Retail's retreat from risk.

Forgive the hiatus.  I just relocated to the city featured in this article.  Set in metro Detroit (the first, no doubt, among many), it’s straightforward enough that it doesn’t really demand a long introduction or exposition.

From the outside, this unusual shopping center looks like it’s on the fritz:

 

No signs above any of the windows; it doesn’t seem like anything is going on.  The inside—in which the building reveals itself to be little more than a strip mall with an enclosed hallway linking all the stores—isn’t really any more promising.

After all, not a single storefront along this silent hallway has a tenant.  From the looks of things, this row of shops has been vacant for quite some time.  Notice the one on the left.

The color scheme should at least hint at the logo of this formerly ubiquitous chain, but if it doesn’t, the slot to the right of the gate is a dead giveaway.

That’s right; it’s the broadly recognizable as the after-hours depository for the once-mighty Blockbuster Video.  Since this company faded to nearly nothing about four years ago, chances are strong that this storefront has sat vacant for quite some time.  A few doors down, the rustic entryway suggests the former home of a Bath and Body Works.

The hallway is silent.  But this strip mall is L-shaped, with storefronts facing both of the intersecting streets. Turn the corner within the mall, and it’s an entirely different story.

All the storefronts are occupied, and the entire shopping center looks fine—quite nice, even.

The tenant mix includes both mom-and-pops and national chains.  If the mom-and-pops were fledgling establishments, one might still be able to argue that the strip mall is declining, and eventually all the chains will leave.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case here.  Buddy’s Pizza has multiple locations in the Detroit area.

And Gibb’s World Wide Wines has apparently been in business for 76 years.  Down the corner from the national mid-priced chain Dress Barn is a Barnes and Noble Booksellers, serving as the apparent anchor tenant—hardly one that you’d see in a dying retail center.

Interestingly, the Dress Barn is new…to that spot.  A label scar (which I regrettably failed to capture in a photo) revealed that it previously occupied a different space in the strip mall—in the half that is now completely vacant.  The relocation is recent.

So what’s going on with one half of the strip mall?  A little knowledge about the physicality of the structure might help.  Here’s another outside view of the vacant half of the L shape:

It’s the lowest level of a parking garage, and the entire structure is connected to the St. John Hospital and Medical Center, resulting in an unconventional healthcare/shopping complex.  The name of the retail component is Pointe Plaza.  After questioning a clerk at one of the fully operating stores, I learned why one side was so vacant.  The row of vacant storefronts will allow enough consolidated space for one of the major gym/health clubs to move in, such as an LA Fitness.  I was unsuccessful in reaching Schostak Brothers, the property management company, to confirm this rumor, but it makes sense: a gym seems like an appropriate tenant for a complex that directly abuts a hospital.  Due to the gym’s size, it might serve as an additional anchor counterpart to the Barnes and Noble at the opposite end of the L shape.

But the peculiarities to Pointe Plaza extend well beyond the structure itself.  They’re political too.

This strip mall/garage/hospital sits right at the corner of Mack Avenue and Moross Road, as indicated in the map above (the small red circle is the site of the Plaza), and in the photo below, with the garage poking above the trees in the background:

Detroiters generally know this intersection as the boundary between Detroit the city and two of its suburbs: Grosse Pointe Farms, to the east of Mack Avenue, and Grosse Pointe Woods, to the north of the hospital.  In most metros, central city/suburb boundaries carry obvious significance in terms of distinctions between municipal tax burdens and ordinances, but in this case, those differences are unusually pronounced.  Detroit, as virtually everyone knows at this point, is among the most impoverished and economically challenged large cities in the country.  Meanwhile, Grosse Pointe Farms and Grosse Pointe Woods each have median household incomes of over $85,000.  I have yet to witness such an extreme juxtaposition between two municipalities anywhere in this country.  While the Detroit side of Mack Avenue in this district is in significantly better economic health than many other parts of the city, it still visibly lags far behind the affluent suburb on the opposite side of the street.

