The Heart of the City

Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century

Alexander Garvin

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781610919500
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles.In The Heart of the City, distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts—of both successes and failures—of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns.This book will help public officials, civic organizations, downtown business property owners, and people who care about cities learn from successful recent actions in downtowns across the country, and expand opportunities facing their downtown. Garvin provides recommendations for continuing actions to help any downtown thrive, ensuring a prosperous and thrilling future for the 21st-century American city.

Chapter 1

What Is Downtown?

Downtown is a uniquely American word, born in early-19th-century New York City, when the city’s population (confined to the area south of what is now Chambers Street) had just surpassed 200,000.¹ Those who lived north of Chambers Street began saying they were going downtown (meaning south) when they went to work, shop, or do business and uptown (meaning north) when they returned home.

As the largest and richest city in the country, New York became the standard by which other cities judged themselves. Thus, residents of other cities soon also began using the word downtown to refer to their business districts, although they may have been going east, west, or north rather than south. At that time their business districts, like lower Manhattan, were mixed-used concentrations of buildings that included many residences.

Over the ensuing decades a growing number of properties that had once been residential were replaced by businesses that could pay higher prices for busy downtown locations. Eventually the word downtown became synonymous with business district. In the mid-20th century, when residents of inner-city neighborhoods began moving to the suburbs, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary still defined downtown as the business center of a town.²

The 21st-century downtown began to emerge in the 1990s when internet service began, deindustrialization accelerated, crime rates started to decline, and downtown business improvement districts (BIDs) began to proliferate. A BID is a section of a city in which the businesses and property owners form an entity to provide services (often thought to be inadequately provided by government), such as cleaning streets, collecting garbage, providing security, making streetscape enhancements and other capital improvements, and promoting the district, which it pays for from a special real estate tax surcharge collected by local government but transferred directly to the BID. BIDs are operated as government-chartered public–private partnerships administered by a professional staff supervised by a board of directors that often combines members elected from the district and relevant ex-officio government officials.³

Internet service, declining crime rates, and BID services altered the character of downtown retailing and opened opportunities for new business and property development that became the basis for action by individuals, institutions, and governments that generated downtown resurgence in some American downtowns, reversed downtown decline in others, and sometimes accelerated growth.

Retailing in 21st-Century Downtowns

Internet use is responsible for a major change in the amount of downtown building space devoted to retail sales. Total U.S. retail sales climbed from $1.8 trillion in 1992, of which $78 billion was sold by nonstore retailers (4 percent), to $4.85 trillion in 2016, of which $564 billion was sold by internet (approximately 12 percent).⁴ Accordingly, one can assume that in 2016, 8 percent less building floor area space was needed for retailing. That change in land use is evident in the suburbs but less so in downtowns.

In 1990 there were more than 1,350 shopping malls in America containing 1.15 billion square feet of space.⁵ By 2017 that number had dropped to 1,100 malls containing 96 billion square feet of space.⁶ There were 6,985 retail store closures in 2017 in the United States.⁷ The pace of store closures seems to be slowing down, however. Between January and September 2018, 4,480 stores closed, 21 percent less than the year before.⁸ Nevertheless, we can expect further decline in the number of downtown stores, except in districts where the population (and therefore the number of retail customers) is significantly growing.

Some stores are closing because their customers no longer purchase the merchandise they once carried. In a world before cell phones, the internet, and digitized calendars, people used appointment books, ledgers, fountain pens, pocket calendars, and adding machines. They do not buy many of these items anymore. Moreover, if they are interested in some item, they will only stop in a store for a few seconds to take a smartphone snapshot and order the item online. Accordingly, there are now many fewer stationery stores in the United States. Even Staples closed 14 percent of its stores between 2014 and 2016.⁹

The decline in downtown retailing in the 21st century was much less pronounced than in suburban malls, because so many downtowns had acquired new residents during that period. During that period lower Manhattan gained 47,325 residents, downtown Los Angeles gained 21,701 residents, and downtown Philadelphia gained 9,708 residents.¹⁰ These additional residents are customers for the new stores and restaurants opening in lower Manhattan, downtown LA, and other resurgent downtowns.

The same cannot be said about downtown retailing in cities that lost substantial populations over the past half century. Cleveland, which lost 518,000 residents between 1950 and 2010, lost all seven of its department stores. The world’s second largest department store, Hudson’s in Detroit, and Detroit’s nine other downtown department stores are long gone, casualties of that city’s 1.136 million population decline during the same period. Both cities would have to add more than 100,000 downtown residents to generate enough customers to justify the return of a department store. If that happens, however, there is no certainty that the additional population would be sufficient to overcome ever-increasing internet sales.

The disappearance of department stores in these cities is not just the result of their declining populations. Internet competition has reduced the number of department stores in the United States from 10,100 in 1999 to 8,800 in 2008.¹¹ Yet lower Manhattan, bereft of department stores throughout most of the 20th century, has acquired an extremely popular discount department store, Century 21. Philadelphia, on the other hand, has retained one of its six 1950 department stores and replaced three of them with large discount stores, one of which was a branch of the Century 21 flagship store in lower Manhattan.

