomous-vehicle-sales-to-top-33-million-in-2040

22) See endnote 5. The italicized emphasis was added by NDM.

23) Endnote 19, p. 9

24) Ibid.

25) Schaller Consulting. UNSUSTAINABLE? The Growth of App-Based Ride Services and Traffic, Travel and the Future of New York City. February 27, 2017. P.1.

26) David Roberts. Unless we share them, self-driving vehicles will just make traffic worse – Vox, 7/24/17, p.9 https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/18/15604744/self-driving-cars-cities

27) MERGE Greenwich: Customer attitudes to Autonomous Vehicles and Ride-sharing. April 2018. https://mergegreenwich.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2018/04/MERGE-Greenwich-Consumer-attitudes-to-AV-ride-sharing-3.pdf

28) Timothy B. Lee. “We polled Americans about self-driving cars. Here’s what they told us. Vox. Aug 29, 2016. https://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12647854/uber-self-driving-poll

29) Regina R. Clewlow Gouri and Shankar Mishra. “Disruptive Transportation: The Adoption, Utilization, and Impacts of Ride-Hailing in the United States.” Research Report – UCD-ITS-RR-17-07. October 2017. Institute of Transportation Studies ? University of California, Davis. Pp. 1,2.

30) Erin Stepp. ‘Americans Feel Unsafe Sharing the Road with Fully Self-Driving Cars: AAA Fact Sheet: Vehicle technology Survey — Phase II. 2017’, Newsroom/AAA.com, available at http://newsroom.aaa.com/2017/03/americans- feel-unsafe-sharing-road-fully-self-driving-cars/

31) Erin Stepp. ‘More Americans Willing to Ride in Fully SelfDriving Cars” January 24, 2018. Newsroom/AAA.com. https://newsroom.aaa.com/2018/01/americans-willing-ride-fully-self-driving-cars/

32) Danielle Muoio. “Uber and Lyft could destroy car ownership in major cities.” Business Insider. Sept 4, 2017. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-and-lyft-limit-personal-car-use-study-2017-8

33) N. David Milder. “Let’s get real about self-driving cars: The transition will take a

significant amount of time.” Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal, February 15 2018. Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 223–232, p. 228

34) David Schaper , “Record Number Of Miles Driven In U.S. Last Year.” NPR. February 21, 2017 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439/record-number-of-miles-driven-in-u-s-last-year

35) Office of Highway Policy Information. Federal Highway Administration. “FHWA Forecasts of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT): Spring 2017.” May 4, 2017. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/tables/vmt/vmt_forecast_sum.pdf

36) See: http://zillow.mediaroom.com/2017-03-01-Millennials-Buying-in-the-Suburbs

37) Deloitte. 2014 Global Automotive Consumer Study 6. http://tinyurl.com/y9ygdeew

38) Joann Muller. Mar 24, 2016 “Millennials Finally Show Up At Car Dealerships (And Automakers Breathe Easier).” FORBES. http://tinyurl.com/yckxnwzq

Some Downtown Equity Issues

Posted on March 17, 2018 by DANTH

Part 2 of the A Closer Look at Some Strategic Challenges Generated by the New Normal for Our Downtowns Series of Articles

By N. David Milder

Introduction.

There are a number of issues that involve questions about who will visit, live, work and play in our downtowns and how all stakeholders – be they those who live, work and play there or those who own properties and businesses – can share in their successes. The term “equity” seems to fit all of these issues. Their emergence has been relatively recent, and their full dimensions are probably yet to be grasped. As a result, most are not on the radar screens of many downtown leaders, save in those cities where the problems have already become very acute and/or nationally visible, e.g., affordable housing in San Francisco and the entire Bay region.

The core equity issues are essentially about what our values and preferences are and how they will be applied to many of the component parts of these successful downtowns. Decades ago, at their nadir, downtowns had a different set of users and, often, different stakeholders. Strong concerns about equity were not really salient since there were so few goodies to distribute and so few people who wanted either a psychological or legal stake in these districts. These days, that has all changed. The equity issues are generated by downtown and community successes, sometimes huge ones, not their failures!

Way back when, it may have been from one of Jane Jacobs’s books, I learned two axioms about downtowns that have stayed with me ever since:

A downtown needs its community’s residents to take psychological ownership of it. It must become “my downtown” in their guts. When that happens, they will not only use it, but also politically defend it, and support efforts to improve it. Psychologically, they become stakeholders.
A downtown should be everyone’s place. It should have attractions suitable for large swathes of the community. It also should be the community’s central gathering place. Anyone acting in an orderly manner should be welcome.

During the decades when downtowns were in decline, it seemed as if few people within their communities wanted to take psychological possession of them. Today’s successful downtowns show a marked ability to attract many more people, many of whom are affluent and well-educated, to live, work and play in them. In some, where the median price of a residential unit exceeds $1m and where the price of a ticket to a show or ballgame can exceed $1,000 in secondary markets, many local residents may wonder what’s there in the downtown for them?

Who Can Afford to Live Downtown?

Downtown experts agree that more residents in the downtown and in neighborhoods within reasonable walking distances of it have been the strongest engine for downtown revitalization. Yet, more housing in those places is proving to be a double-edged sword and concerns about middle income and “workforce housing” are popping up across the nation. The situation in San Francisco has attracted a lot of national attention and demonstrates many aspects of this problem. Nearby Silicon Valley has had a famed economic success and many of its relatively well-paid workers seek housing in San Francisco. For example, Google-owned buses haul hordes of them to and fro daily. The result has been a very expensive housing market in the entire Bay area. It’s become very difficult for these relatively affluent workers to find affordable housing and those pressures are also impacting other types of workers. One response is to accept smaller and/or unusual types of dwellings. Here’s a recent headline in the New York Times: “Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco” (1). The article goes on to detail that: “In search of reasonable rent, the middle-class backbone of San Francisco — maître d’s, teachers, bookstore managers, lounge musicians, copywriters and merchandise planners — are engaging in an unusual experiment in communal living: They are moving into dorms.”

Dorms and other “co-living” arrangements are just one solution path San Franciscans have followed to cope with their region’s skyrocketing housing costs. For example, Business Insider even headlined that: “A 23-year-old Google employee lives in a truck in the company’s parking lot and saves 90% of his income” (2).

A Cargo Container Converted into a Small House in San Franciso.

The Tiny House movement has even penetrated the San Francisco area as evidenced by the photo above taken from an article in Business Insider (3). In this instance, a cargo shipping container was converted into the wee home. Some more affluent San Franciscans have spent $1m+ to purchase and renovate “earthquake shacks,” or are living on boats in the bay. Still others are squeezing together with a large number of roommates into an apartment or house (4).

High housing costs are not confined to San Francisco. As can be seen in the above table, in all 10 of these highly successful major cities, the ratio of median home prices to median household incomes exceed the 5.1 level deemed to indicate serious unaffordability.

