First wave of MidTown Renaissance residential..finished!

Here's a story that just came up last week. For those who don't know, Bob Howard and Mickey Clagg have finished with their first round of residential properties in their MidTown Renaissance portfolio. For some background info, their MidTown Renaissance projects is a series of 30+ buildings in the Midtown area (bounded by NW 13th/NW 6th and Classen/Broadway)..the first wave of restaurants and retail was opened 2-3 years ago, with the restaurant row around the new Walker Circle. This includes Irma's, McNellie's, new bakery, Midtown Y, 1492 Latin Fusion, Midtown Deli, a new Italian restaurant being developed, and many other great places.

Now, 2-3 years later, and after the portfolio has switched hands, the first wave of residential is finished, but it's nowhere near where we all expected. While it's true that lots of preliminary renovation work has been done on some of the more prominent buildings, like the Traveler's Life Bldg, the Osler Bldg, the Heritage Bldg (redubbed 1212 Walker), Pat's Lounge (redubbed The Packard), and others. But the first three residential renovations, totaling 16 units total, are up by Francis and NW 12th (north of St. Anthony = NoSA maybe?, i.e. "SoSA").

909 NW 12th, 905 NW 12th, and 1217 N Francis, to be exact. These are the links to the information I'm getting for this post..


1217 Francis


3 story - 2 units on each story (6 units), each unit 800-850 sf, 1 bed/1 bath, and starting at $950.









909 NW 12th


2 story - 4 units on each story (8 units), each unit 800-870 sf, 1 bed/1 bath, starting at $950.









905 NW 12th


2 story - 1 unit on each story (2 units), each unit 1250 sf, 2 bed/2 bath/2 living room (or study), and going for around $1500.

The City That MAPS Built

(credit Doug Loudenback for pics)

Just look at the difference between 1997/98 and 2003/04; the difference that about 5 years made in Bricktown. In the top picture, you see no canal, and just absolute blight, yet the Bricktown Ballpark is under construction at the end of the ally, which does provide some sort of time stamp on the picture. In the 2nd pic obviously the Canal is finished and the area has opened up with new businesses. It's like an episode of Queer Eye for cities, and I can just here a lisp saying, "from drab to fab!" Sorry, I just had to go there in reference to OKC's gay community leaders recently endorsing MAPS.

1993: OKC's economy is sinking, things are getting worse. The entire center city was in shambles from urban blight. In order to improve OKC's situation, OKC leaders decide to lure employers with wads of cash to come to OKC, but not even that would work.. they just flat-out did not want to come to OKC. In one of these failed deals, the city offered major incentives to United Airlines to put their maintenance center here, and UA turned it down and took a less impressive offer from Indianapolis because, "nobody would want to live in a place like OKC." (That was a news headline.)

2009: The rankings speak for themselves.

#3 on BusinessWeek's Forty Strongest U.S. Metro Economies
#1 on Fortune Magazine's list of best places to start a business
Top 20% of all metro's in GDP growth, U.S. Dept of Commerce
28 of the nation's 500 fastest-growing companies
Top Ten in BusinessWeek's Strongest Housing Markets in the U.S.
#1 on fastest-growing per capita income for a large MSA, U.S. Dept of Commerce
#2 for volunteer hours, #7 for overall volunteerism among major U.S. metros.
#4 Best Undervalued Place to Live, U.S. News & World Report
#8 for Indeed's Best Cities to Look for a Job
#2 on the Brooking's Institution's list of best-performing cities during the recession
#4 in ArtBistro's Top 25 Cities for Artists and Designers
#4 for WomenCo.com's Best Cities for Your Career
#1 on FDI's (Foreign Direct Investment) on list of most cost-effective large cities
#1 on BusinessWeek's most affordable major metros
Top Ten, Mat Hoffman Action Sports Park on National Geographic's Ten Best Things for Families
#37 on The Sporting News' Best Sports Cities (Toronto is #36, Austin is #38)
#28 on the Today Show's Best Places to Raise a Family
#7 on Forbes' Top Ten Cleanest Cities
#4 on Forbes' Best Cities for Commuters
#1 on Forbes' Most Recession-Proof Cities
#4 on BizJournal's 10 Least Stressful Metros

