The Downtown Curmudgeon Is Moving to DANTH's Website Very Soon

We are moving this blog to www.danth.com. Probably this week.


I'll post the complete new address as soon as I know it definitely.


But, if we seem to disappear, go to DANTH's website and I am certain you'll find us easily.


In my next update on our reassessment of our use of social media I explain why we moved.


NDM 012912

Update on the Reassessment of Our Use of Social Media

I am now on LinkedIn and, as I suspected, I can see its utility and regret not having signed up before. But, it takes quite a bit of time to figure out what your profile should look like and then make it so. Next on my agenda is to figure out which groups to join and how my participation in them can benefit DANTH,Inc and still be fun for me.

Ben Burgess, of the NorthStar Group in Annapolis, MD, is leading us through our reassessment and he quickly suggested that I get on Twitter. This astonished me because, of all the social media, I held Twitter in the lowest esteem and saw little likelihood of ever using it. Perhaps, that was because, in my curmudgeonly way, I saw tweets as being constant electronic intrusions sent by total narcissists who thought that the the world's population had an abiding interest in where they were, who they were with, and every single thing they did (including their body functions). However, Ben pointed out that my view of tweeting was somewhat jaundiced, and that it could be a much easier and effective way for me to leverage something that I have habitually done for years.

I do a lot of research on the Internet and almost daily come across a piece of information or an article that I want to share with people I know and/or work with. This behavior feels like a natural  way of sharing with them, but it is also a good marketing tool that can maintain and build key professional (and personal) relationships. Ben convinced me to also send these articles out via Twitter. Let's see how many followers I attract by June 1st.

I signed up to follow Richard Florida on Twitter. Always an interesting guy. But, he tweets so often that I expect his thumbs may have shriveled from so much use on his smartphone's keyboard. I'll never tweet as often as he does. Nor do I want to.

Next week we will be looking into Facebook and YouTube. I actually have been wanting to use YouTube for several years. I always take photos of downtowns when I do my consulting assignments and when we just travel because I find them invaluable tools in my work. But, ever since Flip, the small pocketable camcorder, appeared on the market, I have wanted to start using short movies instead of the still photos. The movies can capture the essential dynamic qualities of a downtown that the simple photo usually cannot -- at least, in my hands. Moviemaking, takes time to learn and I felt I lacked the needed time. But, I am probably wrong about that, too -- I see teenagers and even my 7-year old grandson making short movies on their cameras.

Facebook, is another story of me feeling uneasy. I see it as requiring duplication of the work I put into our website and my blog, while having enormous privacy problems. Let's see whether this old curmudgeon can learn new tricks about it, too.

  

DANTH Is Reassessing Its Use of Social Media

The Downtown Curmudgeon works for DANTH, Inc and since I recently have been arguing that downtown small business operators need to learn how to use and benefit from the "social media," it seemed appropriate that we should take another look at Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube , etc. Other small business operators might be interested in our experience, so I plan on doing a few postings on it.


We also will assess moving this blog from blogspot and integrating it into our website, www.danth.com. 


I found this brief article -- http://usat.ly/wpZY5h --  full of good advice about how small businesses should use the social media. Content, it argues, is critical. Thanks to Phil Burgess for sending it to me.

Office Development -- We now have all the office space we need

For several years now, I have been arguing that a New Normal has emerged for our downtowns and that the business operators, landlords, developers and district leaders who do not recognize that they must adapt to that fact are likely to face severe economic losses. My recently reported research on multichannel retailing (see my last blog posting below) combined with some some recent news items about movie attendance, housing and office development have strongly confirmed my argument.  This posting will focus on office development.

For much of the 1970s and 1980s office development was seen as the economic engine that would drive downtown revitalization in such major cities as Richmond VA, Charlotte NC, Cleveland OH, Philadelphia PA, Seattle WA. Los Angeles CA, etc. Office development primed revitalization efforts were also mounted in smaller cities such as  New Brunswick NJ,  (population 55,181) and White Plains NY  (population 56,853) and in suburban communities such as Morristown NJ (population 18,457), and Garden City NY (population 22,371). 

Many of these office driven revitalization efforts failed to achieve their goals and the downtowns had to add residential, retail and entertainment components to their revitalization strategies. Nevertheless, office development has remained a critical revitalization asset for many downtowns.

A recent article in  CoStar’s e-newsletter reported on the major findings of a symposium of office development experts convened by BOMA. A summary of their findings should put downtown leaders on notice:

“We already have all the office space we likely will need.... But to remain competitive, the existing stock of commercial real estate must be reconfigured to keep pace with an increasingly mobile, Internet-connected workforce; ongoing changes in technology, and to support the way companies are structuring their staffs to foster more collaboration and efficiency, while also addressing the values and attitudes of new generations of workers.”

Increased telecommuting, flexible work schedules, the untethering of workers from desks to enhance collaboration and increase face-a-face client contacts have combined to increase employee density in major office buildings and reduce the demand for office space. For today’s office worker, according to one of these experts, the ideal situation may be:

(W)here you go into the office two or three days per week and work remotely the other days, which reduces our carbon footprint by 20% - 40% and has a huge impact on improved quality of life.”

