Is it too late to build an urban village(s) in the core?

Mixed use building on 1st Avenue SW in Kingston Village

SOURCE: David Sucher, City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village (Seattle: City Comforts Inc., revised edition, 2016)

It is one thing to note the unbalanced, car-dependent way in which Cedar Rapids's showpiece New Bohemia neighborhood--and to some extent, other post-flood areas like Downtown, Czech Village and Kingston--are developing. It is quite a different matter to suggest steps that ought to be taken to remedy matters. It is likely, for one thing, that the present situation has resulted from rational (if short-term-focused) assessment of what is achievable. We have the residential and commercial mix we have because those projects seemed most likely to succeed.

Development surely is constrained by external factors beyond the control of anyone in the core: increasing economic inequality, siting practices of grocery chains, local transportation that particularly favors private motor vehicles, and physical isolation of the core from older residential neighborhoods, to name a few. To name another, the hyper-convenience of the Internet is changing shopping and work habits.

ped crossing island and bike lane, 3rd Avenue and 2nd Street SW in Kingston

I am not in business, and never have been, nor do I have professional training as a city planner. "I know what I like," to borrow a timeworn cliche, but so do a lot of other people, so this needs to be about more than my personal taste and preferences.

A good starting point for a conversation with stakeholders would be to know why they are in the core instead of some other place. I imagine they've specifically chosen to be there, but the owner of the (Downtown) CR Chophouse restaurant blamed its recent closure on the presence of homeless people and the lack of convenient parking (El Hajj 2024). If these truly were problematic, why on earth was the restaurant located where it was? This metropolitan area is replete with commercial opportunities with fields of parking and no homeless for miles. 

3rd Avenue SW: The core has bike infrastructure and bus options,
not great but often serviceable 

Right now the core is heavy on apartments and bars, and light on pretty much everything else (except hair salons--why are there so many hair salons?). It is now the case, and likely to continue to be so for some time, that the economy of the core is heavily dependent on people from elsewhere in the region driving there to shop or dine or drink.

Waste of prime space: Surface parking, Kingston Village

You can be, I would think, the new hot spot only for so long. When I first arrived in Cedar Rapids, the area hot spots were the Amana Colonies and maybe the malls. Today those serve as object lessons: hot spots show their age pretty quickly. If the opening of the admittedly fantastic Big Grove location on 1st Street West has been a body blow to the other bars in the core, wait til you see what happens when the casino opens! Marion has invested a lot of money in restarting its downtown area, but counting on the government may not be your most reliable or timely option. Political decisions are unpredictable, and government finances are ever-shakier.

It seems the best long-term strategy for core areas is to become self-sustaining. That is, if the residential population in the center of Cedar Rapids can become large and stable and diverse enough, there will be a steady source of demand for goods and services throughout the day and week, as well as a steady source of people on the street to provide liveliness and atmosphere attractive to visitors. This will require a different mix of housing and businesses than can currently be found anywhere in or adjacent to the core. Some of this will happen of its own accord once the ball starts rolling, but it may need some advocacy to get started.

David Sucher called his development handbook City Comforts because:

Human comfort is the measure of a city.... The main task [of city building] is making people comfortable, the same task faced by the host at a party. (2016: 20)

The means to this end is mixed-use development, in order to facilitate "mixing" of people, or as he titles an early chapter, "Bumping Into People."

The purpose of mixing uses, allowing different activities to rub cheek by jowl, is to foster more complex and intertwined human relations and thus more interesting places. The purpose is to help create human connections--not to mix activities per se. There is nothing magic about mixing uses. (2016: 32)

wall, 1st Street SW

What an urban village can offer people, that car-dependent shopping corridors like Edgewood or Collins Roads cannot, is accessible, comfortable liveliness. That can be self-sustaining only if there are connections to a steady stream of people at different times of the day, rooted in local residents doing the stuff of daily life. (See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities [Modern Library, (1961) 2011], pp. 65-71.)

In subsequent chapters, Sucher provides detailed recommendations, with plentiful illustrations, about transportation, sense of place, safety, child-friendliness, necessities, compatible building, and entry points. Some of this we can see in the core: most building is done up to the sidewalk, most building fronts are active rather than blank walls. (See his chapter 3.) My own sense is we could do more to welcome children, encourage transportation alternatives, and provide necessities like rest rooms, as well as to make new buildings compatible with the neighborhood's physical history, but maybe conversations will reveal other opportunities.

Ellen Shepherd of Community Allies speaks
at Loyola University, 2016

There are a number of organizations that can support local grass-roots place making efforts. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ilsr.org) provides research and advocacy on behalf of locally-owned businesses; co-director Stacy Mitchell's 2017 post, "8 Policy Strategies Cities Can Use to Support Local Businesses," is a good starting point and conversation-starter. Community Allies (communityallies.net), based in Chicago, provides speakers and training towards building local economies. The Center for Neighborhood Technology (cnt.org) focuses on Chicago, but provides experience on which others can draw. 

There are a lot of forces, and a lot of sunk costs, pushing the core to be a quaint, beer-soaked version of car-dependent suburbia. That doesn't mean we can't push back, and there are reasons to believe the long-term viability of the core depends on pushing back.

SEE ALSO: Alexander Garvin, The Heart of the City: Creating Downtowns for a New Century (Island, 2019). His "six lessons for any downtown" (ch. 6) include:

1. Establish a distinctive downtown image that is instantly recognizable and admirable

2. Improve access into and circulation within downtown

3. Enlarge and enhance the public realm esp. reconfiguring space used by pedestrians, moving vehicles, and parking

4. Sustain a habitable environment downtown (trees, parkland)

5. Reduce cost of doing business for both governments and private actors

6. Flexible land use, building use and new construction