An important question: are the housing costs in smaller communities than our major cities also skyrocketing and having adverse impacts? Probably yes, if they are located in a region, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, where the whole area is thriving economically. For example, the communities where the Jobs, Zuckerbergs, Pages, and Ellisons live are small and hyper expensive. In less economically robust regions, one might expect a more complicated picture. My hypothesis is that higher housing prices are an inevitable result of a downtown and its community becoming successful, desirable places to live, work and play. So, where that has happened, the prices will very likely be higher. For instance, in districts that have recently experienced a significant revitalization that was propelled by mix-use, residential anchored projects. This has happened in a number of suburban communities around our major cities, especially those served by commuter rail. Otherwise, in smaller towns and cities, housing prices probably have not skyrocketed. For some smaller towns, their lower housing costs when combined with strong quality-of-life assets, and decent broadband and transportation access, might give them a meaningful competitive edge in attracting new residents and businesses.

“Micro-living,” i.e. living in units of 300 to 400 SF or less is a growing phenomenon in cities across the globe where their economic success has pushed housing prices well beyond what middle-income and even upper-middle-income persons/households can afford. In the U.S. they can be found in many of our largest cities — e.g., Boston, Chicago, and NYC – but especially in cities such as Atlanta, Cincinnati, Denver, Pittsburgh, Seattle, St. Louis and Washington D.C., where the share of single person households exceeds 40%. The mini apartments also are not unusual in Tokyo and many European cities (5).

To provide some perspective on these 300 SF to 400 SF units, consider that in the recent past many of their occupants would have rented studio apartments. Their average size in NYC, San Francisco, and Oakland are 550, SF 514 SF and 531 SF respectively. The micro-living units are 20%+ to 40%+ smaller than the studios. Also, consider that in the 20 most populous metro areas there is a distinct trend toward smaller units – though all still average above 854 SF (see the above table). The decreases in size have been smallest is in the metro area that have very high costs and low costs and highest in the high cost and moderate cost markets.

The small units, such as those in dorm or co-living buildings, often have desirable social/communal advantages that attract their inhabitants. Whether a true equity issue exists for these residents under these conditions depends on whether the inhabitants really want to live in such units or are occupying them because they are the best of the bad options available to them.

This discussion would also be more informed if there was some research establishing that humans need abodes that have XYZ square feet of living space. My memory says that HUD somewhere at some time established that dwellings were overcrowded if a unit’s occupants have less than 188 SF each. I have not found any research that supports a number like that. Moreover, it is highly probable that the personal space needs vary culturally. For example, NYC subways certainly get crowded, but I doubt that their riders would accpt either the level of crowdedness found in the Tokyo subways or their use of car packers to assure that the subway cars are maximally stuffed with riders. Moreover, there are many people in neighborhoods in the Borough of Queens in NYC, such Kew Gardens, Forest Hills, Bayside, who use the l far more expensive Long Island Rail Road rather than experiencing the crowded subways.

Many San Franciscans and residents of other high price communities have responded to the housing equity issue with their feet. A recent report notes that: “San Francisco lost more residents than any other city in the US in the last quarter of 2017…. San Francisco lost net 15,489 residents; about 24% more than the next-highest loser on the list, New York City” (6). This behavior pattern probably results in area firms losing a lot of talented employees. Of course, very high housing prices probably will also dissuade a significant number of talented people from taking jobs located in a community.

Tourists and Tight Housing Markets. City leaders, their economic development officials and local business operators often brag about how many tourists and second homeowners they have and all the revenues and jobs that means for their local economies. However, the residents of many of these communities may tell a different story. They may note that the retail developed for tourist shoppers really does not provide the types of merchandise and services they need or want and often creates seasonal traffic nightmares on local streets. In many communities, large and small, tourists also have impacted negatively on the housing market from the perspective of the needs of local residents.

Moses Gates, in a study by Regional Plan Association (RPA), noted that: “54,764 apartments in New York City … are vacant, according to the 2014 Housing and Vacancy Survey – but not really. These are apartments used for ‘seasonal, occasional, or recreational use’ – i.e., pieds-à-terre or second homes” (7). He went on to state that:

“We also need to better leverage our housing inventory, especially in places where land is scarce and building new homes is difficult. One way to do that is through policies like a tax surcharge on second homes in the New York City (or a pied-à-terre tax) designed to get mostly unused apartments back on the housing market.”

It should also be noted that strong suspicions have been raised about many of these pieds-à-terre in some of our biggest and most tourist-popular cities (e.g., NYC, Miami, etc.) being money-laundering operations for their wealthy and unknown foreign owners.

Many of these units are vacant for most of the year. They thus do not contribute the pedestrian traffic to the sidewalks below nor the expenditures in the city’s shops, restaurants and entertainment venues that one might reasonably expect – nor the sales taxes on those expenditures.

Are these second homeowners to be treated differently from a downtown’s normal stakeholders? Laws probably protect them in many ways, but I am certain that many local residents would say there is something unjust stirring here that must be fixed.

Airbnb has seemed to be looking for trouble in a host of cities, quickly getting into conflict with city governments because of its alleged flaunting of local laws and putative negative impacts on the availability of affordable housing. As a recent study published in the APA Journal noted, Airbnb had been criticized for enabling:

“…tourism accommodations to penetrate residential neighborhoods, which creates conflicts between visitors and residents, displacing permanent accommodations in high-demand cities and exacerbating affordability pressures for low-income groups (8).

Governments, at all levels, have for decades often mounted programs to cope with the affordable housing issue, though they almost always targeted low-income and impoverished households. Also, the units produced by those programs usually were placed in poor neighborhoods or in those very out of the way, e.g. Far Rockaway here in NYC. The downtown housing equity issue differs in that the targeted population is middle or even upper-middle-income households and that the units produced for them should be at least within a very reasonable travel time of the downtown. It would also probably be a good idea to have representatives of these residents and their employers extensively involved in the development of the needed housing units.

Downtown Success Encourages Landlords to Ask Independent Retailers for Unaffordable Rents

This problem is made more complicated by the fact that to properly understand it one must break it down analytically into three constituent parts: fairness to the merchants, impacts on vacancies, and the impacts of the loss of popular, able merchants. In many discussions of the affordable retail rent problem, things get murky as attention quickly shifts from one of these sub-issues to another. My objective here is not to provide definitive solutions, but to help illuminate the problem and to suggest some solution paths that may be worth exploring.

The Problem Is Not New. Unaffordable retail rents are an issue that long predates the Great Recession. For example, back in the late 1970s, when I surveyed street-level merchants in Charlotte’s CBD about how they were impacted by an off-street, internal shopping network that was created by overstreet bridges connecting a number of new buildings, they replied that it took traffic from the sidewalks and led to hard to afford rent increases. In the two districts I managed, I never met a small merchant who did not have something negative to say about their rent increases.