The potential negative impacts of the New Normal’s static demand for office space are:

• Fewer new downtown office buildings will be built
• Existing downtown office buildings that are not configured to meet the new work habits of office workers will have languishing leasing efforts. A lot of existing downtown office buildings may have to be renovated if they are to be competitive
• Downtown retailers and eateries will have a significantly reduced office worker market because the telecommuters and flex-timers will spend much less time in the district.

Of course, downtowns also too often suffer from the fact that major office tenants provide incentives (cafeterias, subsidized meals and concierge services) and work pressures to keep their employees from leaving the building at lunchtime. Furthermore, the retailing many downtowns is often too weak to motivate substantial office worker patronage.

But, there is a potential upside for downtowns that can provide a dynamic, experience-rich environment. As the CoStar article notes:
 

“The lesson for companies (and the investors and building owners who want to have them as tenants) is that younger workers prefer to work in a more dynamic, experience-rich environment, such as an urban- type setting offering different entertainment, cultural and transportation options.”

Dynamic downtowns will consequently continue to have a distinct advantage in a highly competitive office market, while listless downtowns will probably be weaker competitors than ever.

The CoStar article can be found at: http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Will-We-Need-Any-More-Office-Space-/134483?ref=100&iid=261&cid=DC6077B43E67ACADB224FF6D0AF89AB6  

N. David Milder 011312

Downtown Multichannel Retailing

DANTH, Inc. has just released a research paper I wrote on downtown multichannel retailing.  I prefer to think of it as backdoor retailing, with electronic and non-electronic variations. In any case, the topic is important because downtown retailing is undergoing an enormous change -- one that will not be reversed even when the economy recovers from our Great Recession -- towards multichannel/backdoor retailing. Downtown merchants and leaders who do not adapt to this new paradigm will be left behind, more dross produced by capitalism's creative destruction.


You can download a free copy of the research paper at: 
http://danth.com/storage/pdf/Multichannel.pdf

N. David Milder

On the Passing of Steve Jobs

I greatly admired Steve Jobs for his ability to innovate, but most of all for his view about how to live your life. The latter is captured in this quote from his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University:


“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” 


Too many downtown organizations are staid and stale. A strong dose of Steve Jobs's philosophy would do them a world of good. They need to follow an important Jobs dictum: Think Different!  Also, they certainly could benefit from a Jobs-like fanaticism that their programs are well-designed and actually work, producing strong positive results. As a downtown business recruiter, Jobs, who strongly opposed asking consumers about the new products they wanted, would never ask local residents for the names of specific retailers that recruitment efforts should target. 


 These organizations also could definitely benefit from the kind of strategic vision that Jobs displayed since he returned to Apple's helm. 


And one more thing.  In 2007, I bought an iMac  and immediately had a lot of problems with it. On a whim, I emailed Steve Jobs and detailed my problems. In response, I received a call from Apple and about a week later a technician came to my office and completed a thorough overhaul of my iMac. Is there another CEO in the USA you can email and get a similar response?

A CURMUDGEONLY VIEW OF BID STREET CLEANING PROGRAMS

Can Clean Be Overrated?

An online article that recently drew my attention and got me thinking was “America's Dirtiest Cities” (http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-40390415) by Katrina Brown Hunt. It begins by posing the question: “Can clean be overrated?” It then notes that a survey of the readers of Travel + Leisure magazine found that  “America's dirtiest cities happen to include some very popular tourist destinations” (e.g., New Orleans, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York City, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Miami).  Hunt goes on to note that  “visitors gauge 'dirty' in a variety of ways: litter, air pollution, even the taste of local tap water.”

What drew my attention was not which cities were or were not on the “top dirtiest list” --  for such lists tend to be not very useful -- but, the fact that a group of people who are evidently very interested in being tourists found very popular cities to be “dirty.” Hunt’s question “Can clean be overrated?” seems to me to be a very legitimate one to ask, especially by the leaders of downtown business organizations who spend huge parts of their annual budgets on street cleaning operations.  

Should Clean Streets Be A BID Priority? Are Dirty Streets That Big A Problem?

A few years ago while managing a Special Improvement District  in a city in New Jersey I gave tours of the district to many developers and savvy commercial brokers. Invariably, they would comment on how good the district looked and the lack of litter on the sidewalks. At the same time the city’s political leaders, especially the mayor, were pressing for cleaner sidewalks. How clean did the sidewalks have to be to be considered clean by the local politicos? I thought it was all a bit too anal and somewhat tragic: sidewalk sanitation was getting all the attention of the political leadership when their focus should have been laser beamed on bringing redevelopment projects into the district. Their priorities were all fouled up. Ultimately, we succeeded in getting the local UEZ to pay for the litter cleaning crew, though the SID still had to manage it. Later on the city’s public works department took on the entire street cleaning responsibility and cost burden.