Pointe Plaza sits at the absolute easternmost vertex in Detroit city limits.  And, as the map indicates, it hugs the Detroit side of this inordinately influential boundary.  (The actual Detroit line is at Kingsville Avenue, just to the north of Pointe Plaza, which forms a three-way boundary between Detroit, Grosse Pointe Farms, and Grosse Pointe Woods.)  The proximity of the shopping center to this boundary inevitably complicates the property management agency’s ability to attract tenants, because its identity straddles sociological extremes.  One might expect that the management company would prefer a tenant mix more reflective of the affluent Grosse Points than the long-embattled Motor City, and the best way, of course, is to suppress every potential reference to Detroit.  A simple online search suggests that Google is giving Schostak Brothers, the property managers, an intrinsic advantage:

Not only does Google yield an address that incorrectly lists the facility’s address as Grosse Pointe Woods, but the thumbnail map falsely depicts the facility north of Kingsville Avenue—the boundary that would place it in Grosse Pointe Woods instead of Detroit.  The structure listed where Google Maps shows “Pointe Plaza Shopping Center” is something completely unrelated and definitely not a strip mall.  Meanwhile, Pointe Plaza’s identity online places it squarely in posh suburbia.

I decided to test this locational confusion a bit further, by asking each of the Pointe Plaza tenants a simple question: “Which city are you in?”  Of the seven tenants, only two correctly responded with Detroit.  Just to make sure I wasn’t misinterpreting the information available to me, I also rephrased my inquiry as a leading question: “Are you guys in Detroit?”  Interesting, all but one respondent conceded that yes, they were in Detroit, but most of them mentioned that they were right on the boundary with two of the Grosse Pointes.

Retail has long enjoyed a privileged status in the American commercial landscape: we always build far more facilities than there are tenants, meaning the majority of them can be incredibly picky about location.  The emergence of online shopping has only compounded the issue, because fewer goods and service providers depend upon bricks-and-mortar facilities to conduct their trades.  The fact that Pointe Plaza has avoided any stigma of sitting within the Detroit boundaries is a boon to this bankrupt city, since, for taxation purposes, the assessed value of the commercial property is undoubtedly higher than it would be if it could only attract marginal local tenants.  Only time will tell if this shopping center actually does absorb a major health club chain.  If it doesn’t, it may affirm my initial suspicions: that the vacant wing of this L-shaped strip mall has to overcome the challenge of directly looking out upon the impecunious city of Detroit.  Hopefully a revisit to Pointe Plaza in 2014 will prove me wrong.

An apartment's reversal of fortune.

This summer has obviously been a pretty dry spell in terms of blog posts, but now that I just arrived back in the country a few days ago, I hope for the pace to pick back up before too long.  August may end up a tad scattered, since I will begin the month with a move to Detroit and a new immersion program.  But I also expect this change in locale to elicit some exciting new topics for contemplation, reinvigorating the continual learning process.

Keeping up the theme of continuous learning, I offer a groundbreaking post today.  While it isn’t my first revisit of an old blog topic, this is the first time I’m gone back to view an old site precisely with the purpose of showing how my assumptions and conclusions were apparently originally wrong.  Late last fall, I covered familiar ground by delving into the Westminster Apartments,

Upon first glance, Westminster was a pretty run-of-the-mill place: an auto-oriented, low-rise complex dating from around 1970 that manifested the telltale signs of decline: visibly worn common space, wooden decks and siding that were sufficiently rotted to compromise the overall stability, meager landscaping, obvious vandalism of the buildings through graffiti. 

Like many apartment complexes in Indianapolis and across the nation that date from this time period, what began as middle-class rental housing had devolved over the years, as newer, more modern buildings opened in the vicinity, featuring newer appliances and other amenities.  The property management team for Westminster could have maintained the buildings, but, because federal Section 8 benefits will guarantee them secure tenancy no matter how poor the condition of the buildings, the owners had no real incentive to improve the structures.  After all, even though Section 8 caters to a clientele with incomes far below middle class standards, the institution writing the majority of the rent checks—i.e., the government—always pays in time, meaning that landlords actually get an incentive for letting their property deteriorate to the point that it only can attract Section 8 tenancy.  It appeared last November that this phenomenon was exactly what had afflicted the Westminster apartments.  It’s happened to dozens of buildings in the suburban reaches of Indianapolis over the past 20 years, where suburban units that previously attracted young professional families are now overwhelmingly lower-income.  The result is that suburban districts of Indianapolis that were virtually crime free in the 1980s are now hosting concentrated poverty and all the concomitant social woes.