Generally, when downtowns or neighborhoods become observably successful, they not only attract retail chains, but also tend to attract many other types of businesses, such as personal, professional and financial service operations. A very high percentage of these operations can afford higher retail rents than the average independent retailer. Some, such as the banks, are willing and able to spend a lot more on rents than even the well-heeled retail chains. As one observer noted: “Banks frequently overpay by 15% to 20% or more on average for real estate compared to other retailers for comparable space. Over 10 or 20 years we’re talking a lot of money!” (9).

I put together the above table for an article I wrote back in 2010. It shows how much space a merchant could afford to lease if 15% of his or her annual sales were devoted to paying rent (10). The 15% figure makes the analysis somewhat conservative, as a more accurate number would the 8% to 12% range for downtown merchants and about 10% for restaurants. Small merchants just cannot afford a whole lot of space in any successful district unless they have very significant annual sales.

Small retailers have not been the only group impacted on. Jeremiah Moss, in his book Vanishing New York, describes how bohemian artistic live-work areas, such as the East Village, were erased by major retail chains coming in.

Why Do Landlords Ask for Unreasonable Rents? Landlords are not necessarily being venal or thoughtless if they sign these higher paying tenants when they appear on their doorsteps. They are simply responding rationally to proven market demand. Of course, even then, they must decide, perhaps just implicitly, that these non-retail uses will ultimately generate more value than if a current small retail tenant was retained. However, one might ask if they considered how that tenant might affect nearby businesses and buildings or if they just considered their own bottom lines. Obviously, another important question is if considering the impacts of a potential tenant on the district should be obligatory in some way, shape or form? This problem would ease if a landlord or an accomplished EDO owned a lot of downtown properties with retail tenants and managed them like a mall, but that is an unlikely outcome.

Here are some other patterns that I have found in the ways landlords establish their rent increases

Some increases are based on a reasonably accurate assessment of local rising property values and dominant asking rents. Both of these may already reflect the district’s growing success. These landlords tend to avoid asking for the highest rents. Among them, are a number of experienced professionals who see the landlord function as having strong stewardship aspects and consider what is good not only for their properties but also for those that are near them. I fear that they are a dying breed. How instead can we develop more of them?
Some small landlords I’ve spoken to simply could not explain the reasons for their very high rent increases, save to say they were products of their best judgments. Among those that I have met, many were new to the U.S. and new to local property and retail markets. A number of them would stubbornly maintain unreasonable asking rents for a year or more. These landlords do not typically care who their tenant is as long as they pay the asked for rent. Here the high rents and vacancies are being sustained by landlord ignorance and management ineptitude. Newness to the area is another factor.
Other increases are based on hopes, often wishful, that a national chain or other higher paying tenants can be attracted that will pay much higher rents and have a better credit rating than those of the current independent retail tenant. An analysis of the local retail market is either perfunctorily done or simply missing. An example of this is Wong Kee, located in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It recently “succumbed to a new landlord and rising rents.” It was in Chinatown for nearly 30 years. Its lease was not renewed. by the landlord. The landlord wants to build a pharmacy in its place, though there are already several pharmacies nearby (11). This type of landlord needs to learn what is really feasible from a business recruitment perspective.
A few other landlords – usually those unfamiliar with the downtown, retailing or even property ownership – will ask for very large increases because they paid way too much for their newly purchased building. Their huge rent increases are what they need to financially stay whole. This may be because their bank loan agreement probably stipulated a formula for determining what the rents should be. There was little room for them to consider local market factors, even if they wanted to — and too many didn’t care anyway. According to Jerimiah Moss, banks will devalue a property if it has a small business tenant but increase it for a retail chain tenant. “There’s benefit to waiting for chain stores. If you are a hedge fund manager running a portfolio you leave it empty and take a write-off” (12). In other words, such landlords have tax incentives that encourage them to demand very high rents and tolerate long-term vacancies. They also seem absolutely oblivious about how a vibrant district will increase their local property values and bottom lines.

The Fairness Issue. Local residents and civic leaders may feel that some of the merchants facing unaffordable rent increases are being unfairly treated. This issue is implicitly present in most usages of the phrase “unaffordable rents” where unaffordable is really seen as a synonym for unfair. Should such an equivalence be accepted? Moreover, why should any government entity or nonprofit help those facing unaffordable rents? Market forces are freely at work and, to quote Barzini in the Godfather, “After all, we are not a bunch of communists.” I would argue that it is not the unfairness of the unaffordable rents that justifies remedial action, but their most important impacts: long-term and multiple vacancies and the loss of many popular, high-quality merchants.

Vacancies. First, let’s establish that a certain level of vacancies is necessary for a downtown to work correctly and prevent ossification. Downtowns need some churn to recruit new, attractive merchants and to get rid of the dregs. I think it’s generally accepted that a vacancy rate below 5% suppresses the desired level of churn while one above around 10% can have bad effects on the district. Many consultants, downtown leaders and, perhaps more frequently, elected officials, believe that vacancies can be an unattractive creeping plague. However, the real problem about vacancies may not be the emptiness of the storefront, but the absence of an accomplish operator to occupy it. Let me anticipate those who will claim that a cluster of empty storefronts is visually an eyesore for the district, diminishes its walkability and a puts a blemish on its reputation, by asking: Is the district really any better when the vacancies are filled by unpopular, inept operations? Bad operators can repel customers and downtown visitors even more than empty storefronts.

It is also important to realize that any valid explanation of today’s retail vacancies must take a multi-causal approach that includes far more cautious consumer behavior, the rise of Millennials who prefer experiences over things, significantly reduced demand by retail chains in terms of both the number and size of their new locations, and affordable rents. The reduced retail demand is especially relevant because many of the landlords that were pushing out independents were doing so in hopes of recruiting the very chains that were hardest hit by reduced consumer favor and demand, such as the apparel specialty retailers.

It is also important to consider that reducing landlord asking rents is not the only way of reducing vacancies. As Andy Manshel reminded me, good results can be achieved by “animating vacant storefronts with temporary art or high-quality other pop up uses.” He also suggested that vacancies could be taxed, motivating landlords to sign leases.

Generally, it can be reasonably argued that concern about vacancies is a misunderstanding of the essential core problem.

The Loss of Popular, High-Quality Merchants. That core problem is not the emptiness of the vacancies, but that ill-informed landlord rent increases can result in the closings of independent merchants who are well-loved in the community. They are real losses for their customers, nearby business owners, and their district. Additionally, it usually is very hard to replace them.

However, it must be understood, that by definition, about half of a downtown’s merchants will be below average in their performance, including their ability to satisfy local customers. Are the potential closings of poorly performing, unpopular merchants the type of losses that are worthy of preventive actions by an EDO or municipal interventions? Some, who are ideologically committed to small businesses, may say yes, believing every small firm by definition is worth retaining or saving. Yet, many savvy downtown managers and civic leaders see a prime result of their revitalization efforts being the replacement of their poor-quality merchants, not necessarily with bigger operators or chains, but with higher quality operations.

