Whither downtown retail - the Tribune views the Downtown Merchant's Association

Today’s Sunday edition of the New Albany Tribune contains much of substance.

In “Merchants looking to improve downtown,” the Tribune’s Kyle Lowry describes the return of the Downtown Merchant’s Association, which a handful of downtown businessmen have revived on a volunteer basis in an effort to explore strategies for “getting people into their shops.”

Although you’d never know it by attending a City Council meeting, Lowry insists that the city of New Albany shows concern for “keeping downtown alive” through its support of the Develop New Albany non-profit organization, which in turn was set up by the Indiana Main Street Program.

According to DNA’s associate director, Jane Alcorn, the organization enhances design, promotes the downtown, retains and recruits businesses and provides economic restructuring.

This is interesting. In terms of the institutional lack of accountability that defines New Albany, it’s worth noting that when Smith’s Furniture and Appliance announced its imminent departure from downtown, a snoozing City Hall hastily tossed the hot potato into DNA’s hands, presumably so the non-profit organization could fall on its sword for failing to “retain” business.

But we digress. Before reminding Lowry that downtown’s decline is the fault of the late and lamented General Eisenhower’s interstate highway system (here’s another news flash: “Man lands on moon”), Alcorn describes DNA’s work as “a slow process … we have to figure out how to repackage downtown.”

The answer is provided by Don Preston, who elsewhere in the article bluntly asserts, “let’s stop kidding ourselves – there’s no reason for general, multi-purpose shopping downtown; it’s mostly for specialty stores.”

NA Confidential couldn’t agree more. Alcorn herself should know it, having manned the sign-in table at last year’s DNA seminar promoting hope for America’s neglected downtown business districts in the form of niche and destination businesses.

And what are these? Simply stated, “they must identify a product or service niche that they can dominate, and they must deliver that product or service better than their competitors.” The result is a business that a consumer will go out of his way to visit.

The entrepreneurs who possess the potential to operate these niche and destination businesses are out there, and in fact NA Confidential has seen them sniffing around downtown New Albany.

To be sure, DNA already hawks the standard package of incentives relating to the Urban Enterprise Zone, but when it comes right down to it, there’s only one activity worth considering when it comes to attracting these entrepreneurs.

City government – City Hall and City Council, planners and zoners, adjuncts like DNA – must publicly resolve that it is an absolute priority to place as many of these entrepreneurs and their destination businesses as possible in what are literally dozens of empty storefronts downtown, recognizing that those owners of downtown buildings who seem to regard it as their fiscal priority not to participate in downtown’s revitalization are in fact behaving in an inescapably anti-social manner, and that they will be dealt with by use of the carrot and the stick to play ball with the rest of us.

Firm in this resolve, city government then must address infrastructure needs, prime among them parking. In addition to the parking garage already in existence and the one planned for Scribner Place, municipal surface parking lots should be developed with the money that Councilman Coffey proposes throwing at New Albany DVD. Two locations exist on either side of Stein Glass, one at Third and Main and the other at Fourth and Main.

If City Hall is unable to contribute anything else to this process, perhaps it would be interested in devoting a share of political capital to something remotely approximating leadership. The idea is to organize different community interests so they’re lifting together, not separately.

Perhaps this wasn’t taught at the Dry Cleaning Academy.

Kyle Lowry’s Tribune article

A brief explanation of niche/destination business

Develop New Albany