Keep in mind what not to do downtown

10/28/07
If there’s such a thing as an urban planning hell, it probably looks a lot like New Roc City, a multi-use complex in Westchester County, N.Y.
A 1.2 million-square-foot entertainment/retail/residential complex in the heart of downtown New Rochelle, the project makes a mockery of everything planners hold to be important. It takes notions like walkable streets, mixed uses and transit-oriented downtowns and turns them on their heads, wrapping all those admirable qualities in a hermetically sealed entertainment zone, which in no way relates to the surrounding cityscape.
It’s truly massive. It includes an 18-screen movie theater, an indoor go-cart track, a skating rink, a bowling alley, a video arcade, plus apartments, a hotel, a grocery store and thousands more square feet of retail.
Plus parking. Lots and lots of parking.
From the outside, it’s a massive block of forbidding nothingness. There are no pedestrians coming and going, no spillover effect into the rest of downtown and little to suggest anyone is even alive inside. All the action, from living to shopping to eating, takes place inside.
Completed in 1999, the project was the centerpiece of a redevelopment effort in this city of 72,000, with a dilapidated downtown surrounded by wealthy suburbs.
If the planners of Bridgeport’s mega-projects take anything from this example, it should be to avoid its mistakes at all costs.
New Roc City looks great on paper, and no doubt brings in plenty of tax money. It has become a destination in Westchester, the only place around to get the kind of one-stop entertainment shopping people sometimes look for.
But in terms of revitalizing downtown, bringing life to the streets, it might as well not even be there. All the storefronts face inward, to an interior courtyard. Built to mimic the style of old-fashioned New York City buildings, the fancy facades do nothing for someone walking down the street. It’s Disneyland inside, but outside you could be standing next to an empty convention center.
That’s why it’s so important to see how Bridgeport handles its own projects, like Magic Johnson’s $222 million deal on the site of the former Pequonnock Apartments. It’s plenty ambitious, combining 260,000 square feet of retail space with more than 350 housing units, a movie theater, a hotel and parking. But what it ultimately looks like will mean just as much as the kind of money it brings in.
If the 11-acre site adjacent to Harbor Yard is allowed to weave as naturally as possible into surrounding streets, it could mean a new era for the south end of downtown. It could give people looking for pedestrian-accessible amenities someplace worth walking to.
But if the plan as it looks now is turned around, and all the attractions face the inside with nothing but driveways and loading docks facing the city street, there could be real problems. Blank facades on even the biggest attractions don’t help anyone. Picture the side of the Arena at Harbor Yard on a non-event day.
Canyon-Johnson Urban Fund, with the former NBA star as a founding partner, specializes in places like Bridgeport, and has a track record of success. Of the three largest projects on the Bridgeport horizon, along with Steel Point and the former Remington site on Long Island Sound, it probably shows the most promise, and is most likely to be completed first. But the city needs to keep a close eye on plans, and make sure whatever goes there is for the benefit of the surrounding neighborhood.
Even in the best-case scenario, there’s a real limit to what economic development projects can do to lift a city out of poverty. All the models show that promises of job creation are often fleeting; despite developers’ assurances, there’s little that can be done to keep residents of neighboring towns from new jobs.
The real benefit from successful development goes to city landowners. If and when the community becomes more desirable, land values go up, and property gets more expensive. Renters gain exactly nothing from the deal.
What really makes a difference in the lives of a city’s poor and downtrodden is an improved school system. Better education is about the only surefire way there is to permanently lift people out of poverty. But, because education already takes up most of any city’s budget, there’s not much cash to go around. High taxes, too, have residents screaming for help. So, the thinking goes, the only way to bring in new taxes to both help out homeowners and provide for the schools is to entice developers.
It’s a dicey proposition, which in no way guarantees success. About all that can be controlled in the long run is what those projects are allowed to look like. Keeping New Roc City out of the south end of Bridgeport’s downtown is a great start.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or via e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.