That's not to say that the work is finished. The momentum is still strong, there's still progress to be made, there's still room for improvement. The new frontier for downtown will be along the Oklahoma River, an area that has also seen a drastic facelift over the last decade. Will the progress during the 2000s be the end of the road for the Oklahoma River, or will development of the area along the river be a headliner going into the 2010s? Only time can tell. By Tuesday, we'll have a clearer idea of whether OKC's going to continue at the current rate (or slow down), or if we build onto the momentum.



Images, credit OKC: 2nd Time Around by Steve

Downtown Norman: Revitalization complete

Just wanted to post a few photos of how amazingly well the revitalization of Downtown Norman has gone. Here they be.

Pics taken over the summer..

Pearls of urban widsom

While OKC has Core2Shore, Tulsa is developing long-term plans for a neighborhood that has the potential to rival private development in OKC's C2S area. It has no NBA arena, no artificial waterfront, no convention center, and no Big Dig. It does have a Central Park (in fact that's the actual name of the park), even though it's much, much smaller than the yet-to-be-named central park plans for Core2Shore. It does call for alternate civic investment however.

The Pearl District's main organizer, developer Jamie Jamieson, has been talking to city leaders about what must be done to make this neighborhood Tulsa's version of Bricktown. You might not see it, but many visionaries definitely do. Recently finished plans call for moer improvements made at Central Park, a new canal, and an extensive pedestrian streetscape. Some streets may even be closed to vehicular traffic in order to foster the best pedestrian environment.

In all honesty, this is really a "bare-bones" revitalization proposal. The canal is absolutely necessary because the entire low-lying area is in a flood plain. There will be no development, period, without the canal.

The streetscape is necessary because the roads are completely crumbling and sidewalks are all torn up. The sidewalks are going to be necessary because we can not build a decent urban neighborhood without putting focus on the pedestrian environment. Blair Humphreys has an entire blog practically devoted to walkability in Oklahoma (a good read), which is not very good. Last year out of 500 cities ranked for walkability, OKC came in dead-last and Tulsa came in at 409. The Pearl District is going to be Tulsa's answer to the pedestrian crisis in Oklahoma.

You may be asking, what makes this different from other areas in Tulsa? Downtown Tulsa? Brady or Blue Dome? Cherry Street or Brookside? Even Uptown? The difference is that this is going to be a new urbanist neighborhood, whilst the rest of Tulsa's "urban" neighborhoods are just urban by 20th century standards. You still really need a car in order to navigate Brookside, and Uptown doesn't exactly scream bold modern architecture. In fact, I'm not quite sure what kind of architecture Uptown is supposed to be (other than something severaly in need of renovation).

But is it for real?
The bottom line for these types of visions is execution. We've seen especially in Tulsa that planners can dream and dream and nothing will ever happen. Along 81st Street (yep, not 71st Street) there are rumors of former plans of an actual monorail system linking 169 and the Oral Roberts/CityPlex development. OneOK Tower was supposed to be 60 stories tall. We all remember the Tulsa Channels, the Greenwood chamber's redevelopment proposal, Franklin Square, the proposed high-rise Westin on the Towerview site, Global Development's huge East End proposal, and the list goes on and on. I even have a post dedicated to failed Tulsa proposals, where I start out borrowing a line from Vegas: In downtown Tulsa, what happens on the drawing boards, stays on the drawing boards. Clever, right?

The Pearl District however, is for real. We know this not because Mayor Taylor has shown interest in helping (definitely not from that), but because there is actual development going on in the area right now. Jamie Jamieson is building The Village at Central Park, which is a large community of urban brownstones being built in piece-meal style (so far about 50 built, but many more planned). Pearl Place is a historic warehouse being renovated into a retail strip (this project was actually designed by an architectural firm that recently relocated to the Pearl District).