The same national discount retailers that have become popular throughout the country thrive downtown. There were no Starbucks in New York City until 1994; as of 2002 there were 128.¹² The first Target to open in New York City appeared in Brooklyn in 2002. As of 2017 there were a dozen in different parts of NYC, along with 445 Dunkin’ Donuts.¹³

Thus, by the 21st century downtown had become far more than a cluster of properties where business takes place. It has become a high-density concentration of business, retailing, entertainment, and institutional activity, combined with a large number of residences.

Three Downtown Trajectories

American downtowns are on three main trajectories. Uptown Houston, Atlanta’s Buckhead, and downtowns like them have never stopped thriving. Others, such as downtown Detroit, have been in decline for half a century. Downtowns such as lower Manhattan and downtown Los Angeles, on the other hand, were once on the decline and are now resurgent.

The continuously thriving and resurgent downtowns have one thing in common: a large residential population. Struggling downtowns have small downtown populations. Thus, continually thriving Uptown Houston, the 18th largest downtown, has the fourth largest number of residents (167,000); resurgent Philadelphia, the eighth largest downtown, has the third largest residential population (190,000); and struggling Detroit, the 27th largest downtown, contains only 5,000 residents. Successful 21st-century American downtowns all have sizable residential populations.

In 1950, Uptown Houston was undeveloped rural land with a few emergent suburban subdivisions, that had been annexed to the city of Houston in 1949. Buckhead was a prestigious residential suburb with some service retailers. At that time, downtown Detroit was the thriving center of a city at its peak population of 1.85 million people. Lower Manhattan and downtown Los Angeles, on the other hand, were already declining and would continue to decline for another half century.

Today Uptown Houston contains 26 million square feet of office space, 34 hotels with more than 8,000 rooms, and more than 1,000 stores occupying more than 6 million square feet of retail space. More than 180,000 people live within a 3-mile radius of its main intersection, and 108,000 come to work there every day, nearly 100,000 more than in 1990.¹⁴

Post Oak Boulevard, Uptown Houston, 2016

In the nearly half century since the Galleria opened on Post Oak Boulevard, Uptown Houston has become the 18th largest downtown in America. (Alexander Garvin)

Buckhead, in Atlanta, may have expanded as rapidly as Uptown Houston, but it is a very different downtown. In 1950 it was a 1,594-acre high-end suburb with a population of 26,800 residents living in what the U.S. Census defined as the “urbanized area.”¹⁵ Two years later it was annexed by the City of Atlanta. Seven years after annexation, a major shopping center, Lenox Square Mall, opened on its main street. In 1969, a second shopping center, Phipps Plaza, opened down the street.

Today the core of Buckhead (as defined by its BID) includes more than 27 million square feet of office space, with 2 million overnight visitors every year staying in 23 hotels with more than 5,300 rooms; more than 200 stores occupying more than 6.2 million square feet of retail space (including the 22-million-square-foot Lenox Square Mall and 10-million-square-foot Phipps Plaza) that attracts approximately 32 million customers annually; and 12,000 residents living in 8,500 dwelling units and 68,600 people coming to work there every day.¹⁶

Buckhead, Atlanta (helicopter aerial), 2007

Buckhead is now the nation’s 20th largest downtown (2017). (Alexander Garvin)

Nothing like the mixed-use downtown that emerged around Post Oak Boulevard will occur in Buckhead. It is still a collection of separate automobile-centric, suburban destinations straining to become a mixed-use downtown. Its single-use buildings occupy blocks that people reach by driving to a drop-off location and parking in a garage or vast parking field. Shopping is just far enough away from apartment and office buildings that, rather than walk, occupants separate their day into single-use activities, often driving to a shopping destination rather than mingling with window shoppers on the sidewalk.

Retailing in downtown Detroit, on the other hand, is struggling to make a comeback. In 1950, it was the home of Hudson’s, the second largest department store in the world (at 2.1 million square feet) and 10 other department stores. Today, smaller stores such as Bonobos and Warby Parker have opened on Woodward Avenue, but no department stores have survived. Its 12 hotels with 4,163 rooms had an average occupancy rate of 69 percent in 2016.¹⁷ And its theater district, once second in size only to New York City’s, now hosts only a handful of performances during a typical week. Only 70,000 people went downtown to work in 2016. Consequently, numerous multistory buildings were empty, and only 84 percent of 26 million square feet of net rentable space was occupied.¹⁸ The major downtown attractions are the 41,000-seat Comerica Park, home of the Detroit Tigers since 2000, and Ford Field, a multiuse domed stadium, completed 2 years later, which has a maximum capacity of 80,000. Nevertheless, the downtown population has only climbed to just under 5,000, barely one-third of the number living in Buckhead, which doesn’t come close to accommodating the number of residents found in Uptown Houston or downtown LA.¹⁹

Woodward Avenue, Detroit, 2017

Only 70,000 people come to work every day in downtown Detroit, the 27th largest downtown in the country. (Alexander Garvin)

By 1950, lower Manhattan, which in 1790 was the largest downtown in America, had dropped to number three (after Midtown Manhattan and the Loop in Chicago). However, it was a very different place, having become a single-function business district that went to sleep at 6 pm on Fridays and woke up again at 8 am on Mondays. Fewer than a thousan...