The signs at Bradenton’s city limits call it “The Friendly City.” It’s not a big-name Florida tourist destination; tell most people you live in Bradenton, and they ask, “Where?” But the place is starting to shake its reputation as a nowhere town with a decaying skid row at its heart, and its Downtown Development Authority [DDA] is one of the biggest reasons for the change. Sad note: please see my gloomy Feb. 2008 update.
One potential problem with this change is that a whole lot of people moved to Bradenton because it was an inexpensive, sleepy little town that didn’t have the typical Florida high-rise condominium blight along its waterfront. The condoms are coming to Bradenton now, in a big way, busily stealing large amounts of the area’s natural beauty. But if the DDA does its job right — which it looks like it will — the condomites and other despoilers won’t totally take over the town the way they’ve overwhelmed other once-pleasant Florida communities.
Here in Bradenton, a substantial part of the redevelopment effort concentrates on bringing in businesses, especially owner-operated, arts-oriented businesses. The DDA’s vision of central Bradenton includes its share of high-rise view-blockers, to be sure, but also has plenty of room for street-level retail stores not only in the heart of downtown but also in surrounding neighborhoods. The idea is to create an extended area where people can live, work, shop, and play without being forced to use their cars all the time. It’s an attractive vision of old houses turned into small coffee houses and bookstores; of new construction where shop owners can live above their businesses; where tourists and locals mingle in happy harmony over breakfast in small cafes while old-growth Oak trees shield all this loveliness from the hot summer sun.
Many of these new businesses will not be separated from residential neighborhoods but mixed in with them. Next to a side-street coffee shop you might have a young lawyer and her family living in a renovated older house, with the lawyer — whose office is downtown — enjoying walk-to-work convenience and the ability to pick up interesting food on the way home, not to mention a “pocket park” on the corner where her children can play while neighborhood retirees gossip, play chess or quietly relax in the sun. Add a library, community theater, day care centers, and scenic riverfront within easy walking or bike-riding distance — all of which already exist — and this could be an outstanding community, especially if some of the renovation and new construction is done with an eye toward making it possible not only for lawyers but also for legal secretaries and even the janitors in the lawyer’s building to live within walking range of all this wonderfulness.
Bradenton Village as a key component
When I first came to Bradenton, its largest public housing development was Rogers Garden, a scraggly group of single-story structures that flooded in almost every heavy rain. Rogers Garden has now been replaced by the attractive (but still subsidized) Bradenton Village, which is now expanding onto nearby vacant lots. It’s good to have housing opportunities near downtown for people who do actual work, not just for those adept at exploitation. It’s also good because, even though Bradenton Village is neat and clean and the people I’ve met who live there are perfectly nice, having “housing projects” close to the heart of the development effort is a great way to keep out the nastiest exploiters, many of whom are also racists. Show them a few brown faces in the area and hopefully they’ll run screaming to places their kind has already ruined instead of trying to wreak their havoc on poor little Bradenton.
But the kind of profit-oriented, non-racist business owners and managers we want to attract will love the idea of well-kept, low-income housing near the main business district. It means Bradenton can offer a more reliable labor force than most Florida cities. Think: If you were a customer service rep living in a decent, affordable place, working within walking distance of home, with plenty of activities and shopping also within walking distance, wouldn’t you want to stick with that job as long as possible? Wouldn’t you even accept slightly lower pay than you could get if you had to drive 10 or 20 miles to work every day? Of course you would!
I don’t know if the DDA and other local development agencies use Bradenton Village as a marketing point when they are trying to bring in new businesses, but they should.
In any case, it’s good to see a Florida city making sure non-rich people are as welcome as rich people. Bradenton has never been an overly pretentious place, and it shouldn’t become one now.
Hands-on work by the DDA director
Last week I sent an email to DDA director Bill Theroux asking about sidewalk and street lighting plans for our little corner in the south end of Bradenton’s Village of the Arts. He didn’t reply by email. Instead, the next day he was at our door, answering my questions in person. I am not a millionaire developer or big-time local activist. I am just a writer who works at home, building a humble gallery for my artist wife and trying to coordinate my work with the city’s. But still, here he was, talking about widening our 11th Street driveway entrance (Debbie’s gallery is going to be in what is now our garage) and whether the Oak tree on our corner should stay or go when our street gets new sidewalks late this summer.