But there’s a catch: Westminster is not in the Indianapolis city limits.  This building sits just south of County Line Road, squarely within the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood.  And Greenwood remains a fast-growing, desirable, middle- to upper-middle class suburb, with well regarded schools, a flourishing mall, an expanding greenway network, and a growing logistics/trucking industry that capitalizes on the suburb’s strong access to Interstate 65.  By all metrics, the Westminster should not need to downgrade; it could remain attractive to middle-class people if only the property managers had bothered to maintain it.  But since they hadn’t, it had suffered the same malaise as numerous complexes in Indianapolis city limits, where school districts are often much spottier and crime a persistent concern.  What went wrong with Westminster?

Nothing, apparently—I was wrong all this time.  It fell under new ownership last November and promptly underwent a significant renovation.  They’ve already rebranded the place with a new logo.

And it looks like those renovations are substantial—much more than just a slick new sign at the entrance.  Gone is the spraypainted graffiti, the sagging gutters, the termite-infested wood. Here’s what some of the new ones look like:

Notice the newly planted shrubs, and the sapling in the second photo.  Obviously the buildings received a facelift, but were the changes more than superficial?  A glimpse at some of the buildings still under renovation would suggest that the process has been comprehensive.

The new owners, Van Rooy Properties, closed off a number of the buildings, vacating them completely during the renovation process.  Notice that the doorways are completely boarded shut.  The renovation team also hasn’t forgotten about the rights-of-way.

The asphalt appears to be newly resurfaced and striped.  But the best evidence that the Westminster Apartments are enjoying a thorough renovation are the buildings in which the process has not yet begun—some “before” photos.

Unlandscaped, sagging gutters, peeling paint...they look just awful—worse than anything else I’ve seen on the south side of Indianapolis.  And yes, the unrenovated units still reveal those half-hearted attempts to hide the graffiti tags.

The juxtaposition of the pre- and post-renovation Westminster units should provide enough evidence that the buildings were in a sorry state, but, last November, I had my doubts that they would ever undergo a complete renovation.  The fact that Van Rooy has taken such an initiative clearly speaks well for the survivability of Westminster (though, frankly, I’m surprised the owners didn’t alter the name of the units, as frequently happens when apartment buildings change hands).  However, this initiative does not speak well for the future of equivalent rental properties in Indianapolis city limits.  While I am certain that at least some of the 1970s-era units in Indianapolis proper have undergone a renovation, I’m not aware of any in particular on this side of town.  But, just south of County Line Road, these Greenwood apartment units might benefit from enough of a shot in the arm that they once again attract middle-income tenants.  While Westminster may seem like a modest indicator, the fact remains that the property’s owners determined that its location was sufficiently desirable to invest in comprehensive uprgrades—an action I don’t anticipate seeing among Indianapolis apartments on this side of town any time soon.  In fact, the dominant demographic of the suburban-style apartments in Indy’s Perry Township (just a mile or two away from the Westminster) are Burmese immigrants, who depend on rock-bottom leasing rates.

All in all, the Westminster case study suggests that I was wrong: aging apartments in fast-growing suburbs genuinely are more likely to benefit from a renovation, while the counterparts in the primary city continue to languish.  Maybe I can explore this dichotomy again a few years from now, when another apartment complex on each side of the boundary will inevitably deteriorate to a similar condition as the Westminster pre-renovation.  But at this point, it appears that the affordable housing policies that ostensibly discourage apartment owners from renovating buildings in the old central city of a metro—the portion of the metro typically with the weakest school districts—don’t have the same impact on their suburban counterparts.  But, in another 20 years, the Westminster Apartments of Greenwood will inevitably need another renovation in order to remain viable; at that point in the not-so-distant future, shifting suburban fortunes will determine whether or not the buildings get another face-lift. 