Quite frankly, that was where I felt the responsibility belonged in the first place. Street sanitation was long a city government responsibility, but in hard fiscal times, many of them successfully off-loaded that function and its cost to special downtown districts. By the late 1980s, as the number of BIDs quickly grew, dealing with “crime and grime” famously became their primary programs -- and budget lines. But, I never saw any real evidence or serious study proving that clean sidewalks resulted in either more shopper visits or a significant reduction in the fear of crime.

To the contrary, my own research at that time failed to confirm such relationships. In 1984, for example, I did a telephone survey for Regional Plan Association (RPA) of 600 residents in the trade areas of three outer borough downtowns in New York City -- Downtown Brooklyn, Jamaica Center in Queens and Fordham Road in The Bronx. A Pearson correlation analysis found a weak .12 association between how clean the respondents rated their downtown’s sidewalks and how often they visited that downtown.

Clean streets are often viewed as one of the signs of social disorder hypothesized by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in their famous Broken Windows article to foster the  fear of becoming a crime victim. While the RPA survey did find an interesting correlation of .26 between how clean respondents rated the sidewalks and how safe they felt in their downtown during the day, there were two other variables -- the downtowns overall attractiveness and the types of people respondents expected to find there -- that statistically had twice the explanatory power of the clean streets variable. Furthermore, the correlation between clean streets and how fearful respondents felt while downtown after dark, when fear levels are highest,  dropped to .15. 

My own conclusion at the time was that while the clean streets factor was one of many that, when aggregated, could impact on how attractive trade area residents felt their downtown was, it was getting a disproportionate amount of attention from downtown leaders and far too big a share of their BIDs’ budgets. I felt a lot of them would be better off if they shifted a lot of their street cleaning expenditures over to improving facades, stimulating nicer store windows, attracting quality business operators and developers, etc. Nothing has happened in the intervening years to change my views. If anything, they have been harden by my SID management experience that I described above and by my observations that some BIDs  were paying for sidewalk cleaning services they could not really afford, given that their budgets were less than $250,000/yr.

Among New York City's BIDs, those with revenues under $250,000/yr allocate a higher proportion of their annual expenditures on street cleaning, 32%, than the other BIDs, followed by those in the $250,000 to $499,999 revenue category (see the table above). The largest BIDs, with revenues over $5 million/yr only allocate about 20% of their expenditure dollars on sanitation. Furthermore, among the BIDs with the lowest revenues, about one in four of them are allocating 40% or more of their annual expenditures on sanitation. To my mind, they seem to be more like a sanitation department than an economic development organization. What in the world are their leaders thinking? I use the New York data because they were readily available. The pattern of small BIDs overwhelmingly focusing on street cleaning operations also can be readily found elsewhere.

Why Are Street Cleaning Programs Still Big With BIDs?

Though relatively expensive, these programs:

• Do not require rocket scientists to design and implement. There are existing programs to replicate and service providers to hire
• Quickly provide visible evidence of the BID’s presence and ability to do things. Lots of staff in identifiable uniforms provide a presence and cleaning up the litter is proof of efficacy. These are important program impacts for new BIDs
• Have been implemented by the largest and most prestigious BIDS. Unfortunately, too many of the other BIDs have fallen into adopting programs because their prestigious peers are operating them rather than asking whether such programs can really achieve their organization’s economic growth objectives.
• Are seldom terminated because most BIDs seldom, if ever, engage in real program evaluations
• Have developed an aura within the downtown revitalization community that they are always beneficial. After all, how can one be in favor of dirt and litter? But, that is not the real question.

For most downtowns, the real issues are will cleaner streets:

• Bring more shoppers downtown?
• Increase property values?
• Increase investment?
• Produce positive impacts commensurate with the cost of the street cleaning program?
• Have a bigger economic impact than if its operational dollars were diverted to other programs?

I am not against all BID street cleaning programs. Just those that have no proven impact on customer traffic and economic growth.

FROM DECAY TO TREASURE: THE HIGH LINE PARK

For many years an elevated rail line, that ran about a mile between buildings on Manhattan's west side, sat unused and decaying. It snaked through an area probably made most famous by the title of a Richard Rogers ballet, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.
 
Then a small group of people came up with the stunning  idea of turning it into a park. They managed to make a viable plan, raise money, rally the support of local landlords and obtain city approvals.The result is a unique and hugely popular public space. 
 
The High Line did not spark the area's resurgence, but it has certainly reinforced it.
 
Across the nation, other projects like Millenium Park in Chicago, IL, and Mitchell Park in Greenport, NY, have taken decayed and even brown field locations and turned them into vibrant public spaces. More communities should look into following suit.
  
The photos in the slide show were taken over an 18 month period.





If you have trouble running the slide show you can go to my web photo album for the High Line at: https://picasaweb.google.com/dmilder/HighLinePark


N David Milder

TOUGH TIMES FOR THE MOVIE INDUSTRY -- HOW IS YOUR DOWNTOWN CINEMA DOING?

