Downtown Digest News • Web Extras
With the US economy increasingly driven by the tech sector, a growing number of downtown leaders in mid-sized cities are looking for ways to spur innovation locally. One example is in Fort Wayne, IN, where a rusting manufacturing hub was transformed into an innovation district and changed attitudes along the way. Jeff Kingsbury is a…Continue reading
Burlington, VT, was long known as a small, picturesque college town. But in recent years, Burlington has become afflicted by big-city problems, including crime and homelessness. Taking matters into its own hands, the Burlington Business Association developed a six point plan to ensure that the downtown is safe for residents, employees, and visitors. One important…Continue reading
A decade ago, the downtown organization in Sioux Falls, SD was looking for a way to boost business during January. Downtown Sioux Falls decided to try Burger Battle, a month-long contest that pitted downtown restaurants in a competition to create the best new burger. Participating eateries debuted a new burger, and diners would try the…Continue reading
Downtown leaders face a parking conundrum. On the one hand, urbanists have long preached that cities underprice parking at the expense of pedestrianism. Yet visitors and merchants often hate any hint of rising parking prices and more expensive parking tickets. Add to the mix, hourly downtown workers, grappling with inflation, and it’s more difficult than…Continue reading
Like many downtowns, Cleveland has struggled to adapt to post-pandemic patterns of commuting and visitation. As of September 2022, the city was getting 80 percent of the overall visits it experienced in 2019. And visits to office buildings had plummeted to just 61 percent of prepandemic levels. Given that harsh reality, the Downtown Cleveland Alliance…Continue reading
Grants, loans to Black entrepreneurs boost downtown — Memphis, TN, is a majority Black city whose developers are mostly white. The Downtown Memphis Commission has been taking strides to change that picture by making the ranks of property investors and merchants more diverse. Watch a video overview of the Downtown Memphis Commission’s award-winning program below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3zOowHCutU
...Imagining the future of downtown with community visioning — The community visioning session is a basic building block of community planning and downtown leadership. Read the full Community Visioning Handbook. ...
The Comprehensive Arts Strategy in St. Petersburg, FL, outlines a roadmap for increased collaboration and new marketing opportunities, and it points to both short-term and long-term priorities. Rather than continuing to go it alone, St. Petersburg’s arts institutions are developing shared resources for maps, ticketing, and brochures, along with strategies for boosting attendance during seasonal…Continue reading
Shawnee, KS, is working to bring more small scale manufacturing to the city center. As a first step, the planning commission approved a proposal to permit "artisanal" manufacturing in two areas downtown. The artisanal manufacturing land use allows on-site production of handmade products including food, alcohol, and art. For a business to qualify under the…Continue reading
Downtown Albuquerque, NM, lost much of its vibrancy as small restaurants and retailers failed during the depths of the Covid-19 recession. A carefully constructed grant program is turning things around. The city directed $500,000 in funding from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to grants for downtown businesses. To be eligible, businesses had to…Continue reading
Downtown emphasizes arts as key part of destination’s appeal — In the past decade there has been almost no public investment in St. Petersburg, Florida’s arts scene. See how they are fixing the problem in St. Petersburg’s Comprehensive Arts Strategy.
...Growing with small-scale manufacturing — Artisanal manufacturing land use allows on-site production of handmade products including food, alcohol, and art. For more on small-scale manufacturing downtown, see the archive article “Five steps for wooing small-scale manufacturers....
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Greenville, MS and Columbus, MS are small cities in the same state, but they’re not obvious candidates for a marketing partnership. The towns are 160 miles apart, and Greenville’s autumn Delta Hot Tamale Festival and Columbus’ springtime Market Street Festival have almost no overlap in attendance. In other words, Columbus was just the kind of…Continue reading
City develops process, guidelines for building tree canopy — In 2020, a catastrophic windstorm ripped through Cedar Rapids, IA. In addition to several deaths and billions of dollars in property damage, the storm destroyed more than half of Cedar Rapids’ tree canopy.
In the aftermath, the city hired an urban planner and a national landscape architecture firm to rebuild the city’s urban forest. See the full ReLeaf Cedar Rapids report.
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