Once-in-a-lifetime societal shifts find downsizing baby boomers and settling-in millennials walking in tandem ”” always walking, 180 million strong ”” through remade, flourishing downtowns.
The retiring boomers like the ease of getting around in an amenity-filled environment. As for the millennials, bring on the innovation, bring on the cuisine and don”™t forget the funk.
The challenges toward making that a reality ”” including word that antique theaters don”™t work everywhere as economic saviors ”” surfaced from a panel of four real estate authorities that included municipal leaders and developers from both sides of the Westchester-Fairfield county divide recently at The Waters Edge at Giovanni”™s in Darien.
“There is a new live/work/play model,” said W. Mark Keeney, managing partner, Westport-based Abbey Road Advisors. Among the asterisks of that model, he said, “Baby boomers are looking to downsize in the areas they raised their families. The big question mark is, who is going to buy their homes?”
Keeney took the dais with Supervisor Susanne Donnelly of the Hudson River town of Ossining; and New Rochelle officials Luiz Aragon, commissioner of development, and Ralph DiBart, who heads the city”™s Business Improvement District.
“How do you get more attractive?” asked Salvatore Campofranco, the event moderator and founder and managing partner of Luzern Associates in Wilton. He said the single-family real estate market has been flat for eight years and the commercial vacancy rate is the worst it has been in 20 years.
“But New York City, Boston, Brooklyn are booming,” he said. Saying the suburban model was broken, he asked how the region might capture and retain the baby boomers who had always lived the suburban lifestyle.
Entertainment, Campofranco said, is one key, saying Stamford needed a 10,000-seat arena to compete with other venues for the likes of Billy Joel concerts. “On some town websites the library is listed as the entertainment and they offer tours of the cemetery,” he said. “That”™s not going to cut it.”
“We”™re failures unless we build the environment to thrive,” said Aragon. Calling New Rochelle, “a city with a soul,” he said that in five to 10 years he would like to see it appeal to the same demographic as what he termed “the High Line crowd,” citing the elevated park and chic neighborhoods that have risen on New York City”™s west side south of midtown, supplanting older neighborhoods.
Aragon and DiBart in detail referenced a New Rochelle plan in which the city has partnered with a pair of private companies that will, by contract, develop what the people want in a process called “crowdsourced placemaking.”
“If the idea is a viable project ”” say an opera house ”” then we have an obligation to build that opera house,” Aragon said. “It”™s not an easy process, but a lot of early naysayers have come around.” He called the process “a different way of being proactive.”
There was little love for perhaps the only machine to equal the computer for impact in the last century: the car. Even the relative ease of car ownership in the suburbs is a thorn to planners and developers. Campofranco said some modern urban development does not allow for any parking at all.
“In New York City if you park 20 blocks from the store you jump for joy,” Aragon said. “In New Rochelle, if they park two stores down they say there is no parking.”
Part of the problem Aragon and DiBart face, they said, is that New Rochelle residents have a low opinion of their city, but those outside think highly of it. A century ago it was the third-richest city by per-capita wealth in the nation, Aragon said, and that has left a sturdy legacy of top-tier architecture.
“In New Rochelle, we”™re lucky enough to have the bones,” he said. As for filling the space: “The goal is creating the funkiness they”™re looking for.”
Donnelly, the Ossining supervisor, has a pair of revived theaters ”” to her north in Peekskill and south in Tarrytown ”” and hears from constituents that they, too, might like a theater. “Not everyone can have a theater,” she said.
Campofranco asked for negatives and Donnelly provided them.
“We make it too difficult to do anything, whether it”™s a sidewalk café or signage,” she said. “We cripple them. We have to make it safe, but simple, for people to do business in the community.”
There was talk of intermunicipal economic cooperation, as already happens among Long Island Sound communities on environmental issues, but as one panelist noted, “It”™s the ”˜Hunger Games”™ out there.”
DiBart ”” who previously headed retail planning for New York City and who identified himself as a lover of cities dating to ancient Greece and Rome ”” said, “My job is a translator. Government, developers and the community all speak different languages.”
Event sponsors were McGladrey, First County Bank, Eastern Land Management, awning company GS&S, Benchmark Title Agency LLC and Rakow Commercail Realty Group; 125 attended.
Interesting perspective regarding today’s real estate market.