Seeking answers to Macon-Bibb's commercial blight

More than 54,000 cars drive along the Eisenhower Parkway corridor every day.

“Folks actually want to come to this area. The traffic patterns are there. I mean we’ve got so much traffic,” John Mulherin, vice president of Macon Mall owner Hull Property Group, said in a meeting of area business owners and community leaders last November.

“The Eisenhower corridor is a major economic engine for this city,” he said.

But it’s also in an ongoing state of decline. In the past year, several stores and restaurants have closed -- IHOP, Taco Bell, Pier One and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

It’s not a story of businesses simply fleeing the Eisenhower corridor. Many have played a game of “hop-scotch,” as longtime anti-sprawl activist Lee Martin calls it. Home Depot moved to Eisenhower Crossing, leaving a hulking, vacant store behind in the Westgate Mall, surrounded by acres of empty asphalt. Wal-Mart and Carnival Shoes also moved west in pursuit of greener pastures.

About 30 percent of the retail square footage in the Eisenhower corridor is now vacant, according to an analysis by commercial Realtor Larry Crumbley with Fickling & Co. In comparison, east Macon retail space is about 14 percent vacant, and less than 9 percent is vacant along the Vineville Avenue and Forsyth Road corridor.

It’s an all-too-familiar story playing out all across the country. Once-thriving retail districts closer to the urban core are no longer the shiny new thing. Tastes change. Wealthier people move to the edge of town. Retail follows them. And empty buildings are left behind.

But the people who work and do business along the Eisenhower corridor are not going down without a fight.

Business owners, planners and community leaders from the corridor came together at the November meeting at Central Georgia Technical College to discuss the decline of their community and possible ways to combat the problem.

Mulherin, who led the meeting, said Eisenhower becoming a vibrant part of the community again will require beautifying the highway interchanges, increasing safety patrols and giving the area an identity.

“We have got to clean up the interchange at (Interstate) 475, get people to stop and shop,” Mulherin said. “We’ve got to improve the look of the corridor.”

Hull Property Group is leading an effort to rebrand the area as the “Education Corridor,” connecting Mercer University, Central Georgia Technical College, Middle Georgia State and Virginia College.

The company also is promoting a plan to make the area a Business Improvement District. If it gets the go-ahead, businesses would pay -- according to the value of their property -- into a fund devoted to improving the area’s aesthetics.

These measures might help Eisenhower rebrand and revitalize, but they don’t address the larger approach to planning and development in Macon.

THE BIGGER PROBLEM

Macon-based urban planner Zan Thompson argues that Macon needs to update its planning and zoning process to favor developments near urban centers that are more dense, and more walkable and bikeable. He also says the city needs more “mixed-use” development that integrates shopping with living. He says the process should discourage the development of new shopping centers that the community cannot support along with the old ones.

The current political culture in Macon seeks to lower the barriers to development at the expense of the city’s livability, Thompson said.

“We want to encourage new development, but we need to control it,” he said.

Thompson arrived at this point of view over decades of work throughout the Southeast, including developments along Arkwright and Zebulon roads that are themselves the type of sprawling, car-dependent landscapes he now bemoans.

It’s not that suburban-style retail development is bad, Thompson said. It’s that Macon already has enough of it.

“Macon’s premier retail infrastructure already exists along the Eisenhower corridor and has already been paid for by the citizens of Macon-Bibb County,” he said. “It has suffered only from a lack of attention and good management.”

Sarah Schindler, a professor at the University of Maine’s Law School, has a national reputation for her academic study of land use laws and how they support or discourage sprawl.

On the national level, Schindler said, “we’ve got residential that keeps expanding further and further away into the suburbs because the land is cheaper and people are building new homes, or they want to be further from the city or they want more land.”

Government has several tools, mainly through the powers of zoning, to encourage denser, “smarter” development, Schindler said.

“They can make changes to the zoning code, saying, ‘No, you can’t build a big box in this neighborhood,’” she said. “‘We are only going to allow mixed use in this neighborhood, or if you are going to build a commercial building, it has to meet physical requirements, like a store that could be easily reused by another retail entity in the future.’”

These are the types of changes that Sarah Gerwig-Moore has championed during her seven years on the Macon-Bibb Planning & Zoning Commission, but with little success.

“There are a variety of carrots and sticks for development,” Gerwig-Moore said. “Carrots (such as tax incentives) that encourage developers to look at abandoned sites, sites that have already been developed that already have power, water, sewer running to them -- which are expensive for communities to run -- before they’re able to move into greenfield development.

“And then there are sticks that prohibit certain kinds of greenfield development if there is a blight -- a doughnut -- problem in the community, which we certainly have, and Macon is just not employing those.”