Some Background
As a result of DANTH’s 2008-2013 downtown trend assessment work, we became very concerned about the future of movie theaters in a lot of medium-sized downtowns,so we keep our eyes out for news about the movie industry. In my February 24, 2008 posting, “DOWNTOWN MOVIE THEATERS WILL BE INCREASINGLY IN PERIL”  I noted that according to a PEW survey:

“By a five-to-one ratio Americans view films more at home than they do in movie theaters. Move theaters account for only about 12% of the movie industry’s revenues”

And, according to that same PEW survey, this trend toward watching movies at home was growing. The implicit danger posed by this trend for downtown cinemas, that often are just scrapping by, is a relentless deterioration in attendance and revenues.  

Some Recent Observations in the NY Times
A recent article in the May 29, 2011 edition of New York Times had a title that grabbed my attention: “3-D Starts to Fizzle, and Hollywood Frets,” The reporters, Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply, state  that: “The box-office performance in the first six months of 2011 was soft — revenue fell about 9 percent compared with last year, while attendance was down 10 percent.” That's off of a 5.25% attendance decine reported by boxoffice.com for 2010. To give those delines some perspective, remember that a mere six percent drop in attendance back in 2000-2001 pushed most of the theater chains into bankruptcy.  The current drop in attendance and revenues might be explained by our stalled economy and/or rocketing gasoline prices, neither of which promise to soon disappear.

Many Hollywood big wigs, such as James Cameron and Jeffrey Katzenberg, have argued that 3-D movies would save the industry by bolstering audiences and revenues. But Barnes and Cieply also report that now “there is strong consumer resistance to high 3-D ticket prices” and “the novelty of putting on the funny glasses is wearing off.” While the best 3-D feature films still are doing well at the box office, 3-D films of more ho-hum quality are taking a box office beating in the USA.

Barnes and Cieply also reported that rentals in video stores during the first part of the year fell 36 percent. This fact would be consistent with the crumbling of the Blockbuster chain and a substantial growth in the streaming and downloading of films to home TV and computer screens through Internet services such as Netflix, Amazon and iTunes. The latter was a possibility DANTH’s trends assessment feared would be all too likely.

My Take-Aways
With retail gasping for breath in most downtown and Main Streets commercial areas, their entertainment niches have taken on an even greater importance than they have had in the past. Downtown movie theaters are often the cornerstones of these niches and the recent decline in attendance suggests they may be facing substantially increased financial stress.
Strengthening downtown entertainment niches in small and medium-sized communities will probably follow two strategic paths:

• Buttressing the magnetism of the movie theaters through a package of improvements that includes: 3-D and IMAX screening capabilities; tie-ins with adjacent or in-house restaurants, bars, brew-pubs, ice cream parlors, etc.;  clean theaters, with comfortable seating and audiences displaying civil behavior
• Developing non-formal entertainments, most importantly in well-activated public spaces and restaurants.

What's Happening in Your Downtown?  

Please let me know what is happening in your downtown or Main Street district. If there are sufficient responses, I will report on them in special posting to this blog.

N. David Milder

GETTING THEIR STORIES TOLD -- WHAT PETITE BUSINESSES NEED FROM E-MARKETING

Morristown’s Treasured Businesses
  
France Delle Donne, the director of development at the Morristown Partnership (in NJ), recently sent me a link to a new posting to their website called Morristown's Treasured Businesses.  I took a look and thought it was just terrific! One of the best things I have seen on any downtown organization's website in a long time. It's so different from the dull, static, list-based or e-business directory like structures that I typically see on the webpages of these organizations that deal with merchants. It got me thinking about what I liked so much about it and why. I concluded that, though it had many attractive aspects, it was its ability to provide a narrative for each of these business operators that was most important. Storytelling is a critical factor in successfully marketing a downtown and its businesses, though too often overlooked. Branding is a more widely accepted marketing concept, yet the strongest brands gain their power from denoting some kind of story, even a short one. 
 
The High School’s Involvement Was Critical 

Morristown High School’s Broadcasting and Journalism departments approached the Morristown Partnership about doing a project on Morristown.  After an initial meeting and assessment of resources , the Partnership brought them a proposal for   “Morristown’s Treasured Businesses.”  With significant development taking place in Morristown’s business district over the past five years and an influx of new businesses moving in, the Partnership felt it timely to focus on independently-owned businesses that have been in operation for 25 to over 100 years and weathered a variety of economic cycles. According to the Partnership: 

“We wanted to use this opportunity to connect established businesses with the younger constituency in our community. The hope was to raise a cross-generational awareness and appreciation about treasures in Morristown, including businesses and the human connections associated with them. It had all the components to tell a great story. The High School embraced this idea."

 
Fifteen of the 55 businesses that fit the selection criteria were then interviewed and filmed by the students. A total of 48  students were involved in all phases of completing these merchant “documentaries.” The finished films were then posted on the Partnership’s website for the public to view and vote for their favorites.