Who Should Receive Help? One might cogently argue that the harm done to the public and/or district that would result from the closing of a popular and able merchant might justify an EDO or municipal intervention, but how much sway should the “fairness” of the rent increase have? For example, should an unpopular or incompetent merchant who gets an unaffordable rent increase be helped? That would imply that the fairness issue carries the day. Or will assistance only go to merchants who are able and/or popular? Is the fairness issue unrelated to the issue of the merchant’s value to the community or district? I would suggest that the fairness issue only becomes relevant when the merchant’s community value criterion is satisfied.

My observations suggest that the merchant’s value to the community is very likely to be considered when one specific business favored by an important segment of the community announces that it will soon need to move or close – whatever the cause, e.g., poor sales, increased competition, workforce problems, high operating costs (including costs of space) etc. In contrast, because of the sheer number of businesses involved, municipal attempts to remediate unaffordable rents cannot logistically evaluate each of the benefiting firms and it would probably be a political nightmare to do so anyway. As a result, the fairness issue seems to prevail when municipal actions are taken. For example, here in NYC, the City Council has passed a bill that reduces the Commercial Rent Tax that businesses have to pay if they are located in Manhattan below 96^th Street, pay $250,000+ annually in rent, and that have annual revenues under $5m (13).

In several large cities across the nation — NYC being one of them — proposals also have appeared for rent control laws that cover properties with retail uses.

What Kind of Programs Do We Need to Cope with the Unaffordable Rents Problem? Municipal actions tend to treat quality merchants and underachievers in the same way, probably out of necessity. Moreover, both the retail rent control and merchant tax abatements seem to be rather shotgun approaches aimed at helping broad classes of small merchants. The key actors, whose behaviors need to be altered, are the landlords, not the merchants. The retail rent control approach carries with it great potential dangers and certain resistance from the entire real estate community. Yes, the tax abatement helps some worthy merchants, but it also helps make the unaffordable rent increases more bearable. In that way, it implies the increases are justified.

Downtown EDOs may be in a far better position to mount more effective programs to influence landlord behavior. Many of the landlords are probably on their boards and many others have engaged in their programs. Anyone who wants to educate or convince landlords has to have won their esteem, trust, and confidence. The goal of such an educational effort cannot unrealistically be to convince large numbers of landlords. Instead, it should be, to convince a savvy few among them who can lead by example and thereby also exert some market pressures for others to follow.

Probably the best solution to the affordable retail rents problem is to help able merchants buy the spaces they need to do business. They might do this alone or as a group. Buying a single storefront space is unlikely unless it is from some kind of retail coop or condo. In many suburban towns and cities with populations under around 100,000, I’ve encountered retailers who own the entire buildings in which their stores are located. In big, high rent districts with stores located in big expensive buildings that is not likely

It might be possible for buildings that have multiple storefronts to lease, that a partnership of some kind might buy either the entire building if it is cheap enough or just the retail spaces in the larger more expensive buildings. These groups of retailer property buyers most likely will not emerge organically from the merchants themselves. Probably, they will need the catalytic interventions of teams lead by the downtown EDO that has strong active support from the municipal government and a civic-minded developer.

Local governments can do a lot to assist the development of the retailer-owned co-op or condo buildings:

Provide low-cost land or a low-cost building.
PILOTS just as developers are ordinarily given.
Other abatements such as on NYC Commercial Rent Taxes.

The EDO might also help the buyers connect to financial organizations that will provide them with loans that have reasonable terms.

If helping able retailers purchase their spaces is not viable, here are some other actions that might be tried to assist these merchants. Their effectiveness is far from assured. To influence landlords, local governments might consider:

Using zoning and tax incentives to reduce spaces so that they are smaller than what chain stores would want, perhaps around 1,500 SF to 2,000 SF. Landlord blowback can be expected. Also, quality independent merchants might find such spaces too small and a few chains now might still find them suitable.
Use zoning to limit where chain stores can go. This has been done for personal service operations and big boxes. Various legal and political problems can be expected. Landlord blowback can be expected.
Use their own legislative powers to change its tax code to erase any incentives for landlords to demand higher rents and tolerate long vacancies. Also, vacancies might be taxed as if they were occupied.
Use their external political influence to change the state’s tax code to erase any incentives for landlords to demand higher rents and tolerate long vacancies

If the retailer space purchasing option is not viable, to influence landlords, downtown EDOs might consider:

Creating either a formula that landlords can use to calculate an appropriate affordable rent for their retail spaces or to identify the steps in an analytical process that can help landlords make a well-reasoned decision about rent increases.
Educating landlords about the importance of taking into consideration district benefits and harms in their recruitment decisions.
Make a special effort that targets landlords new to the district, retailing or property ownership.
Jawbone banks about the value of small merchants to properties and downtown.
Issue a brief annual report that identifies the most “recruitable” types of businesses to the district and the types of spaces they will want.
Publicly praise and disseminate information about what landlords who are effectively dealing with the rent increase issue are doing.

To help high value, threatened merchants, downtown EDOs should assist them to:

Find new locations. Deft use of the Internet can help many independent retailers thrive in locations previously deemed less than optimum.
Find financing for the move.
Publicize their new location to let current and potential customers know where they now are.

Who Can Play Downtown?

As Central Social District (CSD) functions and venues have become of growing importance to the vibrancy and success of our downtowns, this basic question has become correspondingly important.

A few years ago, I put together the above table to demonstrate the user frictions that five specific CSD venues and two types of CSD venues have here in NYC. The specific venues were Bryant Park, Lincoln Center (LCPA), Madison Square Garden (MSG), The Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The types of venues were movie theaters and Broadway theaters. The user frictions I looked at were:

When the venues were open.
Their admission fees.
Whether the user’s schedule could drive a visit or does the user have to conform to what is available on the venue’s schedule of performances.
Can the venue be used for visits that last 45 minutes or less? Lots of downtown visitors have holes in their schedules of that length and districts that have venues that can entertainingly plug those holes will be much stronger than those that cannot.

From the perspective of when the venues are open for people to use them, hands down Bryant Park has the most hours open, followed by the movie theaters. LCPA and MSG are basically closed during most days, while the two museums are closed 5 nights a week. If you work or go to school, these results mean that some venues are much harder to use than others.

