Commentary

Downtown?… Where’s That?

By Bill Collins

CityCenter?

What a pall;

Let’s go out,

And build a mall.

Retired mayors suffer an incurable occupational affliction… sadness. Who wouldn’t be sad at the exile of so much urban activity to outskirts? Who wouldn’t lament the decay of so many metropolitan centers? Back in the early 70s there was even a rollicking top pop tune called “Downtown.” It urged us to go there for fun and escape. Its disappearance from the charts was prophetic – many real downtowns soon followed it into oblivion.

No, we’re not talking here about some hopeless western cities where you can drive around all day and still never figure out where the center is. We’re talking about good old Connecticut. The buildings here tell us where the center is all right, but not why so little goes on there.

But if we find this deterioration alarming, its proposed cures are worse. In each of our three biggest cities, those cures focus on huge new commercial development, outside the urban core. They plan demolition of whatever tawdry old buildings stand in the way, and construction of massive, state-of-the-art new ones. Our cities have become like that legendary Vietnamese village which had to be destroyed in order to be saved.

There are problems with that system. First, if the developer falters, everything stops. Second, if the developer doesn’t falter, success generally draws business away from the center. Third, the public money devoted to subsidizing peripheral development means there is that much less for downtown. Fourth, residents and small business are often forced to move out. Fifth, affordable housing is frequently demolished and rarely replaced. Sixth, if the project is successful, it causes big traffic jams.

Fortunately there are better solutions. It’s just that they take more work than most Connecticut leaders care to put in. Life is easier if you can just throw big bucks at a developer, give him a chunk of land, and turn him loose. Mostly that’s what passes for urban revitalization these days, especially in Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven. Rather than looking at Providence as a model, where downtown was saved and reborn, urban leaders here prefer the old urban renewal model – tear down and build anew.

But building anew can never create the lively mix of architecture that any downtown needs. Nor can a hungry developer afford to create the healthy mix of civic activity sometimes described as the four pillars of urban excitement. These pillars are: 1. Residential, 2. Retail, 3. Office, and 4. Culture. Developers don’t want to hear about residential, other than fancy condos. And culture is messy. It means cinemas, live theaters, benches, restaurants, music venues, farmer’s markets, museums, artist spaces, street vendors, gardens, public sculpture, river walks, murals, outdoor performances, and the like.

These elements of appealing urban life are scarcely a secret. Many suburban mall developers have provided them for years. So have some wealthy towns. But to create a critical mass, you really need a city. A city can also set minimum heights for new buildings, require mixed uses with apartments over stores, and condemn vacant buildings to be fixed up for artists.

This is the sort of political leadership which is so lacking in Connecticut. We prefer to keep paying a big developer a gazillion dollars to tell us what we have to do to help him make money. When it comes to reviving downtown, Connecticut is the Land of Steady Habits all right, but they’re mostly bad.

 

(Bill Collins, a former mayor of Norwalk, is a syndicated columnist.)