 
Downtown organizations seldom have the resources to do everything they want, so having other organizations, such as the local high school, get involved is a really good idea. In Morristown, the high school faculty and students not only got involved, they did so for a novel, needed and effective program.
 
Additionally, as the Partnership recognized, high school students are an important retail market segment in Morristown -- and in many other downtowns -- so relationship building with the high school and its students is a good idea for the Partnership as well as many other BIDs and SIDs. 
 
Coping With the Longing for Trophy Retailers Syndrome 
  
Another reason I liked Treasured Businesses so much is that it addresses a critical problem faced not only by the Partnership, but by many other downtown organizations as well: local residents focus on the trophy retail chains that are not in their downtown, but do not acknowledge or appreciate the good small merchants who are there. 
  
Another is its use of the dynamic short movies to enable the local business operators themselves to talk about their shops and their histories in the community. As they tell their stories , these merchants become alive to the viewer, allowing the latter to develop some involvement in the stories and some attachment to the merchants.
 
The Decline of Storytelling About Local Businesses That Has Accompanied Downtown E-Marketing

For many years, from roughly the mid 1980s until fairly recently, many downtown organizations found that doing newspaper inserts and special magazines were strong marketing tools. They gave these organizations the  capability to send strong editorial content, that they created and controlled, to both potential consumers and commercial tenant prospects. At the heart of these publications, their most effective components, were stories that convincingly conveyed to the reader that the businesses or the downtown characteristic covered by that story were interesting, unique and/or -- most importantly -- a discovery. But, the times are “a-changin.”  Downtown organizations are quickly shifting their attention to e-marketing and their websites, e-newsletters and Facebook pages. My visits to many of these websites suggest that this shift from print to electronic marketing has been accompanied by a steep decline in the story-telling their marketing utilizes.

One reason for this trend may be that the easiest, cheapest and quickest ways to present information about local businesses on websites are in list/directory formats that primarily focus on category descriptors of business functions combined with basic contact information. In a few instances a short descriptive paragraph or two, perhaps even a photograph is provided. But, even fewer if any of these formats produce real stories about the local businesses. It’s more like name, rank and serial number, slam, bam, thank you mam. Also, using text to tell a story usually takes more words and time to read than most “webmeisters” advise for a webpage. 
 
The short movies provide an e-commerce, non-text technique for effective short storytelling. It has a strong personal component to it and thus can evoke viewer feelings and involvement.

Storytelling May Be How E-Marketing Can Best Help Really Small Merchants  
 
Since my work on the ‘deliberate consumer” I have been concerned about how the small business operators , say those "petite" firms with annual sales under $300,000/yr
   

• Can be stimulated to make the management and operational changes they must implement if they are to survive
• And how downtown and Main Street organizations can help them to make these changes. 

As I have written in some recent postings to this blog, having an effective e-commerce presence is probably one of these necessary innovations, but:
 

• A full-fledged e-store is probably too complex and resource demanding to be a viable option for these merchants 
• The directory type formats on either the business’ or a downtown organization’s website, even when blown up into full webpage formats, do not have sufficient impact to warrant the time and effort needed to create and maintain them.

 
I would argue that the best thing that their website or a page on their downtown organization’s website can do for one of these “petite” businesses, is to tell their story. That is what Morristown's Treasured Businesses does for these businesses. It provides a model for other downtown organizations to emulate, even if some tailoring to their situations probably will be needed. 
 
Again, the teachers and students at Morristown High School are to be strongly commended for their participation in this program and for doing such a good job on it!
  
N. David Milder

PARKING TRENDS REDUX

I just came across an article in the New York Times, "Higher-Priced Developments Providing Parking" by C. J. Hughes, (published on May 26, 2011) that cites two new upscale housing development projects in Manhattan that are providing on-site parking using hydraulic or   "robotic" technologies:

• An eight-story condo  building on West 24th Street, near Seventh Avenue, with 24 units. the building also will have eight internal parking spaces that are available  through a hydraulic lift.    
• Also on West 24th Street,, near Lexington Avenue, a 55-unit condo is being developed that is adjacent to a fully automated, “robotic”, 64-space garage. The garage is open to the public, but condo’s residents can lease spaces in it for a hefty monthly fee.

I think these projects are signs that the trend toward internally stacked and automated downtown parking that we at DANTH, Inc identified in our 2008-2013 downtown trends assessment is continuing even during our creeping economic recovery. The eight-space parking for the smallish  condo building may be a particularly relevant model for projects in suburban downtowns that can attract households with comfortable annual incomes.  Below is what I wrote about parking trends and mechanical and automated parking back in 2008. I think it is one of the most important trends identified in our assessment and worth a second presentation. 


A. Slowly, We Are Winning The War For Downtown Friendly Garages


For decades following WWII, new downtown parking garages tended to be physically unattractive, intruding into the urban fabric in ways that disrupted how downtowns are supposed to work, and deprived them of an important competitive advantage. The objective was simply to store vehicles. Little thought was given to whether the garage created a pedestrian discontinuity that discouraged people from strolling and shopping, while too often stimulating fears. Even less thought was given to how the perhaps functional, but blaringly ugly parking structure diminished the downtown’s attractiveness and image.