Another key friction is how much it costs to be admitted to these venues and here is where many downtown users are simply priced out. Again, Bryant Park followed by movie theaters are the most affordable – and in many instances by gargantuan amounts of dollars:

Bryant Park is free to enter and the fees for using some of its attractions, such as riding the carousel or ice skating, are reasonable. It and other parks in the city cost the least to use.
At the time I did the research, my check of cinemas in Manhattan showed the average price for a ticket was about $13. Nationally, at the time it was about $8. I would argue that movie house ticket prices should be the benchmark of affordability because so many people still go to the movies.
MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art rank next in lowest general admission prices. The Met “asks” for a $25 donation; MoMA requires it. The Met request is based on the deal the city made when giving land for the museum that gives NYC residents free admission. Residents can pay what they want or nothing at all. A $25 fee/donation to these museums would be 1.9 times more than the average cost of a movie ticket in Manhattan.
The prices at Lincoln Center are pricey. An average ticket to the opera costs $156. That’s 12 times more than going to a movie and taking a four-member family could cost a real bundle. If you want to accept alpine, nose-bleed seats you can get a ticket to a NY Philharmonic concert for about $29. But prices go up to about $112/concert if you are a subscriber to a series. That’s 8.6 times more than a movie ticket. Tickets to the opera and philharmonic concerts can be even higher than those cited if they are purchased on the secondary market and there is strong demand for them. But, given that their audiences have weakened in recent years, the markups are not as large as for Broadway shows or Madison Square Garden events. Perhaps in recognition of its high admission prices as well as its mission to serve a broad public, the Philharmonic does give a lot of free concerts on the LCPA’s campus as well as in the boroughs outside Manhattan. It also has a significant educational program in NYC’s schools.
In 2013, the average price for a ticket to a Broadway show was $98.64. Back in 1955, for her birthday, I took my girlfriend to see Mr. Wonderful on Broadway. We had dinner before at a steakhouse, Gallagher’s and to get to and from I hired a limo. It was a very memorable evening. The whole thing cost under $70, with the fifth-row center seats costing about $8.50 each. Adjusting for inflation, the price of those tickets would be $73.91 in 2013 dollars, substantially less than the actual $98.64. The difference is probably substantially accounted for by higher costs, such as for labor, talent, marketing, and equipment, etc. The biggest problems with today’s Broadway theater ticket prices is that so many of the tickets are bought by dealers who then resell them at substantial markups and that some hot plays are asking for $500 a ticket. Paying $1,000+ per ticket for hot shows.in the secondary market is far from uncommon.
The average ticket to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, in 2013, cost $125, while a ticket to a Rangers was $78. A ticket to a Billy Joel concert at the Garden could range from from $64 to $124. However, here too, a significant percentage of the tickets are captured by dealers in the secondary market and prices for a very popular game or concert can go above $1,000. Joe Six-Pack fans are unlikely to have the financial resources to attend with any regularity the basketball and hockey games of their favorite teams. Their attendance is more likely confined to special occasions for which they either plan early and save or are gifted. For these fans, downtown sports bars may be one way to deliver the more affordable TV access to these games in an arena-like, fan-filled setting.

Parks, other public spaces, and movie theaters are entertainment venues that help make a downtown everyone’s neighborhood. They are the most easily accessible and the least expensive to visit. Consequently, they provide reasons for most of a community’s population to take psychological possession of their downtown. Where they are absent or weak, the downtown will be lacking very important support mechanisms. On the other hand, attendance at the events of many high culture performing arts venues, popular concerts, and professional sports events can only be afforded by those with above-average amounts of discretionary dollars to spend. These folks, too, are assets for their downtowns, assets that downtown leaders only dreamed of attracting in years past.

The Impact of Tourism. The table above was generated from data published online by the Broadway League. It shows just how much the attendance at Broadway shows is dominated by out-of-towners. Just 22% of the ticket holders are NYC residents. Another 18% come from the surrounding suburbs. Most, 61%, are tourists, with about 46% coming from other parts of the USA and about 15% from other countries.

Strong tourism can have important impacts on a local economy. For example, here in NYC, we have about 60 million tourist visitors annually and their direct spending in 2016 amounted to about $64.8 billion (14). About 6.45 billion went to firms in the recreation and entertainment industries. Without tourist expenditures for Broadway tickets, the relatively high ticket prices probably would not have been reached or maintained. One may wonder if a lower flow of tourists would have resulted in lower Broadway theater ticket prices that would have attracted more buyers from NYC residents and from folks in the surrounding suburbs.

As is happening in many entertainment niches (defined to include cultural/arts venues) across the nation, tourism now accounts for very high percentages of the attendance at many of NYC’s major entertainment venues. This is particularly true for our most prestigious museums, where tourists account for 75% or more of their attendance (see table above). These institutions aspire to be and are world-class venues. That means that though they are located in NYC, for New Yorkers, they are no longer just theirs. Some psychological adjustments may be needed. As I write this I remember many years ago, when my neighbors and shopkeepers in Paris warned me in the late spring, that soon “your Americans and the Germans would come” and Paris would not be the same until the fall. They were absolutely right. The buildings, the Seine, the Metro, the museums were all the same, but Paris in the summer was very different. My French friends explained that they felt during the summertime as if their beloved city is taken over by foreigners. It’s really not theirs during those months. Things may have changed in Paris since my student days there, but that sense of tourists taking over is one I’ve encountered in several other communities here in the USA

Tourism can be boon for many downtowns, but it also often is a two-edged sword, that brings a number of problems with it. Some of these problems are obvious, such as how tourism can impact housing and retail, while others may be quite subtle, such as residents psychologically feeling dispossessed in their own communities. Part of the New Normal, as more and more downtowns become adept at attracting tourists, will also be the emergence of these problems.

ENDNOTES

1. Nellie Bowles. “Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco.” New York Times. March 4, 2018. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/dorm-living-grown-ups-san-francisco.html?

2. “Employee lives in truck in parking lot.” “Business Insider. October 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truck-in-parking-lot-2015-10

3. See: http://www.businessinsider.com/american-suburbs-dying-photos-2017-10#in-lieu-of-traditional-housing-some-millennials-are-turning-shipping-containers-sailboats-and-vans-into-homes-59

4. Melia Robinson. “All the crazy things happening in San Francisco because of its out-of-control housing prices.” March 6, 2018. http://www.businessinsider.com/why-people-are-leaving-san-francisco-2018-3

5. Wendy Koch, “Mini-apartments are the next big thing in U.S. cities,” USA TODAY, August 1, 2013. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/30/tiny-apartments-apodments-catch-on-us-cities/2580179/

6. Prachi Bhardwaj. “San Francisco is losing more residents than any other city in the US, creating a shortage of U-Hauls that puts a rental at $2,000 just to move to Las Vegas” BI. March 5, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-bay-area-residents-moving-away-increase-u-haul-rental-prices-2018-3.

7. Moses Gates. “How a pied-à-terre tax could help solve New York City’s housing crisis.” City & State New York. Aug. 30, 2017. https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/opinion/pied-a-terre-tax-could-help-solve-new-york-city-housing-crisis.html

8. Nicole Gurran and Peter Phibbs. “When Tourists Move In: How Should Urban Planners Respond to Airbnb?” Journal of the American Planning Association. January 2017. 2017https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2016.1249011)

9. Richard Pilla. “Why banks overpay for real estate” BAI Oct 6, 2015 https://www.bai.org/banking-strategies/article-detail/why-banks-overpay-for-real-estate

10. N. David Milder. “As we leave the recession, affordable downtown retail rents are a revitalization imperative.” Downtown Idea Exchange. May 2010. https://www.downtowndevelopment.com/perspectives/dixperspectives050110.pdf

11. “Wong Kee Vanished.” http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2018/03/wong-kee.html Retrieved on March 14, 2018.