Speed surveillance scamming spreads statewide.

I don't usually highlight topical events, and certainly not in a way that they become central to a blog post.  But in this case, I just couldn't resist--the news is too timely, and it eerily echoes a subject I've covered on this blog as well as a rewrite at New Geography: the jurisdictionally defined speed trap.  More often than not, a tiny community—a village, an impoverished town, a designated special services district endowed with a certain degree of autonomy—will harness whatever police power it has and turn it into a source of revenue.  I've explored this trend in East Cleveland, a impoverished inner-ring suburb of Ohio's largest metro, which has struggled to raise revenue after decades of watching its middle class tax base dwindle to nothing. 

Based on the placard, it would appear that entire city is hotwired with cameras and radar detectors, and that apparently is the reputation the city carries with it among locals.  Speeding carries a stiff penalty in East Cleveland, but a jurisdiction with high poverty, notorious struggles with violent crime, persistent population loss, and failing schools has few alternatives to raising revenue for city services.  Thus, it issues rampant traffic citations.  Here’s another, more permanent warning about speed limits just a few blocks away from the placard:

In most jurisdictions, school zones employ even more aggressive enforcement and result in particularly steep fines.  East Cleveland is inevitably no different.

A more subversive example featured on the same blog, is (or was) the Village of New Rome, a tiny municipality of less than a tenth of a square mile in size and less than 100 people, which Ohio's capital, Columbus, nearly surrounded.  New Rome had little to its name beyond a notorious stretch of U.S. Highway 40.  By passing an ordinance that shifted the speed limit from 45 to 35 mph years ago, the Village used this road segment within its jurisdiction as a ruthless bait to catch unsuspecting motorists.  This twilight photo, though not winning any National Geographic prizes, still conveys the ordinariness of the stretch of road that snagged so many unwitting speeders.

While speeding served as the public justification for New Rome's many, many citations, the police force would flag motorists for dirty plates, burned-out tail lights, driving too slowly, tailgating...you name it.  Eventually, many motorists had learned that they had to circumvent this stretch of the highway to avoid getting ticketed.  Further research from concerned citizens—who founded the now-defunct website New Rome Sucks to inform the community of this village's perfidy)--revealed that New Rome was funding its own government solely through traffic citations.  In 2004, the Attorney General of Ohio ruled that New Rome had displayed persistent corruption and incompetence in self-governance, and he forced the town to disincorporate, to the relief of just about everyone beyond New Rome itself.  For decades, New Rome managed to exploit its size, relative obscurity, and its jurisdiction over a major arterial to enrich its constituents throw citing motorists just passing through.

Linndale, a micro-suburb on the south side of Cleveland, suffers a similar reputation as New Rome for being a speed trap that, within its pinky-toenail boundaries, makes the most of a clipping of I-71 that passes through it.  I only covered the village peripherally in my blog post, first because I only learned of its reputation ex post facto, but also because the Supreme Court of Ohio has defended the town's right to patrol its boundaries as an appropriate use of police power--apparently the village's leaders have not indulged in the same duplicity in local governance as their Columbus counterpart.   However, Gov. John Kasich did sign a bill in late 2012 dissolving the Mayor's Court for villages with fewer than 200 residents; Linndale had 178.   Mayor's Courts are the primary means of processing and collecting fines for traffic tickets.  While this law does not inhibit the right for municipalities to enforce their speed limits, it ostensibly targets errant jurisdictions that the State feels have abused their police power.  Linndale and other municipalities aggressively appealed this decision but failed to thwart it; Assistant Ohio Attorney General Richard Coglianese and Senator Tom Patton have supported it, conceding that it clearly targets "rogue villages gone wild" through their issuance of speeding tickets.  The Assistant AG provided a telling analogy: if the entire State of Ohio issued tickets at the same rate as Linndale, state's police would have given out 531,140,644 driving citations in 2012--over 1,000 times more than it actually typically issues.  Linndale has little hope of winning the suit, and Village leaders say they will continue to handle speeding cases through Municipal Court of Parma, a much larger neighboring suburb.  But Sen. Patton, whose jurisdiction includes the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, admits that he hopes this measure forces the leadership of Linndale to reconsider its methods of collecting revenue. “This really gives law enforcement a bad name, “ Patton observed. “I've never seen a Linndale police officer trying to offer assistance to a stranded motorist or help an older lady fix a tire or write up an accident report. They're there to write tickets.”

