The Aging Commercial Corridor
With the future of most downtowns largely secured after several decades of reinvestment, attention is now turning to other components of our cities for revitalization. The transition has been slow, but in recent years planners, investors, city leaders, and businesses have been looking to the commercial strip as the next home for their rehabilitation efforts. My idea of the commercial strip was the poorly constructed one-story shopping centers and gas stations with ample parking in front that create traffic issues with curb openings for each individual business along the street. I think back specifically to a few corridors in Lubbock, Texas where I started my career. In my opinion they were poorly planned spaces that needed to be leveled to start over. That was until I read Jennifer Suzanne Minner’s dissertation “Landscapes of Thrift and Choreographies of Change: Reinvestment and Adaptation along Austin’s Commercial Strips.”
Aging commercial corridor on 50th Street in Lubbock, Texas (image credit: maps.google.com)
In her dissertation, Minner uses a combination of interviews with the people involved in shaping commercial districts (small business owners, investors, city officials and leaders, and neighborhood residents) and data to show redevelopment patterns and the function of several commercial corridors in Austin, Texas. The areas I had considered in need of a fresh start, Minner argued were opportunity areas for the field of preservation beyond survey and landmarking. Preservation in the traditional sense never crossed my mind because many of these districts were built in the 1950’s and 60’s in response to the automobile, but they are now within the 50 year window of eligibility according to the National Register and could be considered for designation. While they should not be preserved in time as a formal district necessarily, they should be preserved as what the author terms “landscapes of thrift.”
The landscape of thrift concept reflects the fact that many of the businesses on older commercial strips are owned by people who worked hard and saved their money to invest in their dream. The affordable rents in these areas provided “pathways to entrepreneurialism and methods for multiple generations of business owners and property-owning families to earn and invest money.” But these areas are also the home to fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and corporate franchises that come with large, garish signs trying to one-up their neighbor, competing for the attention of drivers. It is these businesses which turned me off to the commercial strip as an opportunity for revitalization and caused me to overlook the small, local entrepreneurs trying to get their business off the ground in an affordable and convenient space.
Strip commercial on 34th Street which is home to local start up businesses (image credit: maps.google.com)
“The continued life of common building types along commercial strips challenges the deep-seated emphasis in planning and architecture on new development as the primary mechanism of urban change.”
The traditional tools planners employ do not work on the commercial strip as Minner discovered. She found that existing buildings remained “invisible in the process” and were resilient and durable in the face of revitalization efforts. In some of the case study corridors, iconic buildings were incorporated into a new project and preserved, not because of great architecture or historic significance that would result in a designation, but because of its value to the area. We often overlook small reinvestment’s that occur within existing buildings and parcels as a tool to transform the commercial corridor. Instead we focus heavily on long range planning documents that provide beautiful renderings of new buildings and an idealized corridor that ignores the small business owners in these aging buildings. As a planner myself, I realize despite our best efforts to plan a great new district, the commercial strip will change as a result not of one document but as a result of the choices of chain businesses, small entrepreneurs and investors, governmental policy, economics of the land, and often the residential communities surrounding the strip.
It appears however that our plans may be put into action as these participants and the combined factors are resulting in slow but visible changes to commercial strips across the nation. What started as seedy areas, were cleaned up in the 1950’s as family friendly shopping destinations away from the blight of downtown. They were then forgotten as we turned our attention back to downtown, but the trend for reinvestment is moving on from downtown, starting with smaller commercial strips in close proximity. As this trend continues, it is important to maintain the commercial strip as an area where diversity and affordability remain. The mid-century buildings should be preserved for the local entrepreneur, not bulldozed for a new mixed use high-rise. That does not mean that some new development is not warranted, but my former assumption that the commercial strip should be cleared and started anew is not the answer. Preservation will play a role, but not in the traditional landmarking sense. It will enter as a practice of sustainability and to recast a positive meaning of “thrift” helping to find ways to conserve the built environment within a practical and economical context. Minner suggests preservation organizations lead the way by identifying and sharing strategies to adapt buildings in a less resources intensive way. We can retrofit existing buildings to improve energy and environmental performance without breaking the bank of the entrepreneur starting their business in a “landscape of thrift” on the commercial strip.