12. Quoted in Edward Helmore. “New York’s vanishing shops and storefronts: ‘It’s not Amazon, it’s rent.’” The Guardian. Dec 24, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/24/new-york-retail-shops-amazon-rent?CMP=share_btn_link

13. Sarah Maslin Nir. “Tax Break Could Help Small Shops Survive Manhattan’s Rising Rents.” New York Times. Nov. 28, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/nyregion/rent-tax-manhattan-local-shops.html

14. Tourism Economics. “The Economic Impact of Tourism in New York.” https://www.governor.ny.gov/sites/governor.ny.gov/files/atoms/files/NYS_Tourism_Impact_2016.pdf

Some of the Impacts of the Emerging Retail Paradigm on Downtowns

Posted on March 11, 2018 by DANTH

Part 1 of the A Closer Look at Some Strategic Challenges Generated by the New Normal for Our Downtowns Series of Articles

By N. David Milder

Introduction

As I have been arguing for about 10 years now, our downtowns, no matter their size or geographic location, will be facing a set of challenges and opportunities for the foreseeable future that are quite different from those that downtowns faced from the 1960s through the mid-2000s (1). Even as more and more downtowns are attaining great popularity and economic vibrancy, in many crucial respects they will be facing multi-faceted uncertainty and very strong forces that are ushering in significant changes. This situation will not be surprising to those who understand that downtown revitalization is a never-ending process, that even today’s successes do not vitiate the need to prepare for tomorrow’s inevitable new challenges.

Many of those changes will be behavioral, manifested in what visitors/users do downtown and the motivations for their visits. Perhaps even more disruptive – and often in positive ways – will be the changes in the ways downtown spaces, be they retail, office, residential, parking, roadways or parks will be used, and the physical changes needed to facilitate those use changes.

My observations suggest that many downtowners, who understandably are happily focused on their district’s success, are not preparing to deal with these challenges, often even though they may have already emerged in their districts. The objective of this article is to help make downtowners and their EDOs’ leaders become more aware of some of these emerging strategic challenges, so they can begin to take effective actions to respond to them.

We are seeing important changes in the ways that we shop and how we work, how retailers use their brick and mortar spaces and companies use office spaces. In a decade or two, we also will be interfacing with automobiles in entirely new ways and in anticipation of that fact, some steps should be taken either in the near future or right now. The New Normal for our Downtowns promises many large benefits, but also a lot of change and uncertainty.

The Impacts

The retail industry’s operational paradigm is undergoing a disruptive shift in a process that probably will not be completed for another decade. Today, its ultimate characteristics remain uncertain (2). Many downtown stakeholders and EDO leaders are aware of this situation and feel they cannot do much about it – after all, they think, that’s the job of the retailers. For them, the most salient characteristics of the changing retail paradigm are the reduced demand for retail spaces and the difficulty of recruiting retailers to fill vacant storefronts. However, contrary to what many of them believe, downtowners can indeed take steps to enhance the retail shopper’s downtown experiences by attracting and strengthening their downtown’s Central Social District venues, as I have written about in many previous articles (3). In a future article, I will explore the need to better connect what is happening inside downtown shops with what is happening immediately outside on downtown streets and public spaces. Below I want to focus on a number of other issues that are integrally related to the state of today’s retailing that I think downtowners need to be more aware of and prepared to act upon.

The Decline of Strolling and Browsing Shoppers and Multi-Purpose Trips. Among downtown experts, if you peel away the layers of their understanding of how downtowns optimally work, you soon get to the notions of strolling/browsing shoppers and multi-purpose visits. The competitive advantage downtowns have long had over other types of commercial districts was their ability to enable visitors, on the same visit, to easily walk to a large number of different kinds of destinations, e.g., retailer, eatery, doctor, cinema, concert hall, public park, library, bank, real estate broker, government offices, rail or bus terminal, etc. While, retail destinations were just one type among many, in years past successful downtown retailers would be attracting a lot of users and accounting for a significant portion of their district’s pedestrian traffic. The importance of having a multi-functional downtown that sparks lots of multi-purpose trips is evidenced by the very successful malls (such as the Easton Town Center in Columbus, OH) that are designed to be multi-functional – they have residential, office, personal services, and strong entertainment components – and enable their visitors to have multi-purpose trips.

In the optimal downtown, visitors brought in for whatever reason would stroll down its streets, passing shop windows that might catch their eye and draw them inside. Once in the shop, they would browse through its aisles looking at its merchandise, often buying merchandise impulsively or unplanned.

The Internet, combined with many people leading time-pressured lives, has significantly disrupted shopper behavior so that the numbers of strolling/browsing shoppers and multi-purpose visits have meaningfully diminished. Research has shown that for several years now, “(q)quick trips make up more than half of all shopping trips” (4). Many shoppers, after first doing online searches, then make targeted, quick in-quick out visits to brick and mortar shops. They don’t stroll down the streets as much but travel straight to their retail destinations. Once inside the store, they go directly to the merchandise they previously researched online. They spend less time in the stores, do far less in-store browsing and make fewer impulse purchases. Others are “click and collect” shoppers who make their purchases online and visit the shop just to pick up their merchandise.

Americans’ concerns about convenience are understandable, given the time pressures so many of them face. Downtowns that do not try to make themselves appropriately convenient – there are right and wrong ways of doing it – are negligent in their development of an effective district customer service program.

These quick in and out shoppers are not new, but the Internet has stimulated their numbers to really burgeon – and that poses a number of problems for downtowns:

They are anathema to a lot of downtowners – they are not languorous strollers or browsers. Moreover, they likely to use cars and want to park in front of their destination stores. Retailers relying strongly on this market segment are likely to want drive throughs, curb cuts, etc. On the other hand, they have also helped induce retailers to adopt smaller store formats and “click and collect” programs.
They probably are producing a significant reduction in pedestrian trips, most visible and felt in downtowns that have significant, but not huge pedestrian flows of thousands per hour. That means the vast majority of them.
How can those trips be replaced? Having and maintaining a robust flow of pedestrians is more important than maintaining any specific kind of economic use. In most instances, stronger public spaces and other Central Social District venues are probably the most effective and viable responses – they are what drives most discretionary downtown visits these days.
The quick in and out shoppers also probably reduce the number of multi-purpose trips and the ability of downtown retailers to attract customers who will also visit other types businesses in the district. How can that be remedied? Again, stronger public spaces and other Central Social District venues are probably the most effective and viable responses.
These shoppers, while in their quick in and out shopping behavior mode, are likely immune to the magnetism of the quality experiential retail environments that are increasingly seen by retail experts as the secret sauce for brick and mortar stores to have a healthy flow of customer traffic. However, they can switch their shopping behavior mode at a later time.
While I haven’t seen any research on this, I strongly suspect that designated places near these shops for Uber, Lyft and taxis drop-offs and pick-ups would also probably appeal to these customers. Of course, customer accommodations such as these will not be easy to provide, in no small measure because they would be contrary to the way many downtown leaders want their districts to operate.
That said, downtown retailers probably cannot afford to write-off shoppers in a quick in and out behavioral mode. They probably represent too many sales dollars.
Moreover, a shopper may engage in the quick in and out behavior mode on one day and then prefer being in a languorous experiential shopping environment on an another. Target’s plans for its new stores tries to offer features that appeal to people in both the convenience and experiential shopping modes (5). Ticking shoppers off on their convenience-oriented trip may dissuade them from visiting the shop when they want the experiential retail setting. When, back in 2012, I last visited Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, it had short-term parking spots dedicated to shoppers picking up merchandise. Other districts may want to follow suit.
Because the Internet has in a very real sense increased the number of shopping trips that have a specific retail store destination in mind, it can be argued that some retailers may be satisfied with locations that traditionally have been considered less than top rank, e.g., on a side street. Moreover, at such locations, it may be easier to provide the short-term parking and drop-off/pick-up spots for on-demand car services than at the downtown’s 100% corner.

The Need to Repurpose Significant Amounts of Retail Space as Demand Declines. The need of downtown landlords to find new uses for their vacant former retail storefronts is a growing trend and found in all kinds of downtowns. Given that so many downtown properties, especially those that are not in our largest cities, will not be owned by professional real estate companies, there is a strong probability that many local landlords will need help to identify viable new uses for their long-vacant retail spaces and perhaps, then, to attract appropriate tenants. In a very basic way, the repurposing of vacant retail stores has become an essential element of viable business recruitment strategies. The problems are that too many downtown EDOs don’t have a recruitment program and that too many have failed to see that many of their stakeholder landlords need help if they are to repurpose their problematic properties.

The reasons why so much retail space now needs to be repurposed are simple and well-known:

The US has far more retail space than we really need.
Retail chains have finally wised-up and are now opening far, far fewer stores. Those that they do open are about 25% smaller than those they opened a decade ago.
The Great Recession forced a great number of small independent retailers to close, mostly because their customers’ incomes had been reduced and/or threatened. Their closure rate was not greater than that of larger retailers, but their very large absolute numbers – 91% of all retail enterprises have fewer than 20 employees — created the public’s impression that they were hurt far more than other retailers (6).
Post-recession, successfully revitalizing downtowns, be they large or small, encountered vacancies caused by landlords asking for unaffordable rents from their small independent retail tenants.

Today, high numbers of retail vacancies in our largest, densest and most expensive downtowns are not uncommon. For example, in Q3 of 2017, Manhattan’s economy was doing quite well, but its 12 major submarket areas had an “availability rate” of retail space” – a.k.a. the vacancy rate – that averaged 18%, with a low of 7% and a high of 32% (). This strongly suggests that the landlords are asking for unreasonable rents, or much of this vacant retail space is outdated, or these spaces lack sufficient market support. The spaces that are outdated or lack market support probably should be repurposed.

Since the Great Recession, my discussions with suburban downtown managers and my own field observations have indicated that a lot of former retail spaces are being repurposed organically by market forces and rented to personal and professional services operations as well as eateries. In recent years, their storefront vacancy rates have fallen to more acceptable levels, but many suburban downtown leaders worry about maintaining a sense of vibrancy with a reduced retail drawing power. I have long argued that many of the operations in personal services pamper niches can keep store windows interesting and customer traffic levels significant. However, many of these suburban downtowns may want to bring in more Central Social District type operations such as craftspeople, childcare locations, senior centers to fill their storefronts.

Tellingly, at the Illinois Institute of Rural Affair’s (IIRA) 2018 annual conference, one of the featured presentations focused on: “opportunities for communities to create vibrant downtowns by repurposing former retail stores as entertainment, service or civic destinations which better meet the needs of today’s residents” (8). My impression is that many downtown leaders in larger towns also need assistance in properly repurposing their vacant retail spaces. This IIRA presentation also hits on essential points that leaders in downtowns of all sizes need to strongly consider: the repurposing of retail vacancies should not be just to fill an empty space but seen as an important opportunity to increase the district’s vibrancy and economic well-being as well as to improve the quality-of-life available to the people in the community.

The Reconfiguration of Retail Spaces as Their Mix of Functions Change. There are a number of functions that can be part of a retail transaction process and that can be done in a brick and mortar downtown store: e.g., sales, distribution, online order fulfillment, showrooming, customer service and relationship building, inventory storage, connections to the store’s other marketing/sales channels. A lot of the effort going into finding a new retail paradigm is really about determining which of these functions should be present and how they should be carried out. The decisions retailers make about these two issues are important because they probably will have large impacts on the type and amounts of brick and mortar spaces they will need. They also could have impacts on adjacent streets and sidewalks, e.g., if a retailer’s location generates a huge increase in truck traffic because it serves as an online order fulfillment center.

The photo below shows one of the interesting combinations of functions and partnerships that can occur.

Amazon package delivery lockers outside a 7-Eleven in Forest Hills, NY

To accommodate “click and collect” shoppers, online retail giant Amazon has placed a set of package delivery lockers outside a 7-Eleven in a NYC neighborhood. This serves Amazon’s distribution needs while providing the convenience store chain with revenues from what was a dead space. Any reputable convenience store chain’s location is a potential site for such lockers.

Another example of a retailer’s interesting selection of functions is Bonobos, the online-birthed men’s clothing merchant. As of January 2018, it had opened 48 brick and mortar stores in major shopping locations around the country. While it carries lots of samples of its clothing, so customers can try them on, it has none in stock that customers can take with them after making a purchase. Their purchases are delivered to them from another central location. This retailer does not need a lot of on-site space for either storing merchandise or fulfilling orders. Many online-birthed retailers are adopting this “buy and send” approach in their brick and mortar shops.

Nordstrom has a pilot store, dubbed Nordstrom Local, that is very adventurous. It is small, only 3,000 SF, and targets upscale shoppers who can afford to participate in Nordstrom’s Trunk Club that specializes in designer clothing and providing highly personalized services. The customer interacts with stylists rather than salespeople. The only clothing in the store are those pieces that have been selected by the stylists and their customers for tying on. Customers are further pampered with coffee, juice and nail bars. Outside, space has been provided to accommodate curbside pickups. The stylists use an app to help customers select the clothing they will try on when they next visit. (9). It would not be surprising if Nordstrom soon uses artificial intelligence to let customers see what clothing items in various colors and sizes would look like on them, before selecting them for an actual try on.

