Reviving Main Street, or Living in the Past?
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/15/business/15ROOT.html
October 15, 2000
GRASS-ROOTS BUSINESS
By JOEL KOTKIN
MEDIA, Pa. -- In its marketing brochure, this picturesque county seat 18 miles from the center of Philadelphia likes to portray itself as "everybody's hometown." But to property owners like Al Anderson, this mostly white, middle-class burg of 6,000 seems anything but. Mr. Anderson owns two properties along State Street, Media's traditional shopping boulevard. But he cannot rent them to the highest bidders banks, brokerage firms and the like because of a zoning ordinance passed by the borough council last December. The measure, which all but requires landlords to rent first- floor offices to retail businesses, is intended to reinvigorate downtown shopping.
"The demand is for office space for professionals, but they want me to rent to quaint small shops," complained Mr. Anderson, a retired DuPont executive. "They don't realize that State Street doesn't make it as a shopping experience any more." The conflict along State Street may seem minor, but it symbolizes a growing tension in many American suburbs between the rights of private property owners and a New Urbanist-inspired vision of restored, retail-oriented Main Streets.
The perceived success of retail restoration efforts in places as varied as Pasadena, Calif., the Back Bay area of Boston and New Jersey towns like Red Bank, Morristown and Princeton has drawn many imitators. But by their nature, these efforts are likely to be highly divisive in small-town settings, said Larry Houstoun, a principal of the Atlantic Group, an urban development consulting firm in Cranbury, N.J.
"If you begin to work for change in a suburban context, you are at risk," said Mr. Houstoun, whose firm has done two reports for the Media borough council on downtown revitalization. "Many people remember when they had good stores and want the convenience, but there's always a vocal minority who's against change."
For their part, Mr. Anderson and other members of Mr. Houstoun's "vocal minority" feel that the council's initiatives not just the ban on first-floor offices, but also two town- backed retail projects and an ordinance strictly regulating signs stem from misplaced nostalgia. Business in Media, they say, depends on activity related to the Delaware County Courthouse and the town's growing role as a financial hub. Property owners point out that despite the booming economy, State Street now has vacancy rates of 15 to 20 percent.
But political leaders see the policies as a last-ditch effort to return the four-block-long stretch of the street, with its two- to four-story brick buildings built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to its former role as the center of community life. "We like to see ourselves as `everybody's hometown,' with all the diversity and activity that suggests," said Frank Daly, who first as mayor and now as the borough's lawyer has been a leader in downtown renewal policies for more than a decade. "We don't want to end up as an office park. We did not want a street with nothing but law offices and banks."
The vacancies on State Street, Mr. Daly contended, were caused not by the city's policies but rather by the decades-long transformation of small-town America. Perhaps the biggest blow came in the early 1970's, when two shopping malls opened, each less than a 10-minute drive from downtown Media. Another factor has been the expansion of the local service economy. Media's office population has been bolstered by what Mr. Daly called "the litigation explosion" of the last quarter-century. Law firms, including branches of Philadelphia-based firms, want offices near the courthouse, one block off State Street.
The growth of government, which has tripled the number of county workers in Media to more than 3,000 over the last 30 years, also changed the character of the old downtown. The once-sleepy town became an important service industry hub, with a dozen bank and brokerage-firm offices and a daytime population that swells to over 25,000. In the process, Mr. Daly said, State Street storefronts once occupied by small retail businesses were turned into professional offices. Restaurants, clothing stores and bookstores that once served local residents were rapidly replaced by fast-food outlets and print shops that catered to the office clientele.
The last supermarket left in 1996, followed by the closing of the local Woolworth's and a women's clothing store. These developments prompted the council's 1999 ordinance that essentially banned new first-floor professional offices along a four-block stretch of the street. To promote the kind of development it favors, the city restored the old Borough Hall on State Street and leased it to what has proved to be a successful restaurant. It lured another restaurant to space that Merrill Lynch had sought for an office. In addition, the borough required that signs in the downtown district be small and unobtrusive. And it awarded a $2.8 million grant to improve the streetscape and lighting.
Council members, who have generally approved these measures by votes of 7 to 0 or 6 to 1, said their efforts were already luring shoppers back to State Street at night and on weekends. "You can't get groceries downtown, and you can't get panty hose," Councilwoman Debbie Krull said. "Our constituents want more retail, and we want to meet their demand. We don't want a street that's only busy from 11 to 2. We want a nicer mix for our residents."
But what council members view as enlightened planning, landlords regard as an assault on property values. The measure met with polite but intense opposition this year from the Media Business and Professional Association, a new, 65-member group that wants to reverse the new policies and unseat the council. Richard Swift Glassman, the group's spokesman, contended that the council's actions represented a "taking" of property rights, a violation of what he called "free trade" as well as poor public policy. The son of a State Street merchant, and himself a landlord on the street, Mr. Glassman argued that the city's strategy had turned State Street into "an empty shell." He said that as recently as 1983, long after the malls opened, the street had virtually no vacancies.
Another member of the group, Michael McCloskey, a real estate appraiser, said that he, too, missed the former ambience of the street. But he regards the council's actions as counterproductive, even silly, given that an estimated 60 percent of State Street's current consumer base is office workers, mostly commuters. "Hey, I'd like to go back to the past, too in my dreams," said Mr. McCloskey, a longtime Media resident, over lunch at the Towne House, a landmark restaurant just off State Street. "But this is the year 2000 and we have malls and power centers. People don't want to drive to Media for their everyday needs. They come to work, maybe to eat lunch, and that's it."
Pat Callahan, president of the American Association of Small Property Owners, said she considered the Media conflict an example of a trend in small cities and towns including places like Leesburg, Va., and Asheville, N.C. to restrict property rights in the name of downtown revival. Media's restrictions on ground-floor usage, she said, may be setting a dangerous precedent. "The Media situation has implications for lots of communities," said Ms. Callahan, whose group, based in Washington, monitors such policies. "Public officials tend to trade bad ideas around among each other."
In Media, even the most active members of the business group realize that reversing the borough's policies will be difficult; recent surveys show that many residents prefer to see State Street returned to something closer to its 1950's mode. Council members "will do anything that the residents want," Mr. Glassman said. "They don't have to do anything for the businesses, because most of us are not voters," he acknowledged, as most of the commercial property owners live elsewhere.
This kind of controversy too, is common in small towns that have been engulfed by suburban sprawl, as property owners' drive for profits comes increasingly into conflict with residents' preference for the Main Streets they remember so fondly, whether from an earlier day, or from Disneyland's ersatz version.
Of course, not all business owners in Media or other towns oppose renewal campaigns. Joyce Doubet, who with her husband, Joseph, runs a jewelry store on State Street, sees no alternative except for the street to become like too many modern downtowns, cold and dead after dark. "This town is not only about business, but it's also about residents," Mrs. Doubet said. "There are a lot of people who like the intimacy of the town and want to maintain some of the old spirit. This place is still pretty unique, and if everything goes as planned, State Street will come back, better than ever."
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