Peripatetic Ponderings of the 2024 Main Street NOW Conference
One of my favorite annual events that always finds a way to rejuvenate and inspire me is Main Street America’s Main Street NOW Conference. This was my first year attending as a consultant and not as a Main Street manager, but it was just as rewarding of a trip as ever. This year’s conference was held in the Magic City. While I have spent a little bit of time in Birmingham, Alabama before, this was my first real opportunity to explore the city the best way that I know how, on foot. All in all, I was able to cover 40 miles of Birmingham’s streets, walkways, and public spaces, and it all kicked off with a quirky little walk from the airport on the outskirts of town to the downtown conference center.
Along the way, I witnessed the vestiges of redlining, urban renewal, and interstate expansion, leaving the neighborhood known as Woodlawn with blighted houses, vacant lots, and neglected residents. It was clear that Woodlawn’s condition was the product of years of disinvestment, but I was pleased to see glimpses of hope and renewal scattered throughout the neighborhood, thanks to Woodlawn United.
According to the organization’s website, their “holistic approach to community revitalization follows a model established by Purpose Built Communities, an organization that helps struggling communities across the country implement proven and effective strategies to end concentrated poverty.”
To learn more about this inspiring organization, visit them online at woodlawnunited.org.
Similar to the experiences I’ve had walking in other American cities, Birmingham is a city of polarization and disparity. From neighborhood to neighborhood, it’s a consistent case of the Haves vs. the Have Nots. Walking across these human-created boundaries is a stark reminder that the lived experiences of some residents can be vastly different than their neighbors just a block or two away. Much of Birmingham’s economic disparities are a direct result of the federal highway system, which created large dividers between established neighborhoods. US Highway 280 divides Downtown Birmingham from neighborhoods to the east like Woodlawn, Kingston, and North Avondale. According to PolicyMap, Downtown Birmingham’s poverty rate is a mere 9.7% compared to a rate of 60% for its easterly neighbors. The neighborhood of Graymont lies directly west of downtown, separated by I-65, an immense 8-lane interstate. The poverty rate in this neighborhood is 48%.
Before I belabor the point, let me just say that America’s interstate highway system has a long history of separating communities from wealth, resources, and connections. To read more about this topic, I highly encourage you to check out the work of Segregation by Design, available online at segregationbydesign.com or on Instagram @segregation_by_design. This incredible resource has documented the destruction of communities of color in numerous cities across the country, as a consequence of the interstate highway system.
In addition to all the sights, smells, and experiences I encountered through my walking exploration of Birmingham, being able to serve as a conference presenter was a significant highlight of the trip. Alongside my Jon Stover & Associates colleague, Leslie Gray, we presented our session, “Walk This Way: How Walkability Helps Local Economies” to a full room of enthusiastic Main Street professionals.
In this presentation, I was able to recount my walk of every street and alleyway in the City of York, Pennsylvania. After Leslie provided some helpful information about what walkability can mean for a community (like the fact that 78% of people would pay more to live in a walkable community and that mixed-use downtown development generates 10x the tax revenue per acre than does sprawl development), I was able to provide four strategies for Main Street professionals to improve their community’s walkability.
My comments are recorded here:
Prioritize Walking: How can you embody and demonstrate the best of your community’s walkability and live up to these ideals?
If you work for a Main Street organization, I’d venture to guess that the majority of your workday is spent within your downtown. Working in the office, visiting merchants, attending community meetings. Why not leave the car parked for the entire day and walk your downtown? If you have placemaking audits to do, checking out your planters, pole banners, updates on your façade improvement grant program, etc. do it on foot. Demonstrate to the community that your downtown is walkable and that the experience is desirable. As I learned from my walk, walking through a community rather than driving eliminates so many barriers that vehicles put up. It allows us to connect with the members of our community, face to face, on equal footing.
Walking Events & Experiences: How can you enhance and normalize walking in your downtown through events and curated experiences?
I know that events can be a hot button topic in the Main Street world. There are so many more important things we can be doing other than planning events, but perhaps you can transition some of your already established events into walking events. Are there individuals in your community who would love to host walking tours; architectural tours, history tours, or ghost tours? I’ve seen a number of Main Street programs implement Story Book tours where they place one page of a children’s book in each storefront window, encouraging families with small children to walk the downtown and enjoy a story as they go from store to store. Communities all across American have implemented the concept of Open Streets, where there is a designated day or maybe even a few days throughout the year where a section of streets are closed to all vehicle traveling, enabling cyclists and pedestrians to take on the streets without fear of danger, all while building community cohesiveness.