It was not as if examples of better downtown parking projects did not exist. Walking around Manhattan today, for instance, one may easily find garages in what appear to be ordinary high-rise commercial structures that were built before the 1960s. Their parking use is basically masked, save for the signage and ugly windows.


More impressive is the Carew Tower in downtown Cincinnati that was completed around 1930. It is a mixed-use project with wonderful art deco decorative themes placed throughout its three towers, mainly in the metalwork and grillwork of the elevators and lights. Originally, the project had three towers specializing in three distinct uses: offices, a hotel, and a parking garage that relied on an elevator to move cars between levels.


The John Hancock Center, completed in 1969, on N. Michigan Ave. in Chicago, has 100 stories, a height of 1,127 feet and provides space for offices, retail shops, restaurants, and about 700 condominiums. The ground floor and the floor above it are for retail and commercial uses. Above them on floors 3 through 13, thoroughly masked, are 11 stories of parking. The office and condos are located above the parking. A helix one block down a side street provides entry and egress from the parking.


These examples gained little traction until about the mid-1990s and as more downtown friendly parking structures began to appear a kind of snowball effect emerged and more and more developers proposed such projects without local civic leaders having to bang them overhead. Most influential was the Horton Plaza project in downtown San Diego, which hid its parking behind a "skin" of residential units. They also have begun to appear in medium-sized downtowns such as Cranford and Englewood in NJ and Ithaca, NY.


DANTH has created a photo album of downtown friendly parking projects that is posted on the Downtown Curmudgeon’s website for photos. Feel free to visit and download the photos at no cost. The web address for the photo album is:
https://picasaweb.google.com/dmilder/DowntownFriendlyParking#

Photos like these can help demonstrate to developers, town councils, planning boards and the pubic what can and should be done when it comes to downtown parking structures.



B. The Challenges


1. User Convenience and Safety. The above discussion detailed how the external features and ground floor uses of garages have been improving so they integrated far better with the rest of the downtown. Unfortunately, how garages are configured and operate inside very often still create huge problems.


DANTH has no transportation engineers, transportation planners or parking specialists on staff. However, we do run into parking issues continually as we engage in our consulting assignments. As a consequence, DANTH has developed a deep sense that parking issues are habitually scoped-out incorrectly because conceptual blinders lead to parking solutions are formulated to address the wrong problems. As a result, parking facilities are too frequently designed to store vehicles, with insufficient attention to serving the people they transport. Here are some examples of the “people aspects” of downtown parking problems:

• One nameless town along the Hudson River in NJ wanted to build a new parking deck although field investigation showed low utilization of municipal parking lots with ample parking spaces. Survey data indicated that many people simply did not know where the lots were or if the lots had available spaces. Was the problem here insufficient capacity? Was the viable solution a big parking deck? No on both counts. The capacity was adequate. Downtown shoppers needed better, up to date information so they could use it. This linkage between information and better utilization of parking capacity is too often overlooked.
•  For nearly 25 years we have found that on a busy fall Saturday at lunchtime in downtown Wellesley, MA, one can spend a good deal of time searching municipal lot by municipal lot for a vacant parking spot. This strong, attractive and busy downtown is a de facto lifestyle mall without central ownership. Lots of shoppers come not only from the college, but from many other affluent nearby communities. One might hypothesize that such frustrating searching for a parking space erodes shopper interest and visitation. Would a big parking deck be a solution here? How would it fit into the urban context? Would the local female shoppers really use it? If not a deck, what else can be done to ameliorate the need to search for parking spaces?
• · Some downtowns build new surface lots or decks on the periphery of their districts and then the leaders are surprised when few shoppers or diners want to use them! DANTH does not do brain surgery, but….
• Multi-level garages have been built to provide downtown shoppers with convenient parking only to have the operators discover that few shoppers will use the upper levels. No one apparently looked at how much time it would take on foot to get from a car on higher levels down to the sidewalk and then back again. No one also probably thought about the confinement of enclosed stairwells and the probable urine and urine smells they would attract. Or the hiding places built into many garages. Or the fear inducing potentials of elevators. Most shoppers are female and if you interview them about parking you will find they do not feel safe in most garages. Guess what makes them fearful! One does not need to be a rocket scientist to avoid this situation.
• Increasingly, downtown trips are quick, pick up or drop off types of visits and the shoppers do not want to spend more time looking for a space, parking and getting to and from their destination than they will in the shop or eatery. Yet, we have found very, very few downtowns with a short-term parking program aimed at these key consumers.