Neighborhood organizers along with city planners just finished the masterplanning for the revitalization push that is about to be underway. There is no funding yet for these proposals, but we may see the Mayor's office come up with something. The project has had it's fair share of press, from the Tulsa Whirled and news channels. There may be too much community involvement for the plans to get shelved at this point, and unlike with other proposals, nobody is speaking out about how horrible the proposal is. Perhaps they've uncovered a winning plan to muster public support for winning back the inner city: muster urban activist support and efficiently organize supporters long before anything ever goes up for a vote. As opposed to the failed Randi Miller/Bill LaFortune plan: just randomly announce a plan, tell people "Oh, and this is going to be voted on tomorrow," and let the two sides battle it out and call eachother names until it fails and people in OKC laugh at how sad Tulsa is. No pearls of urban widsom in that.

What the Pearl activists have put together is a package probably designed with suburban opposition in mind, and they've clearly outsmarted it. The canal can be stuck on a ballot and labeled "flood detention project, east Tulsa" which would have a higher likelihood of passing than "Pearl District urban tourist canal." A whole streetscape, even a pedestrian mall could just be stuck on a ballot labeled "road improvements, E 6th Street and Peoria." No need to get too specific, you might offend someone from South Tulsa, or City Councilman Roscoe Turner aka Really Old Dude on City Council.

While they can make these proposals seem modest, you be the judge. Here are the actual renderings I snapped from a newscast last week.

current

proposed

current (recently completed)

proposed

Extra..


Kind of a cool deal for T-Town.

What does "Big League City" really mean?

After all of the rhetoric and slogans and hoopla, now that we're a "Big League City"--so what? Do we magically feel better? Or ostensibly, can you even call us a big league city before a single game? Or for folks like New Orleans fans, will it really make a difference, or rather highlight where OKC fails to stack up?

As for the latter, I think not. OKC will stack up well compared to a lot of "big league cities" because the only thing that cities like Memphis and New Orleans have over OKC is too intangible to really make a big point out of.

As for feeling magically better, I think that we can all take immediate solice in knowing what our community is capable for doing for itself. Even during the improbable MAPS revitalization of OKC, people like the NBA were still saying no to OKC. The Hornets was not supposed to be as hugely successful. That whole debacle sure made David Stern's job a lot harder, although a lot more potentially rewarding as well. All of OKC's individual successes have been very improbable, and yet they share one more thing in common: being completely driven by community willpower. Which is a LOT more tangible than you'd think--just pull up exit poll data and compare to other cities faced with similar choices, like Tulsa.

As great as that all is, the largest good that will come out of this will start to become more of a factor once we get into the regular NBA season; Bricktown is going through a phase where it clearly needs a boost (which the last boost it got was probably the Hornets). Businesses prospered on game nights--and since the Hornets left town, we've seen less consistency in the newer businesses staying open for long. It's been harder for concepts to take off and share in the district's success.

There are a lot of reasons why this is about to change. It all has to do with more people downtown. We're beginning to see more residents downtown, and the downtown population--last I heard--was up from like 4,000 to 8,000 since 2005 or so. I anticipate that downtown's population will be around 15,000 come 2010. This means more stability for the various downtown districts because more of a local base; more "rooftops" in the neighborhood. Bricktown can become more like MidTown--which I am starting to think is more representative of downtown's own local scene than anything else (which may be why people notice a profound difference between the two).

If you live in a unit in the Regency Tower apartments or in Sycamore Square, are you more likely to go hang out in MidTown or Bricktown after work? If you live in one of the new lofts we're seeing going up in the Deep Deuce/Bricktown areas, where are you more likely to hang out after work?

Also, I think that there's an intangible benefit from simply having the NBA brand a few blocks away from anywhere in downtown. It adds more prestige to the whole scene, which may in turn increase the value of downtown housing and office space--especially during the mortgage fiasco. I think that the new Devon Tower will also have a very similar effect in adding to the prestige and value of downtown, and is a very tangible part of the new "Big League OKC".

Put simply, so far, "Big League City" has meant this. In the months and years to come, there is no telling what it will come to mean.