On a larger scale, Theroux is working to buy some of the deadbeat motels on Tamiami Trail — the kind that draw horrible publicity — and lure investors who will use the former motel sites for mixed-use commercial and residential development in keeping with the urban village theme the DDA is promoting so strongly.
Theroux is also the sparkplug behind many events and promotions designed to bring prosperity to Bradenton, from trolley tours for commercial real estate brokers to fancy mailers that talk up vacant (and soon to be built) office space here, not to mention an endless hustle for grants and other funding that is a full-time juggling act all by itself. But in keeping with Bradenton’s quaintness (and the small-town feel I hope it never sheds), he still made time to come to our house — which admittedly is on a key corner for the Village of the Arts expansion now under way, and has the potential for becoming a showplace gallery because we plan to run a paperback book exchange and snack stand in addition to selling Debbie’s (and neighbors’) crafts and artwork, not to mention our public wireless access point and plans to put at least a small park bench and trash can on our corner, outside our fence, for public use.
This kind of caring, hands-on management means a lot when it comes to rebuilding a small city. It makes me feel glad I chose to live here instead of in one of the many other communities Debbie and I considered before we moved to Bradenton.
Public-private cooperation
I believe that even if all I provide in the way of public facilities is a tiny corner “park” that’s nothing but a small bench and a trash can (and wireless access point, of course), it’s my duty to help improve Bradenton’s public infrastructure.
Many local business owners and property investors are fixing up old buildings and putting up new ones that are in line with the urban village concept, complete with private but publically accessible spaces designed to draw people in rather than repel them. The city is helping, but the bulk of the money being spent to make Bradenton a better place to live is coming from private pockets. Even on our corner, my wife and I are spending far more to renovate a run-down house and build a pint-sized retail business than the city is spending on new sidewalks and street lighting in front of our property.
And we are not the only ones doing major fix-up. My wife and I recently visited the new Different Strokes gallery at 1019 10th Ave W. and saw just how stunning one of these old places (and its garden) can become with enough vision, work, and money. Pat and Cal Underwood — the gallery’s owners — have made their place into a knockout. It’s a commercial art gallery, not their home, but they have done a truly outstanding job with it, far better than we expect (or can afford) to do with our little place.
Multiply the Underwoods’ efforts by a few dozen or a few hundred, mix cafes and other businesses in with the galleries, and you will have one heck of a place to live even if you’re not directly involved in the arts. And all the city really did to make this happen, when you come down to it, was allow businesses to operate in a residential zone, put in some cute sidewalks and streetlights, and get the police department to treat it as a neighborhood worthy of a little proactive, community-based law enforcement activity. All the rest was done (and is still being done) by private individuals who want to live or work here, and for the most part they’re doing it without government subsidies or special tax breaks.
Still problems to overcome
Even though the DDA is working hard to make central Bradenton a great place to live and work, there’s still much to be done. We still suffer from too many homeless people in the area, brought in partly by a Salvation Army shelter and a soup kitchen called Our Daily Bread, both of which are only a few blocks away from us. Then there are the Tamiami Trail motels. They are no longer havens for budget-conscious tourists, but have become last-ditch housing for people on the skids (including many alcoholics, drug abusers, and illegal immigrants).
In addition, you have your typical “skid row” businesses here: Your “work one day at a time for damn near no pay” labor contractors, beer marts, paycheck cashing joints, overpriced grocery stores with bad-looking meats and vegetables, and other operations that can only exist in neighborhoods that have an aura of hopelessness hanging over them, not to mention plenty of empty lots where less-ghetto businesses once stood. The consultants brought in from Michigan to help create a vision of what the Tamiami Trail area could be like someday (pretty much the same as what you can see on the CoolTown Studios Web site) call this hopelessness “disinvestment,” and say that the best way to combat it is with… hold on to your hat now… “reinvestment” that can replace the vacant lots and businesses that cater to society’s lower fringe with businesses that attract upscale spenders.
