City Center Luncheon Explores Downtown Living (15. September 2006, 15:11 by Derek Young) ~ Thank You For the Opportunity
Today’s City Center Luncheon at the Tacoma Club, a quarterly event developed by the Chamber of Commerce, explored the concept of downtown living. What did we hear?
As a reader of Exit133, a lot of the information wasn’t new to you. Downtown Tacoma is a place with a lot of potential, some beautiful condo projects, and its future is bright. Ryan Petty, the Director of Economic Development for the city, spoke about the current discussion to change how developers are incentived to build in order to effect things like density, affordable housing, and mixed use development. Overall, I am hopeful that we’ll see some of these changes soon. Some of the potential changes are significant and would require a more active hand on the part of the city. Will incentives alone work to make Tacoma more vibrant place or do we need something with more teeth? We’ll see.
We also heard from a panel of ‘experts’ on downtown living including Thea’s Landing resident, Darren Brewster, City Steps realtor, Colleen Walker, and myself. The basic message seemed to be that we’ve come a long way, but we still have further to go. I spoke about the Vancouver dilemma and my overall optimism for the city. It was a well run event and, having been at the front of the room, it seems difficult for me to summarize for some reason.
To all the folks I met, it was good to meet you.
Link to the Tacoma – Pierce County Chamber
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I spoke about the Vancouver dilemma and my overall optimism for the city
If Tacoma could only be so lucky to have the “Vancouver dilemma.” They have retail shopping until 11:00 p.m. in their downtown with endless streams of foot traffic.
Downtown has almost no retail vacancy and has a number of areas on the min streets that support two levels of retail.
A successful downtown by any measure. Tacoma would have to add 25,000 units downtown before it could ever have such a “problem.”
i noticed there is supposed to be an article in sundays tnt on height restrictions for buildings in downtown. id like to see more housing projects like Prium’s Jay Heights, or even taller.
2 | Posted by craigA | Sep 15, 10:34 PM
Derek, it was great to finally meet you there and your viewpoints were absolutely the highlight of the meeting. I too am struggling with how to review the event, (so I came over here for inspiration, lol).
Erik, I hear ya on wanting to have Vancouver’s dilemma. I owned a retail store in Tacoma for 12 years so that will always be my first love. I always wanted to have a store in the downtown area but could never justify it. Today I looked again at downtown Tacoma through my “retail glasses” and still saw no viable reason for a startup biz.
But the new condo craze could well change my attitude. As the population of the downtown area grows, there will actually be a need (as opposed to mere wishful thinking) for retail stores to become engaged in the mix. I think this scenario may well happen quite rapidly and core Tacoma will soon be a fun place to live.
Other types of businesses, I don’t know about. Derek might be right about the looming trend of infill construction squeezing out potential sites for corporate businesses.
Since geographically speaking Tacoma’s urban footprint is relatively small, we may have to choose to promote one kind of growth over another. The idea of building a gazillion condos, while maintaining low income housing, attracting retail business, encouraging corporate workspace and preserving historical properties just makes my brain hurt.
Good to hear everyone is at least discussing it now and finally realizing that what we decide to do today thoroughly affects the future of the entire region.
It’s all pretty exciting if you ask me :)
3 | Posted by Steve Hurley | Sep 15, 10:41 PM
Good to see you there Steve,
As the population of the downtown area grows, there will actually be a need (as opposed to mere wishful thinking) for retail stores to become engaged in the mix.
We can likely all agree we need more of everything downtown as it still has a large vacancy rate. The issue of which component to add first is the real crux of the issue.
I am convinced that housing and offices needs to be brought in first before the retail because of the following: housing can survive in an area all alone for awhile but retail cannot.
Plus, we can’t really force more retail in the area. It pretty much fills in as the market for it grows.
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