In her recent conversation with Bruce Rushton (“Can we talk?,”
Jan. 19, 2017) Lisa Clemmons Stott, executive director of Downtown Springfield,
Inc., said that Springfield lacks a
vision for its city center. “We don’t have this collective understanding of
what the neighborhood wants to be.”
This is not inaccurate but it is insufficient. What
Springfield doesn’t have is a vision for the whole city with a downtown in it,
a collective understanding that what downtown might be is shaped by what
allowed to be in every other part of the city by local zoning, infrastructure
and finance policies.
For instance, downtown landlords cannot command rents needed
to make ground-floor commercial and rehabbed office space pay because of there
is a glut of such space citywide. There is a glut citywide because the city
devoted all its resources for two generations to make sure there was a glut. When you encourage construction of
office and commercial anywhere, you lower the potential return everywhere.
The problem downtown is not only a lack of a
vision, but a failure by city officials to clearly see, and plan for, the city as a whole.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2017.
