• Originally published September 1, 2010 at 4:52 p.m., updated September 1, 2010 at 4:52 p.m.

Bay City has made impressive progress in revitalizing downtown while preserving its historic nature. Having traveled much of the country for my training and education, I have learned a few things about viable small towns in a car-centric world. A recent study funded by the Bay City Community Development Corporation reinforces much of what you will read here.

Revitalizing a downtown requires a combination of encouraging commercial AND residential foot traffic. Fortunately for Bay City, the surrounding downtown area has not suffered the residential abandonment seen in many other downtowns. However, Bay City downtown does run the risk of being a “daytime” business hour downtown as seen in places like Fort Worth, Houston, and even large centers like the Texas Medical Center.

The question then arises, how do we encourage more people to make downtown part of there regular lives and not just there business lives? And how do we do it without raising taxes?

One effective proven method is entertainment and town markets. Another, is to create an environment that people would enjoy visiting and using to stroll with children or family/friends. Right now, the courthouse is surrounded by a vast empty space bearing the beating of the daily sun creating a barren unappealing no-walk zone. This relatively unused prime real estate area can benefit from 3 main changes:

a) Round steel tables that seat 4-6 people and can easily be screwed into the ground and removed for events. These would have umbrellas or other shade structure. These would encircle most of the empty space around the block of the courthouse.

b) Small non-imposing fountains that create a sense of peace, refreshment, and fluidity.

c) Increased and improved lighting at night to create ambiance. Including lighting the fountains.

As you can imagine, this sort of small investment/change will encourage the daytime business crowd to come out and have lunch in a more communal area. And at night, local residents can enjoy this as a central plaza with street vendors(operating at night when it is low traffic) offering snacks and other goodies. The vendors can pay a small fee if they are in carts, and a larger fee if they establish small booths. These fees will offset much of the expenses incurred for the revitalization but should not be so high as to discourage small businesses from establishing here.

To further revitalize the local culture, local artists can be encouraged to display there work in the evening hours. Also, musicians can be offered a small stage(one on each corner) to present there craft. And to avoid homogenizing the crowd/environment each corner MUST be for a different type of music (classical, rock, country, latino)

Although people often underestimate the value of creating social plaza’s, it is not hard to convince yourself otherwise. One can simply look at planned mixed developments around the country including no farther then Sugarland’s town square, or Rice Universities West U shopping district, and contrast this to a business powerhouse that is a daytime/nighttime pedestrian ghost-street like our world famous medical center and Downtown Houston.

Future Bay City Resident

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