The only problem is, this “reinvestment” needs to be massive, continuous, long-term, and must involve city services and law enforcement as much as it involves pouring in money. In mid-2004 I saw an article in the Baltimore Sun under the headline, Hollins Market area ready for rebirth. I seem to remember writing a few articles about an impending Hollins Market “neighborhood rebirth” in the early 1990s myself, and others wrote about it in the 1980s. That rebirth has been going to come along any day now for over 20 years, spurred by the presence of hip, socially-conscious artists and writers.
Debbie and I were once recruited heavily as prospective Hollins Market area residents by neighborhood activists. One local landlord even offered to give us a house for free if we’d agree to renovate it and live in it for at least five years. We declined because, despite the amount of government money going into the neighborhood, it had been abandoned by police to the point where it became the backdrop for The Corner and other depressing, reality-based crime dramas.
Hollins Market was an area where — despite many millions of dollars in grant money and private investment going into the neighborhood — the three decent restaurants near Hollins Market closed because crack-fueled crime drove away most of their customers, and most of the people we knew and liked who lived there left once they realized that they weren’t going to get any of the “clean up the neighborhood” help the Baltimore Police Department and housing code enforcement people always promised but never delivered.
Bradenton’s central city problems are nowhere as severe as what we saw in Baltimore’s Hollins Market area, and I see the balance between upswing and downswing tilted far more toward the upswing side here. One problem Bradenton has, though, that Baltimore doesn’t, is terrible conditions for people who choose to walk instead of drive. It is so dangerous to cross the pair of one-way streets that make up State Route 64 and separate our neighborhood from downtown and the riverfront next to it that whenever we go downtown we drive instead of walking or riding our bikes. Some major thought needs to go into changing Bradenton’s downtown traffic patterns, and there must be a major upswing in traffic law enforcement before this area can be considered “pedestrian-friendly” by any sane person.
The last big problem Bradenton must solve to bring “reinvestment” to its core can be summed up in one word: Slumlords. This is the one business group that never “disinvested” here. There are low-end rental houses, apartments, and trailer parks in various states of decrepitude all over this area. I assume Bill Theroux and Larry Frey, the city’s Director of Development Services — another guy who has his head on straight — have plans to get slumlords out of our neighborhoods and to put their properties into the hands of owner-occupants who will take care of them, so I’m not going to spend too much time worrying about this aspect of civic improvement.
Cautious optimism
The endless rise in gas prices makes close-in living more appealing than ever. So does increased traffic on country roads that are increasingly clogged with suburban drive-to-work traffic. There’s also pricing to consider. You can still buy houses — even duplexes — in central Bradenton for between $100,000 and $200,000. Most of them are going to need some work before you can move in, but when it comes to a choice between a $140,000 house plus $10,000 in fix-up money, and houses that are far beyond your family’s financial reach, the choice is obvious — even if the $140,000 place isn’t in a neighborhood you’d choose if housing prices everywhere else weren’t totally crazy.
For whatever it’s worth, most of the other low-cost areas in Manatee and Sarasota Counties are worse than central Bradenton on the crime and nuisance front, and this area has more improvement potential than almost anywhere else in the region. In other words, it’s rapidly becoming a smart buy for middle-class families that want a pleasant, interesting place to live.
Meanwhile, I’d love to see a nice, high-quality supermarket open up either on 9th Street or Tamiami Trail. It would get a fair amount of upscale traffic from the soon-to-be-built waterfront condominiums and other prosperous people moving into this area, not to mention people who are on tight budgets but still like a little luxury in their lives now and then. I’m sure Theroux and his crew have thought of this already and are helping (or will soon be helping) one of the better grocery chains find a suitable location near downtown Bradenton.
That’s all fine with me. Things are looking good around here. So, at least for the moment, I will stop worrying about neighborhood improvement and go back to work on my upcoming book, “Point & Click OpenOffice.org” so that I have money to fix my place up enough that it looks like part of the fixed-up, cleaned-up central Bradenton that Bill Theroux and many other people in city government are working so hard to create.