Now, what’s the latest kerfuffle in Ohio regarding speed traps?  This time, the controversy heads south to Cincinnati, where the adjacent suburb of Elmwood Place (surrounded on three sides by Cincinnati limits) hired an outside company to install speed monitoring cameras last year, in order to record traffic violations and hand out citations to motorists passing through, largely in response to a pedestrian fatality the previous year.  Like its counterparts of Linndale and New Rome, Elmwood Place is tiny (about one-third of a square mile in size), and hugs some major arterials: though I-75 only skirts the edge of the village, two other arterials intersect in the heart of the town.  And like New Rome and the much larger East Cleveland, Elmwood Place is not prosperous: most estimates place the poverty rate of the population at well over 20%, and it lost about 20% of its inhabitants between 2000 and 2010.

Needless to say, the speed trap was an economic boon.  Within a month of installing the cameras, the Village issued 6,600 tickets—more than three times its population.  But the negative fallout was almost immediate: Facebook pages encouraging a boycott; a lawsuit issued in part by a pastor whose attendance plummeted after more than half of the parishioners received tickets on a Sunday after Mass; decreased patronage by the local businesses; increasing hardship by the already low-income population that has also received these citations; the resignation of four councilmembers and push for the Mayor to resign.  A county judge has labeled the practice as a “scam”—an initiative that fosters more ill-will toward law enforcement than it does at promoting a culture of improved road safety.  If litigation succeeds in making Elmwood Place pay back all the fines collected plus legal costs, the Village will suffer greater hardship than it ever experienced before the installation of the cameras.  Meanwhile, continued implementation of the speed monitoring may eventually kill off long-standing businesses due to diminishing patronage.

Interestingly, none of the articles regarding the Elmwood Place controversy show any awareness that this situation has reared its head in Ohio in the past—repeatedly.  Are the parties involved in litigation at Elmwood Place aware of the long-brewing trouble in Linndale and New Rome?  The national attitudes toward speed cameras or other speed traps seem bipolar.  According to the Yahoo article, even as 12 states have banned speed cameras and nine have banned red-light cameras, overall use has increased fivefold in the past decade—and is growing.  At the same time, Ohio seems to be retreating from its practice of monitoring motorists.  Aside from the Assistant AG’s clampdown on Linndale mentioned earlier, a bill passed 61-32 in late June by the Ohio House proposes to outlaw both speeding and red-light camera monitoring.  During the hearing for the bill (which showed little partisan divide), defenders of cameras argue that overwhelming evidence shows that they do improve safety.  Most law enforcement supports the cameras; so do private citizens who have lost family members to other people’s reckless driving. Meanwhile, the opponents of these cameras nearly always recalled the apparent history of moneymaking schemes; one Democratic representative evoked Elmwood Place as evidence of corruption, specifically referencing how 40% of the proceeds collected for tickets go directly to an out-of-state private company whose primary profit motive encourages it to issue as many tickets as possible.

While these scenarios might finally have reached the boiling point in Ohio to impel more statewide unity in traffic safety enforcement, the overall approach to camera monitoring is likely to remain fragmented at the national level.  One might suspect that the international controversy regarding Edward Snowden’s revelations of National Security Agency’s intensive monitoring of private citizens might provoke further backlash, but at this point no evidence suggests that state lawmakers are correlating the Snowden affair with traffic cameras.  By and large, complaints against speed traps have little to do with privacy invasions—after all, the monitoring virtually always takes pace on public ROWs—but the interest of public roadside safety may have helped spawn the proliferation of surveillance infrastructure across a variety of other settings, both public and private.  Ohio may be icing the sting from this practice a bit more vigorously than most other states, but the persistent resurfacing of this issue suggests that the real ethical questioning at a national or even global level has yet to come.