In my former role as the Director of Downtown Inc in Downtown York, PA, we held a wildly successful event twice a year called The Sweetest Pint, where we had 8 locations throughout the downtown that hosted local craft beer paired with a local chef’s plate. Between these locations, attendees would walk and talk. We would rotate the 8 locations so that new and exciting places were being featured for each event; highlighting restaurants, artist galleries and studios, retail shops, and entertainment venues. After every single one of these events, we always heard feedback like “wow, I didn’t know that place existed. I want to share with my friends. Or, you know, it's pretty cool to spend a day walking around downtown.”
Enhance the Walking Experience: Nobody wants to walk in your downtown if they feel unsafe, unwanted, or if frankly there is just nothing nice to look at. What can you do to ensure that walking in your community is a desired activity?
In Jeff Speck’s book, Walkable City, he concludes that a walkable community must provide 4 things. He calls it his General Theory of Walkability, which states that a community must provide reasons to walk, it must provide safe places to walk, with a certain level of comfortability, and it must provide an atmosphere that is interesting in which to walk. As somebody who has walked thousands of miles in all kinds of settings, I know that nobody wants to walk on a busy sidewalk or on the shoulder of a road where cars are flying by at high speeds, breathing in exhaust, and existing in a constant state of heightened anxiety.
For much of the 20th century, traffic engineers worked hard to figure out how to get vehicles to pass through city centers and main streets as fast as possible. It is our responsibility in the 21st century to figure out how to get vehicles to pass through our communities as slowly as possible. Road diets, speed tables, narrowing of lanes, curb bump outs, raised crosswalks, and adding trees are all good ways to slow traffic to improve the pedestrian experience. Not to mention, don’t we want drivers driving slowly to enjoy our beautiful downtowns anyways, instead of finding the fastest route out of there, or, even better, pulling the car over and exploring our downtowns on foot?
What can we do to enhance the aesthetics of the walking experience? It sometimes doesn’t take a lot, but we should do everything we can to make the experience of walking in our downtowns as pleasing as possible to our senses. Pole banners, public art, live performances, murals, a proper urban canopy, artistically inspired crosswalks, little free libraries, and inviting storefronts are all small things we can implement to make walking in our downtowns more desirable, safe, comfortable, and interesting.
I’ve seen hundreds of Main Street programs implement new wayfinding signage in their downtowns. Not only do they assist with helping visitors navigate around, but they also enhance the overall branded experience of their visit. If we only offer vehicle-centric wayfinding signage, then we are communicating that our communities are not safe to walk through or that walking in them is not desirable.
Consider implementing pedestrian wayfinding signage that utilizes walk radiuses, to show how walkable key destinations are. I’m sure many of you are tired of hearing that there is never any good parking in your downtowns. Having a visual representation of how close locations are from a parking garage can help change that narrative. When we designed and installed new pedestrian wayfinding signs in Downtown York as you can see here, we discovered that every single anchor destination was less than a five minute walk from a parking garage or lot. If that sounds like a lot, ask yourself, how far of a walk is it from the center of the Wal-Mart parking lot to the cooler in the back of the grocery section?
And Walkability for All: Is the walking or rolling experience in your downtown safe and inviting for children, for wheelchair users, or hearing and sight impaired individuals?
As an able-bodied individual who has walked in hundreds of downtown and main street communities, it’s sometimes easy for me to forget that my experience isn’t the universal experience. A 12 second crosswalk signal may be sufficient for me to cross a busy street, but how about an elderly individual, a person using a wheelchair or some other mobility device? I have no problem with getting over an improperly placed curb cut or one that is elevated, but what if I was in a wheelchair or pushing a stroller? As somebody who has never experienced being cat-called, I generally feel safe walking through a community at night, but does your downtown have proper lighting to make all individuals feel safe?
Beyond just centering the stories and experiences of children, the elderly, individuals using mobility assistance, and the vision and hearing impaired, we can be more proactive in ensuring that their walking experience is also desirable, safe, comfortable, and interesting. The AARP’s Livable Communities’ program offers a free Walk Audit Tool Kit. Click here to access the digital version of the tool kit or order your own hard copy, so that you can assess your own community’s walkability from the perspective of multiple users.
