Last night Bradenton unveiled a $68,000 consultant-generated study (pdf download) on Tamiami Trail revitalization that ignored many problems that may prevent it from becoming reality. But it contained one essential nugget of advice that could justify the study’s entire cost all by itself.

This advice boiled down to, “Your first project had better be big and visible and must be a financial success.”

The initial project suggested by the consultants was mixed-use commercial and residential, with commercial space fronting on the main street, apartments above the retail space, and townhouses behind the retail space, fronting on side streets. By necessity, this kind of project would take up an entire block. It could not be built piecemeal, one small lot at a time.

There is logic to this proposal. Those of us who live in this area and have substantial middle-class incomes would love to have upscale shopping nearby, possibly something along the lines of the Trader Joe’s grocery stores specifically mentioned in the report. But without a built-in business base, an upscale store is unlikely to survive here. Building — literally — a customer base at the same time the retail space is built takes care of this problem.

An attempt by the city to purchase the run-down Manatee Inn fell through last month. Update, Feb 2006: the city finally managed to buy this eyesore and is now razing it. Yay! This is a perfect “starter” property for Tamiami Trail fixup not only because it occupies an entire square block in the middle of the fixup zone but because buying and closing the Manatee Inn has removed a major eyesore — and has removed a dwelling spot favored by the illegal immigrants, alcoholics, and drug addicts whose constant presence is one of Tamiami Trail’s most persistent problems.

The primary reason cited by city officials for not meeting Manatee Inn owner Dick Black’s original high asking price was that if they paid over $2 million for that property, and then turned it over to a developer for less than that, everyone else who owned a decrepit property in the area — and everyone who wanted to build anything new here — would expect similar treatment.

The consultant report seems to suggest the opposite: that for the first project the city should bite that bullet and subsidize its land purchase to make sure it succeeds. The reasoning behind this idea is that the first developer takes the biggest risk; that once you get one project going, and the new units within it sold or rented (or some combination of the two) at a profit, unsubsidized developers will jump in and take it from there.

‘Workforce Housing’

This is what we say now instead of ‘affordable housing,’ which in some people’s minds seems to bring up images of drug-hazed welfare recipients sitting on stoops looking for robbery victims. It’s also a more realistic term, especially when most middle-class workers cannot afford the $300,000 (and up) now demanded for most new suburban-style houses in Manatee County.

The consulatants kept talking about the basic dwelling unit in a mixed-used Tamiami Trail development being only 1000 square foot — essentially a spacious two-bedroom — with an enclosed/attached garage for security, and a price tag between $150,000 and $200,000.

Their contention is that while not everyone wants an ‘urban core’ lifestyle, there are between 5000 and 10,000 households already in Manatee County that would enjoy it if it was available. Plus, of course, this whole area is going through growth, growth, growth, so there are probably another 62 zillion people in places like Indiana and Kansas who would want similar places to live, especially young couples starting out and those whose children are grown and would now like to have a warm-weather coastal life that also gives them walk-to-work-downtown convenience.

One good thing about the city providing low-cost land for the first Tamiami Trail development(s) is that, in return, it can require ‘workforce housing’ prices for a substantial percentage of the residential units, possibly tied to a “You must live here for five years to get the low price” scheme to keep speculators out of the picture.

Beware the Land Sharks!

One problem with trying to do revitalization in Florida is Land Sharks (AKA “real estate investors”) who come in and screw everything up.

A Land Shark’s brain thinks like this:

• Property values here always go up.
• Therefore I must buy property and hold onto it.
• Meanwhile, I’ll rent it out and do no maintenance. I don’t need to fix it up because it’ll go up in value no matter what I do (or don’t do).
• Since drug addicts and illegal immigrants are the tenants least likely to complain to housing authorities about my lack of maintenance, these are the people I’ll rent to. Besides, they pay rent in cash so I can duck some taxes, hah, hah, hah.
• If I have a commercial property — same thing. I’ll get all the rent out of it I can today, without doing any fixup. And if I don’t get my high rent, no big deal. It can sit vacant. Some fool will come along and give me lots more than I paid for it if I have a little patience, hah, hah, hah.

Many properties along Tamiami Trail and in adjacent neighborhoods have fallen prey to Land Sharks. Prying properties out of their jaws is essential to the success of Bradenton’s redevelopment efforts. I’m still not sure how this is going to happen, but I expect that it will, one way or another.

The ‘Homeless’ Problem

We have two kinds of ‘homeless’ here:

• Families and others whose incomes aren’t keeping pace with increasing housing prices. Typically these people become homeless after losing a job, getting sick or getting evicted when a landlord decides to renovate and increase rents. This is curable homelessness. Members of this group who want to stabilize their lives usually manage to do so eventually either on their own or with help from social service agencies, family or private (often church-based) groups.
• Bums. This is the crowd that panhandles along roadways and in shopping center parking lots, sleeps in bushes along the riverfront, hangs out all day in the library, and generally messes things up for law-abiding residents. This is ‘homelessness’ as a lifestyle choice. People who choose this lifestyle will patronize soup kitchens as long as there are soup kitchens, and will generally not take a job if offered (or show up for more than a few days even if they take one).

Helping the first group — the ones you might call ‘involuntary homeless’ — is good. Hardly anyone, even the hardest-hearted Republican, thinks giving a hand up to people down on their luck is bad. There may be disagreement about help methods (public or private) but that’s the only argument, and it’s not really a major one.

Helping bums is harder. Many don’t want help in the “turn your life around” sense, and forcing help on people who don’t want it is not only expensive and often illegal, but usually futile. I suspect that the only practical thing we can do with the bum crowd is make it hard enough for them to hang out in Bradenton that they move on. I wish I had a better solution, but I don’t.