Nudging the ‘urbs in the right direction.

When negotiating the introduction of typically suburban corporate chains in an otherwise urban neighborhood, it typically takes an inordinate amount of fancy footwork.  Most American cities have a “Midtown”—either explicitly or implicitly named—that suffered colossal disinvestment from the 1950s onward, or perhaps even as early as the Depression.  Now, thanks to their proximity to revitalizing downtowns, these Midtowns are lurching back toward relevance, but they come wearing the battle scars of urban renewal.  The pockmarks of parking lots still vaguely remind the older generations of the long-gone architectural marvels that previous civic leaders presumed were obsolete.  Several months ago I explored the Midtown of Birmingham, Alabama, better known as Five Points South, an economically healthy old neighborhood which amidst the handsome century-old buildings, claims its fair share of space devoted to off-street parking.  In recent years, in recognition of the growing attractiveness of the area, newer development has arisen, such as a Chick-fil-A restaurant, taking advantage of the pedestrian traffic by with a structure thrust to the lot lines at one of the most prominent corners.  The parking for this otherwise archetypically suburban restaurant change is tucked on the interior portion of the lot, making it much less conspicuous to general public view.

In more recent month, I learned that my home city of Indianapolis had contended with its own developmental maneuverings a few years ago, when another national brand wanted to build a new structure in its Midtown.  The CVS at 16^th and Meridian Streets didn’t get a lot of coverage when the City approved the design and construction began.  My friends at Urban Indy decided not to cover it.  Recently, before I left town for an extended amount of time, I decided to give it another look.

From this angle, it seems like a solid piece of urban infill: massing is in keeping with what one might expect for a commercial building only 1.5 miles from the absolute center of the city.  The edges of the building are more or less flush with the lot lines.  The signage and awnings are nowhere near as ostentatious as one might expect if the majority of passers by were zooming along at over 40 mph in their vehicles.  For the most part, the lettering and iconography generally seem to cater to pedestrians.

But notice all those qualifying adverbs and phrases: “more or less”, “for the most part”, “generally”.  The entire process is riddled with compromises, as manifested by a view of the building from just about any other angle.

At this point, I’m standing along the west edge of the building, looking northward down Meridian Street.  From this vantage point, it still looks like a busy urban street with an entrance to the CVS right next to the bus stop.  But I’ve contrived the perspective to shroud or omit any of the compromises.  Here’s one of them:

The reflection makes it difficult to discern, but this door fronting the east side of the building is false.  In a truly pedestrian-scaled urban environment, this door should serve as the primary entrance, since it faces the sidewalk along a busy street.  But instead, customers to the CVS have to enter on the south side.

Directly abutting a big parking lot.  Fundamentally, this drug store caters first and foremost to the automobile.  It has no real entrances at the corner of Meridian and 16^th, visible in that first photo.  In fact, it offers a drive through pharmacy on the east side, just as one would expect in the suburbs.

In short, the CVS achieves just what it needs to assume a basic veneer of urbanity.  And apparently it took a bit of arm-twisting to get there.  A person with detailed knowledge of the development helped shed some light on the process.  The most influential agencies in shaping the design were the City of Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development, the Near North Development Corporation, and the CVS developer.  None of them wanted a conventional suburban design.  To their luck, the Walgreens across the street (at the southwest corner of this intersection) exemplified what not to do.

One of the most prominent intersections in Indy’s Midtown loses any sense of urbanism with a building dwarfed by its own parking lot.  If it weren’t for the some of the surrounding context, it would be hard to tell that this Walgreens was even in a city setting.

