A report on downtown revitalization by six students at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management found that retail business can add to an established downtown but cannot anchor it. "The single most effective anchor of small downtowns is one or two high-density employers" -- companies that employ at least 1,000 people -- and the surest way to attract them is through exceptional city schools, they wrote.
Other important findings: Closed-in areas generally fail to prosper as downtowns because they are seen as unsafe. And essential, but often costly and unpopular, infrastructure improvements, such as widening or rerouting streets for better traffic flow through a downtown commercial district, are key to a vital downtown.
While there have been a number of studies of Ithaca's downtown over the years, the business students' report was the only one to compare the city with 13 other U.S. communities that are similar in size, character and resources. Among them were Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; Boulder, Colo.; Bloomington, Ind.; and Bennington, Vt. The students made site visits to all 13 towns during the past year and assessed what made their downtowns vital and what detracted from them. They also took a long hard look at Ithaca's downtown to study what was working and what needed improvement.
The students, Geoff Archer, Amy Gillett, Jay Krueger, Brian Lee, Shana Leiberman and Benjamin Wood, presented their comprehensive study to Ithaca Mayor Alan Cohen, who commented: "I thought the report was thought-provoking, with some excellent, tangible ideas." Cohen plans to share its findings with his staff and with Ithaca's Common Council.
According to the students' report, even if a town is doing well overall, it suffers when its downtown doesn't flourish because a thriving and attractive downtown has a symbolic value as well as an economic one, instilling a sense of pride in community. Conversely a lackluster downtown embarrassed residents, particularly when they hosted visitors.
Ben Wood, one of the students who worked on the report, said he was surprised to discover that communities with successful downtowns had all begun by taking a similar series of steps to improve their city's basic infrastructure -- the accessibility of the downtown commercial center, the flow of traffic to, through and around it, and the usefulness of the downtown's overall organization. The difficulty with trying to make these kinds of basic improvements, said Wood, is that it can be hard to convince a community to support the cost when the changes, while they make a downtown function better, don't make it look better.
On the report's finding that closed-in downtowns don't prosper because they appear unsafe, the students noted that some of the cities they visited had experimented with closed streets but had reopened them after a sharp drop in retail sales.
On the efficacy of having a high-density employer downtown, Wood stated: "You bring one or two thousand people to a downtown and all of a sudden you have shops, you have restaurants, you have activity, you have commerce." He added: "Towns like Ithaca can have great success attracting employers who need a highly educated populace to recruit from."
The best way to attract a large downtown employer, the report stated, was by offering economic incentives and by improving schools to the point where people would chose to relocate in a community and commute great distances to work if need be, because of the quality of the schools.
Other findings: Downtowns with a sufficient number of residents are more likely to be safer in the evenings and have a more-vibrant night life, but the residential mix must include people of different economic backgrounds, to prevent downtown ghettos of a single economic class, poor or wealthy.
The study was one of the Service Leadership Projects undertaken by Park Leadership Fellows at the Johnson School. The fellows are Johnson School students selected for their leadership potential and commitment to service. Leadership training is part of their MBA studies.
Clint Sidle, the director of the Park Leadership Fellows Program, calls the Service Leadership Projects, "the capstone' of the Park Fellows' leadership development. "By giving them an opportunity to practice their leadership skills in the community," he said, "we hope to reinforce their lifelong commitment to public service as well as plant the seeds of change in the community."
As a longtime resident of Ithaca, Sidle has a special interest in the downtown rejuvenation study. He grew up in the community, was a wrestling star at Ithaca High School and at Cornell and went on to earn an MBA at the Johnson School in 1977, before joining the university as an administrator. "This is important work," he said. "It identifies the underlying support structures that make a downtown more vibrant and sets up a framework that can be used to help understand the problems of the Ithaca Commons in more depth."
In addition to the downtown revitalization study, Park Fellows Service Leadership Projects that benefited the community this past year included helping the Tompkins County SPCA develop a strategy to gain more members, developing a program plan for the Women's Community Building, attracting more funding for Ithaca Housing Authority and performing a needs-assessment study in Dryden for Ithaca's Catholic Charities, which wants to offer more services in that area. Projects now being worked on include developing alternative air service to Ithaca, working with the county chamber of commerce to help non-profits attract government funding, and setting up a local venture capital fund to be run by students for the community.
The downtown study is accessible on the web at http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/park/service.html.
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