OT: City redevelopments

[SunDancer]

Being a Buffalo, New York resident, our city and Niagara Falls has failed on many plans to develop its toruism, hospitality, business and cities.

We have watched Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada take off after building the casino. The whole "falls coast" is fileld with Las Vegas-lights and big buildings and is entering the next stage of development. Our city, Niagara Falls, is a dump (I go to college at Niagara University). They converted the old convention center into a casino by the Senca Indians, but it has not encouraged new businesses to take stand. I guess they are going to build a new garage and a new 450-room luxury hotel later this year, but the casino has not tricked any effects into new "booming" construction. Buffalo is in a battle to over the opening of one, or two, casinos. They are losing money, businesses and failed plans.

I noticed around the nation, cities like Louisville, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Long Beach all have step with the redevelopment plans, and seem to be able to keep businesses. What are your thoughts?

[JonInMiddleGA]

I believe the specific circumstances of a situation would weigh heavily on the outcome of any "redevelopment" plans but if I were to hazard any generalities on the subject:

-- This is not a good time to judge the potential of development/redevelopment. We're not under "average" conditions right now, there isn't much that's going to prompt any risky proposiitions.

-- Development plans are not short-term propositions, they're more of a long-haul investment. You won't see major change in 6 months, judge them in 6 years instead.

-- If I had to guess off-hand at the effectiveness of various options, I'd say casino development is one of the better bets for sparking activity. Then again, anything that promotes tourism dollars successfully would be in the same category.

[Fritz]

As Jon says, redevelopment takes time. My observations based on the ongoing redevelopment of Norfolk is that a city must be willing to invest truckloads of money. Often it will seem like waste as one project after another is launched, and none of the seem to make money.

There seems to be some sort of critical mass a city must provide before a chain reaction can occur. A casino alone will not be enough. A casino and a hotel might not be enough. It may take the addition of a generous tax package, subsidies to new businesses, plenty of rezoning, and some road work to get the thing going.

On the residential side of Norfolk's redevelopment was a public/private matching plan when it came to external work. When an entire street takes advantage of this, it can transform a dreary line of brick rowhouses into an explosion of color and greenery.

[Craptacular]

SunDancer, I'm just curious about what you know or think about redevelopment in Milwaukee.

I haven't lived in the Milwaukee area for 10 years, but I have been trying to follow their efforts, and have mixed feelings so far. They have done some good things so far, such as building a nice convention center (although they are still hurt by the fact there are not enough hotel rooms), creating a limited Riverwalk, and adding a Santiago Calatrava-designed addition to the art museum. They are also tearing down a freeway spur which, depending on who you listen to, could be good or bad for redevelopment. I really wish they had tried harder to build Miller Park downtown, instead of a few miles west on I-94. An Indian tribe just recently opened an expanded casino just SW of downtown in an industrial valley, but now there are rumors that they may be able to build something downtown ... this info would have been nice 2 or 3 years ago!

The biggest issue for Milwaukee in the near future is transportation. They are going to rebuild the Marquette Interchange over the next 4-5 years, which will be a MAJOR headache for anyone in the area. This interchange, where I-94 and I-43 meet downtown, is the basically the nerve center of Wisconsin commerce. A large portion of the debate has been the reconfiguration / elimination of the some on/off-ramps that feed downtown. The construction itself will disrupt business for a few years, but if the end result is that it's harder to get downtown after construction is completed, I think the city is in trouble.

[thesloppy]

Here in Portland, there is a growing push for building a baseball stadium so we can lure the Expos into town. Clearly, this is what our sagging little city needs, because the Expos are known far and wide for the heaps and heaps of cash monies they attract on a daily basis.

[Swaggs]

Interesting thread.

My hometown of Morgantown, WV, although obviously not the size of some of these cities, is working through a period like this right now.

[kcchief19]

Casinos can be catalyst for development, but they are not automatically so. By my observation, casino projects like what you described do a nice job at generating taxes and revenue for a city, but do little in and of themselves to revitalize an area. The tax revenue generated by a casino can be spent by an area to improve other parts of a city, but I have not witnessed too much growth surrounding a casino, since nobody really wants to be next to one.

Plopping a casino in a shabby part of town can in fact be a very bad idea. Upscale customers won't go if it is too shabby. Riverboat casinos have been very successful in a place like Kansas City because they have been placed in areas that were un- or under-utilized. The cities have then used that money to invest in other parts of the city that are more valuable for revitalization.

Another thing -- revitalizing a city means more than one project. You have to have one project after another to maintain momentum. Denver is a great example of that. That downtown is pretty impressive, but they have done it with a major project coming online almost every year.

[JonInMiddleGA]

chief -- you bring up an interesting distinction that I hadn't thought about earlier. The impact of casino(s) would indeed seem to be dependent upon the specific area where they're located. In my mind, I was thinking of areas such as Tunica, MS or (to a lesser degree) Biloxi, MS where there simply wasn't a lot of "there" there before the casinos were introduced into the mix. For me to see the area within 20 miles of Tunica now vs five years ago, the difference was dramatic, as the number of retail storefronts had multiplied by a very obvious factor I'd estimate easily as double-digits.

But that is probably a much different scenario than plopping casino development into an existing metropolitan area.

[Leonidas]

They are debating this down here in North Carolina in Raleigh. What strikes me as funny though, not being a native of this area, is how they call it a big re-development proposal. This implies Raleigh was some big urban center to begin with. Maybe I missed something in history, but I look at Raleigh as an emerging place, not a re-developing one.

[JonInMiddleGA]

I think the size of an urban area (or at least someone's impression of it) may be relative to where else they're familiar with.

FTR, the Raleigh-Durham area is the 46th largest (of 287) markets in the U.S. (based upon the Arbitron definitions for radio markets). Roughly the same size as New Orleans, Nashville & West Palm/Boca Raton.

If you're from Chicago, Raleigh probably doesn't seem real urban. If you're from, say, Syracuse (about half the pop. of Raleigh) then it probably seems much bigger.