The Nordstrom Local store on Melrose Place in West Hollywood. (Photo by Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

The online luxury retailer Moda Operandi offers another interesting example of how retailers may use brick and mortar locations, one that is similar in many respects to Nordstrom Local. Moda started online, but later opened a brick and mortar location on 64th Street, steps away from, though not on Madison Avenue. It is not among, yet very close to Mad Ave’s cluster of designer stores and amidst a large dense cluster of very wealthy residents. It is not a traditional store — it does not want to attract shoppers who are walking nearby. It is indifferent to pedestrian flows. It is an “appointment showroom,” where the retailer identifies the customers who will be asked if they want appointments. Those asked are filtered from Moda’s online customers who have made frequent and significant purchases. Moda knows from those purchases and their website navigation a lot about the customer’s preferences. On their appointments, Moda is able to show them a wide range of merchandise specifically selected to match their tastes. This all occurs in a very attractive, private, face-a-face setting. Moda probably sells a lot more merchandise, while the customer gets loads of privacy, recognition, and pampering as well as selections matching their preferences. Using e-commerce transactions to identify/qualify shoppers for personalized, pampering attention in brick and mortar stores may be one of tomorrow’s successful retail strategies (10).

Moda Operandi and Nordstrom Local have very strong personal service-based experiential strategies. Both are looking to have relatively small size physical presences in very well-to-do commercial districts, but that will have very high sales volumes per square foot of space. The retailing activity in their locations also is more invisible than customarily thought necessary for retail establishments. Their operational models rely on their ability to leverage pre-existing relationships – Moda through its online sales and Nordstrom through its Trunk Club – to identify customers to target for intense pampering and relationship building.

Nordstrom Local and Moda are changing the definition of what is a good downtown location for luxury retailers. Though they may be located in a downtown or neighborhood commercial district, strong pedestrian flows and strolling shoppers are irrelevant to their operational model. These locations are valued instead because they are convenient for wealthy customers to access and then receive their pampering. Also, there is a low probability their shoppers will arrive by bus or rail, travel modes that many of these shoppers consider completely déclassé.

What happens to districts like Rodeo Drive, Madison Avenue, Michigan Avenue, Newbury Street, etc. if a significant proportion of their major luxury retailers adopt a lot of the approach used by Moda Operandi and Nordstrom Local? For example, what will be the effects on who is walking on their sidewalks and the local demand for retail space. Will their retailing also become more invisible? Will they, too, have a greater need for stronger Central Social District venues to keep their sidewalks energized?

AmazonGo in Seattle. Photo by Kyle Johnson for the New York Times

The current temple for quick in – quick out shoppers is AmazonGo. Its opening in 2018 in Seattle grabbed a lot of media attention. Though relatively small, 1,800 SF, this convenience store broke new ground because its whole shopping experience uniquely involves several technologies. Check-out is automatic, not requiring a stop at a cashier or register. Shoppers need an Amazon account and the store’s app on their smartphones to enter. That allows their movements to be tracked as they move through the store and take items. When they leave the store, their account is automatically charged for the items they selected and left with.

Other large retailers, such as Home Depot and Walmart, have had self-check-outs for years, but they required the shopper to scan purchased items and then to make a credit card transaction. It took the cashier out of the equation but made the shopper do more to complete the transaction.Most shoppers did not use it. At AmazonGo the scanning and payments are automatic, the shopper needs to do nothing. Also, all customers must use the system. For years, big box stores and supermarkets have faced a lot of consumer blowback about their inconveniences – they are so large it takes a lot of time to get about and find items, checkout lines are too long, etc. Self-checkout was intended to make the shopping trip more convenient (11).

AmazonGo is small enough to easily fit into the vast majority of our downtowns, any of them that can attract a reputable convenience store chain. Lockers for Amazon’s click and collect shoppers could easily be added on to them. The success of these stores will only reinforce convenience shopping. Of course, if you think about it, Amazon’s whole business model is based on appealing to the convenienceand value-oriented shopper.

A certainty: changes are coming to retailers near you!!!

An uncertainty: what those changes will be.

Endnotes

1. See for example: “The New Normal for Downtown Retailing.” Downtown Curmudgeon. Oct 29, 2009 https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2009/10/the-new-normal-for-downtown-retailing-i-introduction

2. See: N. David Milder. “Retail at the End of 2017: Apocalypse or Evolving Paradigm Shift”. .” Downtown Curmudgeon. Dec. 3, 2017. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2017/12/retail-at-the-end-of-2017-apocalypse-or-evolving-paradigm-shift

3. See: N. David Milder. “The New Normal For Our Downtowns Cheat Sheet.” February 1, 2017. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2017/02/the-new-normal-for-our-downtowns-cheat-sheet

4. IRI: Quick Trips Make Up More Than Half of All Shopping Trips” Convenience Store News.07/31/2017 https://csnews.com/iri-quick-trips-make-more-half-all-shopping-trips

5. Corrine Ruff. “Target’s ‘next gen’ store caters to 2 types of customers”. Retail Dive. Nov. 13,2017. https://www.retaildive.com/news/targets-next-gen-store-caters-to-2-types-of-customers/510740/

6. N.David Milder. “Nationally, How Small Retailers Were Impacted by the Great Recession.” Downtown Curmudgeon Blog. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2017/01/nationally-how-small-retailers-were-impacted-by-the-great-recession

7. Cushman & Wakefield, MarketBeat Manhattan Retail Q3 2017

8. See conference program.

9. Ronald D. White. “Nordstrom’s newest store aims for a personal touch — and no clothing racks”. Los Angeles times. Oct. 6, 2017. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nordstrom-local-20171006-story.html

10. A lot of this information is taken from my article on Madison Ave luxury shopping district https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2017/01/a-large-luxury-urban-retail-district-under-the-new-normal

11. Jake Bullinger.” Amazon’s Checkout-Free Store Makes Shopping Feel Like Shoplifting.” The Atlantic , Jan. 24, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-go-store-checkouts-seattle/551357/

Toward a General Strategy for Small Town Economic Development

Posted on October 7, 2017 by DANTH

Toward a General Strategy for Small Town Economic Development

The above link will take you to the article I have just completed on this subject. It focuses on smaller and rural communities with populations under 35,000. However, much of the analysis is also applicable to many suburban communities and even some urban neighborhoods.

Since 2010, I’ve been trying to figure out a viable approach to stimulating meaningful economic development in our smaller communities that:
— Considers current realities
— Leverages likely local assets and
— Does not threaten the scale and lifestyles that make these communities attractive to close to 70 million Americans.

This is a major research paper — 32 pages long — that brings together my work on Central Social Districts, quality of life residential and business recruitment, contingent workers, and small business e-commerce capabilities.

It is a very curmudgeonly article. While I hope it genuinely and productively explores new ground, some readers might find it somewhat contentious.

The article has lots of illustrations, but I still felt it was too long for either a newsletter or blog format.

I hope you will find it informative, useful and interesting.

N. David Milder