The “doughnut” Gerwig-Moore refers to is the ring of semi-inhabited suburban retail outside of Macon’s rapidly revitalizing downtown. Other cities across the country have constrained such development with planning regulations, perhaps the most dramatic of which is known as a “green belt” or “urban growth boundary” that requires all development to be concentrated within a ring of undeveloped land on the outskirts of the city.

Such regulations theoretically would force developers to revitalize existing properties, as the option of starting fresh with new construction on empty land further from the urban core simply would not be available to them.

Portland, Oregon, is arguably the most prominent example of a city that has instituted a green belt, but so has Lexington, Kentucky -- a city closer to Macon’s size.

Thompson said that if mid-sized, post-industrial cities such as Macon want to develop a community that people want to live in, especially younger workers who value a sense of place, leaders need to create a mix of incentives and disincentives to shape a “smarter” approach to development and growth.

COLUMBUS’ EFFORTS PAYING OFF

One community that seems to be shaking itself out of a cycle of decline is Columbus, an hour and a half southwest of Macon.

Located along the Chattahoochee River, Columbus is just miles from Fort Benning.

Brannon Bass, 32-year-old electrical engineer, looks out over the rapids that course close to the town center. A kayaker practices his rolls as students hang out on the rocks.

Nearby is a zip line crosses the river. Overlooking the rapids is a new office building for Synovus bank, next to which are loft apartments that sell for as much as $1 million.

Just 15 years ago, Columbus’ downtown was widely known as a place to avoid, several people said, including Richard Bishop, president of Uptown Columbus.

Bass and his family have seen the downtown area improve dramatically in the last several years.

“It’s a lot better than it was 10, 12 years ago,” he said. “My in-laws lived here for two years back when my wife was in middle school here. They didn’t like it because there was nothing to do. Back then it was still kind of run-down down here. Now when they come back, they’re amazed at how much it’s changed and how much it’s grown.”

Columbus’ growth and improvement is evident downtown, where the main street is vibrant with shops, restaurants and cafes. It’s a draw for college students.

Macon’s downtown is also coming along, but in Columbus, there’s evidence of broader progress to make the community more attractive and livable: ordinances that balance commercial development with aesthetics and the public in mind.

Bishop, a former Columbus deputy city manager, credits forethought and planning for Columbus’ turnaround. He said business and community leaders in Columbus realized that younger workers tend to choose a place first, and then a job while baby boomers tended to follow work wherever it led them.

Bishop said this requires a different way of thinking about place, one that values quality of life and aesthetics as much or more than ease of driving.

HARD TO QUANTIFY A SENSE OF PLACE

One way of doing that is having ordinances that require businesses to account for aesthetics as they build new developments.

Columbus has an ordinance that recognizes trees as “a vital part of the heritage passed to us by nature and our forefathers” and requires developers to maintain a certain density of trees on properties. The ordinance also stipulates plantings for medians and parking islands.

Columbus also has a sign ordinance that restricts the height of commercial signs. They also have implemented “historic overlays” that constrain development in historically designated areas.

Bishop said these ordinances, along with the progress Columbus has made more broadly, are the result of difficult compromises between the government and business interests.

He said it’s about more than just making the community look good. It’s also about attracting new businesses and residents.

“I think quality of life and what a community looks like, to me, is an advantage when you’re trying to recruit businesses in a lot of ways,” Bishop said. “They like to see a neat-looking city.”

Rick Jones, Columbus’ director of planning, agrees that a history of tough compromises and a solid groundswell of public support has helped balance the short-term, profit-driven needs of businesses with longer-term interests to make aesthetics and quality of life central to planning and policy-making.

He says it boils down to the community wanting a sense of place.

“It’s an overall feeling about how folks perceive their community,” Jones says. “We’re trying to be something different, something really identifiable, so that you know you’re in Columbus, Georgia.”

TREE ORDINANCE A CONCERN

Thompson, the Macon planner, said communities like Macon should look to cities like Columbus.

“It’s not just what your job force is. It’s not ‘do you have theater, do you have a college football team they can go to games?’ and that kind of stuff,” Thompson said. “It’s what do your streets look like? What’s it like for people to live in this town? Is there a quality of life there, aesthetically?”

But frequently, businesses and Realtors regard the kinds of ordinances and constraints that encourage “smart,” aesthetically pleasing development as obstacles to attracting businesses, at a time when they feel they’re just starting to crawl out of the hole of the most recent recession.

For example, a concern for commercial developers is Macon’s proposed tree ordinance, said Tim Thornton, owner of Thornton Realty and a member of the Commercial Council of the Middle Georgia Association of Realtors.

