The Key to a Strong Downtown Is Smart Policy Changes, Not Big Projects
It’s getting hotter here in Texas, making it a prime time of year to spend down by the river. Without a doubt, the riverwalk that connects Cameron Park, East Waco, Downtown and Baylor University is one of the city's grandest amenities. When I lived in Sanger Heights (a historic neighborhood not far from downtown) one of my favorite weekend pastimes was biking down to the river, across the bridges and back, or into downtown for a cool beer or iced matcha.
The riverfront has a long and interesting history. If you look at old renderings of the city, you’ll see the town emerging right along its shores. After a series of floods, urban renewal projects and the tragic tornado of 1953, those organic neighborhoods were replaced with a convention center, hotels and restaurants — the kinds of plans you might see featured in standard downtown master plans.
Well, it seems that the master-planned approach to downtown revitalization is once again rearing its head. “Master Developer Sought for Waco's Grand Downtown Vision,” read the headline of an article last fall. Since then, the council has adopted the renderings delivered by California-based architectural firm Gensler, a plan that includes razing the current convention center and building a new city hall and a new stadium for a yet-to-be-identified minor league baseball team, among other things.
Contracts with Hunt Development Group followed earlier this year. With this newest plan, the city seems poised to adopt a playbook similar to what we’ve seen in countless other downtowns: an emphasis on grand, top-down, built-to-a-finished state projects that, in my conversations with other Wacoans, have left many of us scratching our heads: “A new convention center? A baseball stadium?”
The master-planned approach is understandable. Like most American downtowns, Waco is constantly competing with surrounding suburbs for residents and customers, always trying to figure out how to make its downtown an attractive place for residents to spend time. Against this backdrop, it might seem like master plans, combined with various incentives and an emphasis on entertainment, are the only way to attract developers and customers to the core of the city.
But relying on the master-planned, “Big Project'' approach to revitalization is a risky way forward. Rather than growing the city’s wealth, these big projects often require significant public investment and incentives, which put cities in the risky financial position of making large, expensive bets in the present and hoping to recoup that money down the line.
Not only that, but these plans also lock cities into committing to a future they can’t possibly evaluate for profitability, relevance or resilience. It’s simply impossible to know if these plans will achieve their intended goals, and their large, centralized nature makes it hard to adapt to shifting market conditions or changes in regulation and funding.
The good news is that cities have alternatives. Instead of opting for big projects that compromise long-term financial health and their ability to adapt, public leaders can instead reach for a variety of policy changes that require much less money, preserve adaptability and have the potential to spark a positive cycle of wealth generation.
For example, in November, Detroit residents will have the opportunity to embrace the Land Value Tax, an approach to taxation where land is taxed higher than property. This essentially punishes land speculation, creating an incentive for landholders and owners of blighted properties to put their assets to productive use and relieving the tax burden of homeowners. This is an example of a policy change that doesn’t require massive infusions of public money and that can actually spark more productive uses and new revenue for a city without increasing the city’s overall liabilities.
Parking benefit districts are another example of how to use land more productively, while also generating an income stream for the surrounding community and (more importantly) not increasing expenditures. In Austin, Texas, for example, a parking benefit district installed in the West University neighborhood generated $150K in its first year, leading to a 10% increase in sales tax and more investment in sidewalk infrastructure.
Cities can also use their power and influence to take on a more human-centered approach to the connective infrastructure in downtowns by selecting a variety of inexpensive placemaking and road-design practices that improve their safety and overall attractiveness, making the downtowns more appealing to people on foot, instead of drivers in cars. Other policies could simplify the business-opening process for entrepreneurs or even (most ambitiously) make it possible for small-scale manufacturing to return to the city’s core.
These kinds of decisions are a clear break from the status quo when it comes to developing downtowns. The “Go Big or Go Home” pattern of thinking assumes that the only way to make downtowns attractive is to lure private investment through millions of dollars of public money, as well as exemptions from tax obligations and long-term maintenance duties.
In reality, what we need are more practical policies that are based on a realistic understanding of what makes downtowns attractive to people: continuity in the built environment (rather than the gaps we see when too much land goes to parking), safety, beauty, housing options and practical businesses.
But this approach requires courage. It requires leaders who are willing to accept that their job is not to force a particular outcome for downtown, but instead to cultivate the kind of environment that allows an interesting downtown to emerge incrementally over time due to the contributions of many players who are free to make many small bets. It requires being willing to forgo the sexy renderings and the political high of a ribbon-cutting in front of a new stadium, and instead embrace the wise but unpredictable nature of the incremental approach.
This is how all the iconic cities we love emerged: They were not built to a finished state by a central planner but were built by many small hands, gradually, over time. Cities can’t fully reproduce the environment that cultivated that kind of outcome, but we can reach for policies that embody the same ethos.
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Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.