In both the city where I work and the neighborhood where I live there are a large number of dilapidated commercial buildings with what should be considered ideal locations sitting empty and slowly rotting away. In my ‘hood many of these buildings have been slated for redevelopment at some time or another – something that may not happen anytime soon (or ever) if redevelopment in California is really and truly removed as a source of land-use police power and construction financing. In the city where I work, these buildings are recognized as proverbial millstones that hinder any forward momentum in revitalization efforts, yet the list of options for how to address the problems they pose is short – too short to be useful most of the time.
What do you do with a burned out shell of a hotel that constantly attracts squatters and vandals and drug-users when the land-owner still thinks it is 2006 – and that his property is still worth something?
Or how about a strip of turn of the century brick buildings with beautiful street-front access whose facades are literally falling off?
In the past you waited for some big developer with a little foresight, a willingness to take risks, and a nice fat pocketbook (or access to lots of credit) to come in and make something of the latent potential of the area. Seems though in the last few years that latent potential has become more and more difficult to recognize. At the same time those deep-pocket developers have been much more reluctant to start projects that deviate from the “proven” model (which is scary because that “proven” model is on its way to being “proven” wrong). Which just leaves the buildings – blighted and abandoned.
In the past and in other urban districts, buildings like this (ok maybe not the burned out hotel, but definitely the brick commercial structures) would attract the bohemian set – artists and crafts-people willing to rough it a bit to have a space that fit their wants and needs. Both Manhattan and San Francisco are full of stories of neighborhoods that were resurrected from death-by-blight by artists and the art galleries and restaurants and bars and clubs and residents that followed them. It is what I consider “Guerilla Redevelopment” – without the subsidies or the grants or the eminent domain or the use of laws or regulations or even zoning to control and limit and direct neighborhood changes.
Yet as beneficial as guerilla redevelopment has been for some places, many cities work hard at limiting and restricting and even eliminating the guerilla redevelopment ethos. Instead of allowing people with little access to immediate capital but with lots of access to sweat equity to go in and innovate, these properties are commercially advertised, commercially managed, and commercially restricted. Which means they are commercially empty, because there just isn’t a lot of commercial demand right now.
Cities and local governments, who could provide incentives and encouragement and an innovation friendly environment (with the recognition that the creative class (thank you Richard Florida) and the economy that they bring thrives in innovation friendly environments) instead hide behind zoning and use restrictions designed to promote homogenous development. Even the ubiquitously praised “mixed-use” development is seldom as mixed as it could be – or even as it would need to be to be truly successful and self-sufficient in the long-term.
Zoning and use restrictions were created to protect cities from incompatible uses – to save the residential neighborhoods from the rendering plants and the garbage dumps. Yet they’ve become tools of exclusion that have been used to prevent everything from racial integration to socio-economic equalization to, you got it, local innovation. Who is going to invest time and effort into a building that is going to be red-tagged for stop-work because the owner/renovator doesn’t have the funds and access to politicos that cities have come to expect from big-time large-scale developers?
Lots of cities would agree that fostering innovation is quickly becoming a key to economic survival. The problem is the failure to recognize that innovation isn’t necessarily going to come from the places we’ve been accustomed to – from the big corps and the big developers and the big money. Technology has allowed innovation to scale – so now it is available to all of us. Cities and neighborhoods would be well-off to recognized the new scale of innovation, and embrace it.
Because a barebones but workable building occupied by artists and designers and emerging entrepreneurs is a whole lot better than a decaying empty building with its facade falling into the street.
urbanhistori 