New RiverCity president Kim White announced Thursday that she wants to shift the downtown development agency’s focus toward bringing more residents, more retail shopping and more businesses downtown. Few would disagree with those goals. Getting more people to shop, live, work and play downtown would make the city’s core more vibrant and more interesting, and build synergy and economic clout for the city.
The challenge, as Mrs. White well knows, is how to accomplish these vital goals.
None will come easily, because each is each is a necessary ingredient for the other. Downtown needs more people clamoring to move downtown to spur developers to build more — and more affordable — housing, condos and apartments. With slow job growth and tight credit haunting recovery from the Great Recession, that’s a hard housing cycle to ignite.
Ditto with recruiting new business to fill downtown’s vacant office and retail space. And until more residents and workers show up to provide consistent patronage and shopping power, it will be equally difficult to recruit the sort of retail scene that would help lure more people downtown.
This chicken-or-egg conundrum — which comes first — is the crucible for urban redevelopment plans. Chattanooga has made significant progress the past 15 years in building tourism, housing, a restaurant and nightlife scene, and patronage and buying power both downtown and on the North Shore, so there is foundation — and need — for RiverCity’s new focus. But where to start?
Mrs. White’s strategy is rooted in several areas. She wants to shape a focused marketing initiative to attract niche retail businesses, to build a downtown alliance with UTC’s student base, to create bonds with real estate, development and business brokers to strengthen recruitment, and to put downtown Chattanooga on an interactive 3-D website to engage area citizens, and potential newcomers, in planning and building a more vibrant urban center.
Her redirection of RiverCity is both a natural shift in boosting the city’s renaissance, and an inevitable shift in RiverCity’s economic role.
Since 1986, RiverCity has served the community as a downtown redevelopment agency. Established by $12 million in private capital from the Lyndhurst Foundation and civic-minded banks, it initiated and helped orchestrate a wave of mind-boggling public and private investments. At last count, our revived downtown has benefited from some $2 billion in private investments and an array of quality attractions and businesses. All of this, arguably, would not have occurred without the focused effort of RiverCity.
Though it retains some income from leases and residual endowment funds, its economic base and development capacity has been diminished over time by the upfront costs of its development work. The agency, moreover, has more recently been unfairly hobbled by political attacks and undermining from city hall. Its survival, for the time being, may best be secured by a shift away from development and toward recruiting a stronger business and residential base for downtown. No one can argue that the work Mrs. White has outlined still needs to be done.