According to the Ypsilanti Courier A blue print is in the works for Downtown Ypsilanti. This Summer the Ypsilanti DDA received a $25,000 grant to help develop the blueprint or 5 year plan for downtown. To receive this grant a %50 match must be made by the city.
That makes the total $50,000 heading towards a plan for the future. The city will hire HyettPalma, a planning firm, to help them create this plan. HyettPalma will use information gathered from a random phone survey conducted by the DDA and suggestions from the Blue Print Process Committee.
My favorite part of the article is this — “The first meeting will take place on Monday and continue to meet regularly until the week of Feb. 25, when representatives from HyettPalma will visit Ypsilanti to firm up the plan and hold community forums to garner input from local residents.”
They expect the plan to be finished in March. Contact Brian Vosburg, Ypsilanti’s DDA Director, at 734-482-1410 or by email brian@ypsilantidda.org
Now that you have the gist of whats going on let me make some points. We are hiring a firm to help us with a plan but the firm isn’t going to visit the city until February 25th and they are to finish their report in March. The links of ‘helped’ communities on HyettPalma’s website seems to suggest that they are in the business of helping resort-type communities. I have strong suspicions that their knowledge of how to rejuvenate an economically depressed downtown. We need our downtown to be a place that local citizens use. There is a lot of competition for the tourist downtown and we can’t win that battle. The DDA continually spends money on improvement projects such as bricking the sidewalks and dividing the road with cement planters (which is the type of thing HyettPalma tells cities to do).
We do not need a firm from Virginia to tell us what to do. Follow the links on this page to the local blogs. There are hundreds of people that are generally in agreement of what our city needs to develop the downtown. The first thing we need is appropriate retail space for small business as was mentioned on the often quoted Mark Maynard site. We also need to get the property owners to clean up their crap, this included the city. No matter how you enter the downtown district it looks like crap. Arriving East and West on Michigan Ave you find abandoned properties (a lot on water-street), poorly maintained properties, and low-income vulture stores (Plasma Center, check cashing stores, $69.00 insurance places). There is no way people driving by would even think of stopping or looking out the window to see what stores are available. I’ve driven through a lot of towns and stopped because they looked interesting and none looked like Ypsilanti — See I just saved the taxpayers $50,000.
Here are my ideas for downtown:
I have long thought that if I won the lottery I would set up a retail SPARKprogram to develop retail businesses for downtown. Think about it, if we gave small independent retailers with good ideas a cheap or no-rent retail space, training, a single internet page, legal, and counseling advice (I’m sure there are people that would volunteer) for a year then sent them down the street, In Ypsilanti, to pay rent after they have figured things out. The retail Spark would also give us the opportunity to develop a culture of stores for Downtown and develop a ’scene’ different from other cities.
What is my vision? My vision is a downtown that plays on the liberal and green aspects of our population. According to the Parks Report 67%of our population is between 15 and 44. We don’t need antique shops we need to make Ypsilanti Hipsilanti (oh yeah that was tried by putting up signs). Perhaps our Retail-Spark could bring back Henrietta Fahrenheit (a very cool clothing store), A record Store as cool as Rubber Sole, and more trendy stores to compliment The Rocket and the bike-shop. We get cool stores and we have people with good ideas they just get killed by the plagues that kill most small businesses. Start-ups (especially trendy start-up) need support to make it and if we can get some to succeed others will follow. One cool store isn’t a destination but 10 cool stores are, no one cool store can survive on an island.
I would also suggest working on the ‘Green’ theme, have some stores that sell solar panels, wind turbines, rain barrels, hemp pants whatever have a re-use center that sells donated items to fund some of the activities. All we need to do is make Ypsilanti the destination our citizens would want.
I would also strongly suggest that the park plan, the Depot town plan, and the DDA plan all work together. Imagine how great it would be if we continued the Friday music series but instead of it just being a stage with people playing it was an event with sidewalk sales, swap-meet, street performers, etc. This can only happen if we link the types of businesses downtown with the music and the event. Remember aged 15-45 is who we are.
I’ve included this link to Hyette Palma’s own review of what they did for Manistee and since this is their own review I find it less than impressive. 10 years after their initial plan they were rehired to come up with an ecconomic plan?
Downtown Manistee, MI: Hyette Palma in 1992 to help the city of Manistee revitalize their downtown. They state on their website that Manistee has made great improvements over the last 10 years and in 2002 they were rehired to update their plan. The plan they came up with in 1992 was to enhance the appearance of downtown and in 2002 they changed their focus and are now working on 1)Maintenance, to further improve Downtown’s curb appeal; Economic development, to further improve Downtown’s business mix via business retention and recruitment; and
3)Marketing, to attract larger numbers of both local residents and area visitors.
To sumerize — Save the money and work with the great volunteer brain power our city has to offer. I don’t want to here that we only have to pay $25,000 either because the other $25,000 comes out of somebody’s pocket.
Thanks for your time,
Kurt Anschuetz
*post updated since original — thanks to Steve Pierce for correcting my figures.
