Is Free Rent Enough to Jumpstart a Sleepy Commercial District?

 

 

For decades, about five blocks of the South Avondale neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama, was all but vacant. Once a small, thriving cultural district on the border of affluent sections of the city's Southside, South Avondale's business district had experienced a stunning decline in recent decades thanks to "white flight," population loss, and the closing of industrial businesses that manufactured goods such as cotton and bricks.

 

- Coby Lake and his brother, Hunter, took action. They snapped up property along South Avondale’s main drag. They built a brewery — one of only a handful in Alabama built since the state’s antiquated alcohol laws were changed in recent years. And with an innovative contest to give one new business owner six months of free rent in one of their vacant storefronts, the Lakes are now being credited with helping to transform South Avondale's business district into a thriving cultural center once again. Could their free rent plan serve as a model for other neighborhoods in decline?

 

- The Lakes went to Main Street Birmingham, a public-private urban redevelopment organization that partners with the city. The Lakes, along with Elizabeth Barbaree-Tasker of Main Street Birmingham and some marketing pros, got to thinking: What attracts new, independent businesses to a neighborhood? The answer was simple, they thought: Free rent. And they aren’t the only ones to come to this conclusion. In Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown by Roberta Brandes Gratz and Norman Mintz, the authors advocate for free rent as a way to court small businesses on the edge of breaking into public.

 

- The response, Barbaree-Tasker says, was overwhelming. "We've been trying lots of interventions in districts across the city," she says. "But this is by far the most successful one." They received 75 applications for businesses. Though only one was chosen — Freshfully, a grocery store designed for local farmers to sell their food and goods — additional businesses have since gravitated to South Avondale. A barbecue restaurant recently opened along with a mercantile shop and a pub; an art gallery, a third bar, and a sandwich shop are all set to open soon, as well. "Avondale is becoming a retail destination," Barbaree-Tasker says. Birmingham is "a fairly conservative city, so there’s not as much entrepreneurial growth in the retail or restaurant mix.

 

Full article below:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/10/free-rent-enough-jumpstart-sleepy-commercial-district/3637/

Thanks for posting this! I know there were talks of this in Toledo's Vistula District. There are some gorgeous late 1800's commercial buildings with lots of potential on North Summit, Lagrange, and a few other cross streets in the neighborhood.

 

I think Birmingham is basically a Rust Belt city transplanted to the south, so it's a good model for northern Ohio.

Hmmm. Free rent can certainly help, but it's still no good if the foot traffic is ass. Lots of other bills out there, too.

 

The benefits of it vary greatly with each business' situation.

Free rent could be huge in places like downtown Cleveland, where foot traffic is constantly moving past empty storefronts.  And filling storefronts in outlying neighborhoods can create foot traffic where there hasn't been any in years.  There will never be foot traffic if there's nowhere to go.  The desitinations must come first, then the traffic.  People cannot be coerced to gather together and wait in barren commercial districts.  But rebuilt commercial districts can draw traffic from outside their immediate area.  Free rent can help get us there.

No

Good job!

It's worth a shot, especially in still-dense but blighted areas.  But of course, financially, someone has to make the numbers line up somewhere.

I think this was a sound business decision for the owners of the building. If they hadn't done this, they would probably never have leased the space and they would have less foot traffic for their business. Help someone help you, essentially. You just need an owner with enough capital to go without rent payments for several months while momentum starts up.

 

But I agree that it has to happen in a select area with the right mix of conditions. Plopping this down in just any neighborhood/street isn't going to do anything in most cases. This needs to be carefully planned out or else get really lucky.