An interesting thought from the consultants was that increased development along Tamiami Trail will lessen the bum problem significantly, not necessarily by decreasing the number of bums but by bringing so many legitimate people into the area that the bums would become a small, nearly invisible, minority. The idea is that while a high percentage of bums makes a neighborhood feel nasty, a few don’t matter much.

This makes sense.

Retail: Class Matters

Many of the businesses here cater to the current population and aren’t suitable for a more upscale clientele. Federal Discount Beverages on 9th Street West is a perfect example. It sells cheap beer and wine, cheap cigarettes (as low as $11.99 per carton), money orders, wire transfers (so you can send money home to your family in Mexico), and other products and services needed by a downscale population that includes a high percentage of illegal immigrants.

I shop at Federal because it’s close and the cigarettes are cheap. My wife hates to go there. She also dislikes the Bravo Supermarket on Tamiami Trail, which is only marginally clean, and doesn’t have very good meats (or very good prices).

Most of the other retailers in this neighborhood are of similar quality. The only nearby gas station has consistently higher prices than stations in more prosperous neighborhoods. There are ‘work by the day’ labor contractors, bars where floor cleaning is obviously not a priority, lots of “Buy Here - Pay Here” used car lots, and other operations that don’t cater to the $40,000 a year (and up) crowd.

The consultants are realistic about one thing: That the “urban” section of Tamiami Trail is not going to attract big-box retailers and other major chain stores. There are already plenty of them within a few miles, and more (notably a Lowes) being built within a five minute drive. The hope here is to create a destination shopping area based on unique goods and services.

One example of a business that should move to a revitalized, ‘urban core’ Tamiami Trail is Ezra Cafe. I enjoy the food and ambience there, but the location is just plain wrong. This restaurant doesn’t belong in a strip mall on Manatee Avenue W. It belongs in a fixed-up older building. It needs to be near or in the Village of the Arts.

And if Ezra doesn’t want to move, someone else should open an elegant-but-casual eating establishment either on or near Tamiami Trail. A little evening entertainment wouldn’t hurt. The main thing is, this place would and should be a destination, a place worth traveling to from 10 or 20 miles away based on its unique menu and atmosphere.

Now apply the same thought pattern to retail and service businesses. There are establishments that don’t feel right in suburbia but are ‘at home’ in an urban core environment. These must be places — especially when the revitalization effort is starting out — that are unique enough to draw customers from beyond the neighborhood.

An example of this kind of business is reptile-specializing Pet Kingdom — and it’s already here, but stuck in the back of one of the ugliest strip malls on Tamiami Trail.

That mall galls me. With a little work and creativity, it could become a neighborhood showplace, with Pet Kingom and two or three other unique stores bringing in people with money, possibly a cafe with decent outdoor dining (the parking lot is way bigger than it needs to be), and a generally decent ambience. This doesn’t mean the pawn shop on the corner of the shopping center needs to go. Why shouldn’t a pawn shop look nice? And maybe — just maybe — a pawn shop that put a little effort into catering to folks a little above the bottom of society could be more profitable than one that’s just like all the other deadbeat ones around here.

‘Unique’ is the Key Word

Brand-new ‘Main Street’ shopping/residential districts are springing up all over the place. Disney has Celebration, Florida, and new non-mall malls are springing up in Eastern Manatee and Sarasota Counties. Downtown Bradenton has a nice riverfront that these places lack, but it’s getting condomized hard and is not easy to walk to from Tamiami Trail with current traffic patterns, so the only way it factors into Tamiami Trail development is by increasing the (probably seasonal) condomite population. The trick is going to be attracting business owners and developers who are non-mainstream enough that they create something special instead of a series of “me too” businesses and buildings.

Planting some Royal Palms and putting old-timey streetlights along a main drag helps, but only goes so far. Talking up Bradenton’s history isn’t going to do much; aside from Hernando deSoto (probably) landing here, it’s pretty much the same as any other Florida town’s history, and most old houses here — hardly any of which are older than the area’s oldest living residents — have no characteristics that set them apart from similar residences built in the rest of Florida between 1910 and 1960.

Technology? This area is zero-land on the tech front. Bradenton’s city Web site is pitiful. The local Economic Development Council’s site doesn’t allow browsers other than Explorer. There are a few scattered inventors, just as there are everywhere else, but there is no decent engineering college nearby, nor is there any other employment or educational reason for technological innovators to be here instead of somewhere else.

There is no municipal marina or even a Sailing Squadron like the one in Sarasota, which is self-supporting but on city-supplied land. Boating here is divided between trailer powerboats and ‘yachtsmen’ who can afford high private marina rents. So we can’t boast about our coolness on the sailing or really even on the powerboat front; Sarasota may not have a public marina but at least it has a maintained mooring field. When it comes to maritime amenities, Bradenton is strictly second-rate.

What we can offer is color and dazzle. Murals help. We have some nice ones already, with more coming. Even buildings in the proposed mixed-use developments painted more vividly than the usual Florida builder-loved blah earth tones would help, as would not painting a whole bunch of buildings on one block the same color or giving them all the same roof pitches or other evidence that they were stamped out of a single mold.

In other words, we can accentuate quirky charm.

That’s one thing Bradenton has in abundance. All we need to do is stop hiding it and start exploiting it. And in this context, even a few bums can be part of a revitalized Tamiami Trail’s ambience — as long as they’re halfway interesting, don’t litter, and have a place to take regular showers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.