Rename SW 25th Street

In some places along SW 25th Street in the old Capitol Hill district, the street signs actually read "Commerce Street." In most places, the street signs read "SW 25th Street" and the addresses for all businesses along here are split between 25th and Commerce. So which is which?

To me SW 25th Street resembles the decay of the Capitol Hill district following the advent of Crossroads Mall and the white flight to points in Cleveland County. This is just a part of the century-plus long history of the Capitol Hill district which became around 1900, and was formally chartered in 1905, just two years before Statehood in 1907. What exists today along SW 25th Street is merely a reminder of the once-thriving city that once stood here right after the turn of the 20th century.

Capitol Hill is basically an inner city ghost town. It is the equivalent of towns like Picher, which had over 30,000 inhabitants and then whithered away because of air not fit to breath, and now recently, a tornado. Or like Tombstone which had 15,000 and then whithered away after fires, floods, and emptied mines. Capitol Hill was once a thriving independent suburb of OKC. Even though past population statistics for Capitol Hill (prior to merging with OKC) are nonexistent, the 1910 Census shows OKC having around 65,000 residents. One year later OKC annexed the City of Capitol Hill, but Capitol Hill retained a degree of separateness and over time the area had suffered significant population losses, business had entirely left once-booming Commerce Street, and the once autonomous district clinging for its identity was virtually dead, and not long after, it's rich history and identity was dead, too.

Long forgotten were the days when the city was a 1910 "Moore" or "Midwest City." Though the reality is that comparing Capitol Hill to a historic version of Moore or Midwest City is an insult to the quality of city building that existed back in the day. The Suburban Railway Company operated a streetcar system in the city, with a line that ran up and down Commerce Street, which was the downtown for the south side of Oklahoma County, and of course, the streetcar connected to rail across the river in OKC. And long gone are the department stores on Commerce Street, like Brown's, and Penney's (although Sears is still on S. Western after several decades in business). And most forgotten of all is the neighborhood's Irish heritage, which is mentioned in this Dustbury post. The truth is that S. OKC's strong Catholic Heritage runs much deeper than Hispanic migration. The reason for Catholic institutions like St. Mary's, the Mount St. Mary School, St. James, and so on, is because the kind of suburb Capitol Hill became was one assembled of stout Irish heritage. It may be unfathomable for anyone who has trekked through the area in the last 20 years and thought the Oklahoma Opry was a little out of place.

Today there are good feelings all around Capitol Hill over a revival. Life has been poured back into historic Commerce Street. Shows still go on at the old Oklahoma Opry, to the west traffic backs up on Western Avenue for many blocks during the day. East of the Opry, there are now shops, bakeries, Mexican eateries, American eateries, businesses, law firms, community organizations, and so on. The new streetscape along Commerce Street has brought in new businesses and activity into the district. A large swath of S. OKC that used to have abandoned homes and no activity or street life now boasts families in homes that have found the American dream in Capitol Hill. Churches enjoy packed congregations, whether they're one of the 4 Catholic churches in the area, or one of the dozens of Baptist, Methodist, or other denomination churches. Schools are so packed that a majority of Maps for Kids money is actually being allocated for new and expanded schools in S. OKC.

There are good feelings all around Capitol Hill, but much work remains to be done. It is doubtful if the city is willing to make the kind of investment in Capitol Hill that has been proven to work in several other areas of the inner city. It is time to bring back Capitol Hill's heritage and identity. Many of the original south side families are still there on the south side, and others would be astonished. Many of the original graduates of Capitol Hill High School and U.S. Grant High School still live in S. OKC, just right on the other side of I-240. Many of the elderly in the area trace their families to the original 1889 Land Run, and remember running family businesses butcher shops, bakeries, groceries, newspapers, etc that all called Capitol Hill home. It is time to bring back the legacy of Commerce Street, because perhaps then the area will be as close as it ever was to its once-thriving self. Dominoes will fall into place once SW 25th Street gets completely reverted back to its original name. There are so many things one can imagine that could turn Capitol Hill into a star, or at least an exciting and vibrant modern, urban district. But first let's just bring back Commerce Street, just like it was.