Why downtown matters

So much has happened in the heart of cities like this since the heyday of the downtown department store that it's no wonder downtowns continually work to explain themselves.

Cedar Rapids historian Mark Stoffer Hunter flashes back 50 years to the time when the city of Cedar Rapids converted most of the major avenues into and out of downtown from two-ways to one-ways to better handle the volumes of traffic headed downtown.

“Everybody was going downtown,” Stoffer Hunter says of the time back then.

They don't now.

Much of what made downtowns headed for the malls on the edges of cities years ago, leaving city cores in the lurch, forcing them to re-imagine what their future might hold.

Planning studies about reinvention fill bottom drawers and litter dusty shelves.

Along the way, more and more people started needing the downtown less and less.

“Part of what happens when downtowns went into decline was that people lost the feel and the importance and the comfort for being downtown,” says Ruth Fox, a landscape architect and planner who lives and works in downtown Cedar Rapids.

As downtowns such as Cedar Rapids's come back to life, Fox says, it will take time for people to see that the new downtown is worth going to see and use.

“It's going to take awhile for ‘a love of' to come back to the downtown,” says Fox, of Ruth Fox Landscape Architecture + Planning.

‘LIFE HAS CHANGE'

Jeff Sanford, an urban planning consultant in Memphis, Tenn., and past chairman of the International Downtown Association, says cities such as Cedar Rapids don't need so much to redevelop their downtowns as to redefine them as community assets, along the way putting to rest forever the memory of the downtown as the retail behemoth of a day gone by.

“Downtowns will never be what they were 30 and 40 and 50 years ago before the advent of the suburban shopping mall,” says Sanford, who came to Cedar Rapids a year after the 2008 flood as part of a delegation from the International Downtown Association.

“… Life has change. And so, too, does downtown Cedar Rapids have to change.”

In his trip to Cedar Rapids, Sanford says he saw downtown Cedar Rapids as a place that was becoming a residential neighborhood and an entertainment center as well as a business and employment center.

He saw that the downtown had a “great opportunity for continued growth.”

He particularly recalls the flood-hit area on the west side of the Cedar River across from the downtown, and he says it made him think of the Mud Island community across from downtown Memphis that was nothing 20 years ago and today has 5,000 to 6,000 residents.

“All that rose up from even less” than what's in Cedar Rapids, Sanford says.

BRUSHING SHOULDERS

Brian Brandt, managing director at Principal Financial Group in downtown Cedar Rapids, says a downtown matters today because it is the “visible face” of a city's business community and is the center of the arts, culture, entertainment and government.

These days, adds Brandt, chairman of the Metro Economic Alliance's Community Development Innovation Council, Cedar Rapids's downtown has become a “great incubator” for startup businesses because the downtown offers office space, business support and potential customers.

One of those startup entrepreneurs is John Schnipkoweit, a member of the Metro Economic Alliance's board of directors who lives and works in downtown and would have it no other way.

Schnipkoweit helped start one company downtown, Ovation Networks Inc., which helps hotels and motels set up wireless computer networks and now has 50 employees, and he's on to a second company, RecBob, which has six employees with hopes of growing bigger as it helps local adult recreational leagues across the country and the world manage their teams.

Schnipkoweit says he's in downtown because that's where he easily can brush shoulders with business associates and other idea people on the street and in the coffee shops.

“That to us is pretty valuable, those interactions,” he says. “There's a reason that universities don't spread their buildings over an entire city. They have a central campus.

“A downtown is much like that for business.”

As with other downtowns, Cedar Rapids's business core has focused on housing in recent years, with the goal of turning a 9-to-5 world into a round-the-clock one. Schnipkoweit lived in downtown Kansas City, Mo., for three years in the early 2000s when he says the downtown housing market there began to boom.

“You have to build up critical mass, and I saw that happen in Kansas City. We don't have that yet,” he says.

THE FRONT PORCH

Kris Gulick, a two-term Cedar Rapids City Council member and current president of the Iowa League of Cities, says he talks to officials in Iowa cities big and small who are trying to figure out a way to keep their downtowns relevant and alive.

Cities care about their downtowns, Gulick says, because they represent a concentrated center of property value - its property-tax revenue helps support services throughout the city.

Gulick's council district consists of about half of northeast Cedar Rapids, much of which reaches miles from the downtown, as well as the flood-hit, westside Time Check Neighborhood, where residents can complain that the city spends too much time and money on the downtown.

Gulick says such a “perception” can't be helped because the downtown, too, sustained great damage in the 2008 flood as did a number of city buildings located there.

“Surely, we have to replace those (city) facilities,” he says.

Urban planning consultant Sanford, who headed up the business improvement district in Memphis for 13 years and has consulted on downtowns big and not so big, says Cedar Rapids is far from alone in working to improve its downtown amid complaints from other parts of the city about it.

There's no reason, Sanford says, that cities can't do more than one thing at once. Streets can be fixed in residential neighborhoods even as downtowns are being revitalized, he says.

At the same time, though, Sanford says a downtown is a unique neighborhood, one that belongs to everyone who lives in a city. He says the downtown, too, is a community's “front porch,” “often the first and lasting impression a visitor has of a community.”

“And so it would seem to me to be in the best interest of the city to work to make that impression a positive one,” he says.

“If misery loves company,” Sanford adds, he points to the city of Chicago as a place where he says former Mayor Richard M. Daley endured plenty of criticism from the neighborhoods outside the city's core because of money spent in the downtown. The same was true in Sanford's own city, Memphis, he recalls.

“But nothing breeds success like success,” says Sanford, who notes that $5 billion of growth in downtown Memphis over 15 years has made the voices against the downtown fewer.

Cedar Rapids planner Ruth Fox says she's been amazed at people who she assumed would support downtown Cedar Rapids saying that the city is focusing too much on the city's core. She says the city would be focused as much on another part of the city, say, Lindale Mall, if it for some reason was at the center of a natural disaster as the downtown has been.

“People don't love their downtowns as much anymore,” Fox suggests.

Fox says you can't buy love, but she says the investment in a new library, new riverfront amphitheater, new convention center and renovated arena and Paramount Theatre in downtown Cedar Rapids will attract people to use them once those facilities are ready.

People love the places that they go to, she says, and she adds that could be telling, even for a new and changing downtown.