At the very least, all parties agreed that the new CVS should hug the parcel boundaries at the intersection, like the Chick-fil-A in Birmingham.  Ahead of the first design proposal, the NNDC rep suggested that the developers choose materials and design the structure in keeping with some of the historic apartments in the area; among the most prominent is to the right of the Walgreens in the photo above, just a stone’s throw from this CVS site.  The developer ultimately deployed the CVS “Main Street” standard design, typically used as infill for historic towns in the northeast.

Beyond that, the developer was unable or unwilling to budge on a lot of the other details.  The planners at DMD and NNDC both tried to push the front door to the structure so that it was facing Meridian, forcing pedestrian ingress directly from the sidewalk.  But the developer insisted that the CVS had rigid internal layout requirements, and inverting the conventional position so that a loading dock would abut the alley (the east side of the building) would preclude a functional drive-through pharmacy.  In addition, placing the entrance along the Meridian Street sidewalk would force a yawning distance between the handicapped parking and the front door.  The DMD encouraged a double entrance, so that pedestrians could still access directly from Meridian Street, but CVS shuns the prospect of controlling two doors; having a second access point also robs the interior of several valuable square feet for retail.  Consequently, the door fronting the sidewalk in the above photo is bogus.  The last major compromise, not surprisingly, dealt with parking: the required minimum was a generous 50 spaces, but CVS insisted that it must have more than 70, in order to compete with Walgreens.

To be frank, it is by and large understandable that the resulting edifice manifests some pretty significant compromises from the urban design ideal.  The developers of the CVS couldn’t alienate their car-dependent base, especially since Meridian Street is one of the main arterials leading to the northern suburbs.  It would have been particularly unwise for the developer to employ massing that obscures the parking; such a move would simply impel all those motorists to opt for the Walgreens across the street, where parking is patently obvious from both Meridian and 16^th Streets.  This CVS simply cannot expect to flourish if access is less convenient than its neighbor across the street.

Fortunately, in spite of these concessions, the teams at DMD and NNDC were able to wrestle some other smart features in the design.  These “nibbles” include the following: extra sidewalk connection from 16^th and Scioto (the alley on the east side of the property) wrapping around to the front south-facing door; more discreet dumpster enclosure locations; a real tree-lawn next to 16^th Street, and a bus shelter near the “door” along Meridian, where one previously had not existed.  And, though it really doesn’t count as a nibble, the “Main Street” CVS design (a standardized template) employs two floors; although the windows on the second floor are fake, the building really does have a mezzanine second story in the section of the building fronting 16^th Street.  It’s not just a block of Styrofoam.

Though the number of compromises to this CVS stunted the interest of Indy’s urban blogger community when the building opened a couple years ago, it did attract the attention of prominent St. Louis blog NextSTL, whose Alex Ihnen by and large saw it as a significant improvement to similar proposals in one of St. Louis’ more prominent Midtown neighborhoods.  If his description “doesn’t suck” seems like faint praise, this may be time to invoke a timeworn cliché: never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Obviously every individual will have a different standard for “good”, but in judging this drugstore development, it is prudent to leave a wide berth that encompasses anything between the worst possible outcome and the ideal.  The effort to achieve optimal urban design in Indy’s Midtown warrants a reflection upon this neighborhood’s struggles over the years.  Most locals apparently remember the structure that preceded this CVS: an International House of Pancakes with—as NextSTL recalls—a dodgy reputation.  And immediately to its south: a blighted, defunct old car-dealership.  For the majority of the last 50 years, the only saving grace to Midtown was its proximity to downtown and accessibility due to major arterials like Meridian Street. What had once hosted the mansions of some of Indianapolis’ elite families devolved into low-rise office complexes (many nonprofit or social services), faded apartment buildings, tawdry nightclubs, and—manifested by the intersection with 16^th—national chains with drive-thru options to cater to the suburban commuters.  Much of this segment of Meridian still looks this way.  As this essay has already demonstrated, the south sides of the intersection host a moderately urban CVS and a fully car-oriented Walgreens.  What about the other two corners?

The McDonald’s building is scarcely visible behind the trees, but the surrounding parking lot dwarfs it as well.  It’s indistinguishable from the typical McDonald’s in the suburbs.  And the last corner?