Because of the nature of our business DANTH is primarily concerned about the people who live, work, play and shop in downtowns and how they engage in those activities. Consequently, DANTH sees the nature of their parking needs not just in terms of needing a place to store a vehicle, but also and primarily about how that parking space will impact on the ways those folks use the downtown and its shops, restaurant’s and entertainment venues. From such a consumer perspective, the key parking issues are first convenience and safety and only then capacity. Few downtowns have their parking problems analyzed in these terms. Far too few parking facilities are designed – even recent ones – to maximize user convenience and safety. Ah, you think we are wrong! Then let us ask: “When was the last time you parked in a garage that had electronic signage directing you to the levels with empty spaces?” Never, probably. Roaming around a deck, searching for an empty space takes time and generates frustration and then perhaps anger. It is an irritating inconvenience. Then it seems to take forever to walk out of the deck and likely requires walking down filthy, foul-smelling, little prisons with stairs. It certainly is a very poor way to welcome visitors into your shopping district. It is the worst kind of customer service.


2. The Cost Of Downtown Land. Downtown land costs are high and rising. Moreover, as a downtown revitalizes land costs will escalate at an increased pace. This means that creating more physical capacity for downtown parking is getting more and more expensive. Parking revenues typically cannot compete with those yielded if the same parcels of land are put to office, retail or residential uses. In fact, without subventions and/or greater project density, parking very often cannot pay its own way.


Finding solutions to this problem is a major challenge to future downtown revitalizations.


C. Technological Responses: Some Examples
To address the above problems requires management and technological innovation. Unfortunately, gene therapy has not matured to the stage where it can be used to cure downtown leaders and city officials who work so diligently to produce ghastly, unattractive and user insensitive parking facilities. Getting rid of them is certainly one alternative, but usually difficult to achieve. Another approach is to find good examples of the people friendly parking projects and then selling local leaders on them because the projects will genuinely improve the downtown, while making the leaders look far-sighted and effective (i.e., like real leaders).


Technology can play a big role in maximizing the amount of parking that can be placed on a piece of downtown land as well as help make a parking facility easier, quicker and safer to use.

	Figure 1

1. Stacked Parking. One way to deal with rising land costs is to get more cars parked on the same amount of land. This can be done by going higher—but it also can be done by packing more parking spaces into the same volume of space. For example, in Manhattan, cars have been mechanically stacked on top of each other in small outdoor lots. These parking operations double or even quadruple their capacities without increasing the size of their lots. See Figure 1.


Looking out over the 2008-20013 time period, DANTH believes that relatively small infill residential projects will have growing impotence in downtown revitalization efforts across the nation. The viability of many of these projects will hang on their ability to provide on-site parking.

	Figure 2.

The stacking approach pictured above has been adapted for use in basement garages – see Figure 2 – located in such modest infill projects. DAL Design Group and its development subsidiary, in Bayonne, NJ, are working on a number of projects using this technology.
At this juncture, DANTH cannot recommend the immediate adoption of this technology – but, we can state that it is one that certainly warrants serious investigation.


2. Robotic Garages. Another approach, using much more sophisticated and expensive technology, is to build what some call robotic garages and others refer to as automated parking systems. For example, a seven-level municipal parking structure, only 56 ft high and capable of storing 324 cars was built on a relatively modest 100 x 100 lot in downtown Hoboken, NJ. (Martin, 2003). The entering autos are placed on a steel palate, which is then moved mechanically to and from its storage location under computer guidance.


This garage encountered problems with the computer program controlling its operation, resulting in its closure for a time. Although now reportedly fully back in operation, its problems have put a wet blanket over the idea of robotic garages in the Northern NJ area.


But, robotic garages promise at least doubling the number of cars that can be stored on any given piece of downtown real estate, while greatly reducing the personnel costs for attendants and cashiers. These benefits attract a number of developers even though robotic garages cost significantly more to build. For example, at 123 Baxter Street, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Automation Parking Systems installed and operates what their name says in a new building. It has 24 residential units, ranging in size from 1,200 sf to 4,800 sf. Every unit is guaranteed at least one parking space in the basement garage, which holds 68 cars. The estimated average cost for a robotic garage space is about $40,000, compared with $30,000 for a space in a typical underground garage, although those figures can be considerably higher if the builder has to dig deeper or encounters other problems along the way.


Manhattan's Chinatown is very densely populated with many narrow one-way streets. Parking is at an absolute premium. New infill residential buildings, such as this, with safe off street parking, are rare. The 44 parking spaces not allocated to residents will be made available to nonresidents, with the revenues raised hopefully more than offsetting the costs of the robotic system’s installation and operation.


Here is a link to a DANTH slideshow on the Automation Baxter Street facility and how it operates:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dmilder/RoboticGarage123BaxterStNewYorkNY


The technology it uses has been used successfully in numerous facilities in Europe, especially Germany. DANTH thanks Jordan Rinzler of Automation for inviting us to visit the facility and being our tour guide.


The Takeaway. Based on the information we have obtained, DANTH believes that robotic parking should be given serious – not knee jerk nor flippant – consideration for any downtown project that requires about 130+ parking units. DANTH also believes that the number of such projects that will find automated parking an appropriate solution will increase with time and the:

• Accompanying rise in downtown land prices
• Reduction in the costs of the automated systems
• Growing acceptability of the approach as more systems are built and operate successfully.
• DANTH also believes that the automated approach may be appropriate for smaller projects, such as 123 Baxter Street, when the facility can meet, in addition to the needs of building residents, high neighborhood demand for parking among people who can and will pay a high price for it.