Such an ordinance could stipulate a percentage of tree coverage in parking lots and require certain minimums for plantings on new developments, similar to existing regulations that already cover Macon’s historic districts.

Thornton said Realtors would be opposed to those rules because they say they would hinder new developments.

“We’ve got hundreds of thousands of trees. That doesn’t mean that certain trees don’t deserve protection, particularly in the historic areas, or that there shouldn’t be some incentives to preserve and plant some trees,” Thornton said. “But I’m not sure that that’s (commercial Realtors’) number one concern, particularly if it’s at the price of prohibiting development and increasing the cost of development.”

The tree ordinance is mild compared to an urban growth boundary or some other restrictive zoning measure that would bar greenfield development in favor of infill development.

Mayor Robert Reichert said he does not support such restrictive policies, as he fears they would drive business to neighboring communities.

However, Reichert said he would support a policy that makes infill development more attractive, “to try to get people in voluntarily, rather than to coerce them not to do something someplace else,” Reichert said. “That’s a much better way than to try to regulate building in the greenfield, saying, ‘You can’t do that unless you do X, Y, Z.’ ”

CATCH MORE BEES WITH HONEY

Thornton recalls how lively and dynamic downtown used to be before Westgate and then Macon Mall lured away businesses and shoppers. He understands that businesses are attracted to places that value quality of life, he said, but in his day-to-day job, he has to respond to the needs and desires of his customers.

Given the choice between redeveloping a property along Eisenhower versus building on a similarly priced or cheaper parcel to the north or west, Thornton said it’s an easy choice for developers.

“It costs me the same thing to build apartments here as it does in the nicest part of town,” he said. “And no doubt that this is a declining area. The crime statistics bear that out.”

The sentiment is echoed by commercial Realtor King Kemper at the Summit Group, also a member of the Middle Georgia Association of Realtor’s Commercial Council. When developers or retailers are considering property, the first thing they wonder is ”what do the demographics look like?” Kemper said. “Eisenhower -- there’s a lot more crime issues. Certain developers are going to be looking for a higher median income.”

In order to make such an area attractive, Thornton said, “it takes some special incentives to motivate, incentivize a developer.”

“There are any number of zoning minimums and restrictions that they could potentially lower or relax to give the developer more incentive to go in,” he said. These could include density allowances -- allowing a developer to build something taller or more intense than what would normally be allowed -- or designation of districts where businesses could get property tax breaks for redeveloping vacant buildings.

Thornton points to two projects currently underway as examples -- state-subsidized plans to redevelop the ornate but dilapidated A.L. Miller High School as affordable housing, and Mercer’s in-progress, mixed-use, dense development across Little Richard Penniman Boulevard, for which Macon-Bibb taxpayers are building a pedestrian bridge.

Kemper said he thinks retail developers could be attracted to infill projects with the offer of “special bond financing through the city.”

“You generally see that more with industrial-type projects,” Kemper said.

Not all incentives have to be directed at major tenants, like big box stores. Reichert points to the example of Bradenton, Florida, a city with a redeveloped “arts village” that he visited during a trip sponsored by the Knight Foundation.

“The arts village took an existing subdivision that was close into town, that was dilapidated,” Reichert recalled. “They came and did a planning and zoning overlay that allowed residential commercial and light manufacturing all in the same area.”

Artists are able to live in upstairs apartments with retail galleries on the ground floor and workshops in the back.

“They’ve got people moving in, the prices go up, more people move in, then here comes commercial activity around it, like grocery stores and pharmacies to support the people,” Reichert said.

However, zoning or tax incentives designed to promote redevelopment have their limits, Kemper said. “It doesn’t matter how cheap taxes are. If developers don’t feel like they have the tenants and therefore the consumers, it’s not gonna happen,” he said. “You could give somebody a property, and if it’s in an area of town that doesn’t excite him, you’re not going to get any kind of project.”

Thornton agrees no one incentive will do the trick. But he does think it’s the job of Macon’s leaders to balance the purely economic needs of businesses with a need for “smarter,” denser growth that doesn’t continue to sprawl outward.

“I think it takes somewhat of a government hand to reverse” the forces that have encouraged flight to the suburbs, he said.

But Reichert said change will have to be gradual.

“Since World War II all the way up to now, we’ve been (building) greenfield development, sprawl, and further and further out,” Reichert said. That trend is reversing, he said, as people tire of ever longer car commutes, “but it’s not going to happen overnight. You don’t turn a battleship around on a dime.”

Mercer University students Jane Hammond, Joel Patterson, Lia Sewell and Conner Wood contributed to this report.

This story was originally published April 27, 2015 at 10:21 PM with the headline "Seeking answers to Macon-Bibb's commercial blight."