Again, the Chase Bank puts its parking front and center.  Thus, despite its drawbacks and compromises, the CVS reigns supreme at this intersection in terms of the urbanity of its design and configuration.  Looking south down Meridian Street towards downtown demonstrates its superiority, particularly when juxtaposed with the neighboring Walgreens.

The other three buildings at 16^th and Meridian owe much of their lack of inspiration to the economic conditions of the neighborhood at the time of their conception.  Neighborhoods to the east, such as the Old Northside and Herron-Morton Place, had not yet achieved a mature level of gentrification that would allow them to rally a strong degree of support—or opposition—to design standards at this intersection.  These days, both neighborhoods claim a quorum of committed citizens who moved to the area because of the attractiveness of the pedestrian-scaled architecture.  These newcomers have both the wherewithal and the psychological commitment to push institutions such as NNDC or DMD to raise the bar.  During the design review process for the CVS featured here, the City was also fleshing out its Urban Design standards and guidelines, which would either persuade or overtly enforce a stronger approach to design in Indianapolis’ region center, an area that includes 16^th and Meridian.  Though the approval of a CVS at this location preceded the implementation of these Guidelines, it is obvious that the spirit behind them exerted a fair share of influence on the conception of the CVS.  It’s not fantastic.  But it’s better than anything at the other three corners, and it’s also more in keeping with the urban scale of two neighborhoods immediately to the east, visible in the photo below:

16^th Street is the dividing line here, with Old Northside to the right and Herron-Morton Place to the left.  While 16^th is an important arterial as well, it doesn’t provide the sort of expansive suburban access that would have made it as attractive of a corridor as Meridian Street for commuter-oriented drive-thrus.  Though the century-old apartment buildings that frame this photo suffered serious decline in the second half of the 20^th century, more recent gentrification efforts have stimulated a renaissance at both.  This section of Midtown, particularly in the last few years, has emerged as a fashionable enclave for affluent professionals, with a growing array of locally owned retail to serve them.

The urban form remains a palimpsest--just as it always has.  My prediction is that growing interest in the community will push more developers to adopt the CVS approach to urban design—or something better.  I’m not sure the property value in Indy’s Midtown is going to skyrocket enough that we’ll be seeing high-rise apartments replace the McDonald’s or Chase Bank any time soon.  But I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it happens eventually.  And if—or when—someone eventually does decide to build at this prominent intersection, he or she will inevitably assume a mentality of “highest and best use”, not just because of city design regulations or the neighborhood arm-twisting, but because the lucrative nature of the real estate here would make it ridiculous to do otherwise.  Why build a single story fast food restaurant when you could comfortably fit eight floors of office and apartments above it, and the neighborhood wouldn’t raise a stink?

If we ever get to that point, mark my word the opposition won’t be a big new apartment building—the nabe will fight the Mickey Dees.

Missouri capital redux.

Over the weekend, a blog article of mine prompted an interview from the city's local newspaper.  The original article, published here about a month ago, focused on the obvious revitalization efforts that have taken place in downtown Jefferson City, capital of Missouri.  Although I had never visited there prior to the trip that prompted the article, I was taken by the high level of maintenance of the city streets, the relative absence of demolished old buildings, and the considerable investment in the streetscape.  But most of all, I was taken by a Jimmy John's.

The presence of a national chain, particularly one as aggressively franchised as Jimmy John's subs, demonstrates a greater level of confidence in the viability of this main street as an attractive locus for commerce than all the plantings, park benches, and brick sidewalks in the world.  A predictable chain restaurant may not be what the Jefferson City's downtown boosters were craving, and it hardly indicates that the small city's main street is a major shopping destination, but at least it shows that it's strong enough that a business leader with some capital was willing to give a chance to some real estate as close to the center of it all as you can get.

This blog article recently prompted the Jefferson City News-Tribune to follow up on my article, interviewing me further about my impressions and including more of the history of revitalization than I ever knew coming into it.  I encourage my readers to take a look, and feel free as always to post comments here or wherever you like.  Thanks again.