3. The Grove. Rick Caruso and his firm, Caruso Affiliated, have created one of the most successful and popular retail centers in the country, called The Grove. Located in Los Angeles – the city famed for reputedly having no there there -- its design resembles a small downtown, with its own trolley, bevy of trophy retailers, cinema, restaurants and location next to the locally cherished Farmers Market. It is also across the street from Parc La Brea, a huge housing complex built by MetLife after WWII.


In no small measure, The Grove’s success is due to an insightful understanding of how shoppers behave and a great attention to detail in responding to shopper needs, especially concerning making the visitors experience easy, safe and enjoyable.


This is shown in how they handle parking. The garage has eight levels and – contrary to what happens elsewhere -- shoppers have no problem with using the upper levels. In part this is due to The Grove being so popular, but also because the garage uses open escalators and electronic signage to make shoppers feel their visits will be safe and convenient. Here is a link to a brief DANTH slideshow that shows these two features:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dmilder/ParkingAtTheGroveInLosAngeles

The escalators completely avoid all of the garage stairwell problems and make pedestrian egress and entry feel safe, pleasant and quick.


The electronic signage greets the drivers as they enter the garage and indicates how many spaces are available on each level. This type of signage is used all over Europe. It is absolutely astonishing that more garages in the USA do not install them.


Moreover, in Paris, for example, similar sign technology is used to indicate on roads coming into the city the occupancy levels of various municipal garages, which reduces the amount of time, effort and gasoline drives spend on finding a space. Such a technology can certainly be implemented in the USA. Communities such as Wellesley, MA, and the Hudson River community described above would greatly benefit from them.


The Grove exemplifies a level of concern about visitor convenience and safety that many downtowns leaders and business operators can learn from. The Grove also uses modern technologies in ways that many downtowns can use as models.

Some Interesting Research About E-Commerce

The Online Articles

A May 5, 2011 posting on ClickZ,  "Is Facebook Marketing Behind Macy's Online Sales Jump," suggests that that Macy's efforts to pick up Facebook "likes", which in 2011 grew to 800,000 was responsible for the 50.3% rise in the Macys.com and Bloomingdales.com monthly sales. The article also mentions that Foursquare and Twitter were used in this campaign.

A May 10, 2011 posting to the Business Insider by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, "Turns Out Social Media Marketing Doesn't Work" reports on recent research done by Applied Predictive Technologies. The research tested "how much location-based services like Foursquare and Facebook Places can help local businesses." It found an impact that is just "close to 2%." (There is no clarity as to what the 2% refers to in the article, e.g., sales, visits, etc."

Gobry advises Foursquare investors not to panic because the used social media may not have had enough time in the test to work and "Right now, social media marketing and advertising is in the experimental phase. We don't really know what works and what doesn't, fumbling in the dark."

I consider customer service as a critical marketing tool, so another online article that recently caught my eye was by Joe Light and posted on April 25, 2011 to the Wall Street Journal's website. Titled "With Customer Service, Real Person Trumps Text,"  the article reports on a large national survey conducted by American Express to find out how consumers want corporations to provide customer service. The survey found:

• 90% of the respondents wanted customer service handled by live representatives over the telephone
• About 50% like customer service delivered by online chat
• Just a little more than 20% would use social networking sites
• 20% said they would use auto-response phone systems
• 70% said they would spend more with a company that provides good customer service , an increase from the 58% that felt that way last year.

My Take-Aways

I think Gobry hit the nail on its head, but that his remarks apply not just to social media marketing, but substantially to internet marketing in general. What is obvious is that large, savvy corporations with ample resources and large technical staffs  such as Macy's and American Express are still trying to discover what really works and what doesn't and many of them are still "fumbling in the dark." 

The small merchants that populate so many of our downtowns lack the resources and skilled staffs of the large corporations and the results for them of a failed online marketing campaign are probably more dangerous. Advocating their involvement in unproven and for them complicated and expensive internet ventures is irresponsible. Yet, an internet presence is fast becoming an existential imperative for all merchants, be they large or small! Downtown organizations that want to foster merchant presence on the internet in most cases need to focus on programs that have some real proof of effectiveness and that make merchant involvement less complicated and more affordable.  I have always been fond of the Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) approach to program development and to my mind it applies here. For most small downtown merchants small, affordable, simple to do and easy to maintain steps may be the most viable.

Of course, there are always the exceptions, those marvelous exceptions among the small business operators. At the extreme they are the true innovators that may start in garages, small offices and small shops and create firms like Apple, Microsoft, and Limited Brands. While small business innovators of this high caliber are relatively rare, my experience suggests that there are 5% to 20% of a downtown's merchants who may be open to some innovation and willing to take some risk. Should downtown organizations focus their efforts on this group or do they need to develop two-tier programs, one level for the more innovative-prone merchants, the other for the average merchant?

N. David Milder