Bishop: Providence Needs Less Redevelopment Areas, Not More
Thursday, August 02, 2018
Capco Steel employs 150 people working in gray buildings between Acorn and Sims avenue. The city has drawn a street and a public use plaza right in the middle of their business.
But most folks don’t have my sensibilities about wasting federal money, so why is everyone so upset about these visions? Eminent domain is the number one problem. Whether you have a home or business in the target area, a plan that the city promises is just out to make your neighborhood better could actually result in your removal, along with others who live and work there. Such strategies are reminiscent of the famous Vietnam dispatch to the effect that ‘we had to destroy the village to save it’.
But that’s not our vision object the planners, who point out that the plan didn’t envision any specific use of eminent domain. No, it didn’t. It just made a very careful statement that the Providence Redevelopment Authority (PRA) retained the “right” of eminent domain. And this ordinance, if passed, had the city council finding in advance that any use of eminent domain whatsoever by the PRA in the future in this area would be presumed to be in the public interest of curing blight – even if that condemnation involved taking property from a going business and awarding it to some other private party.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIf anyone thinks that redevelopment agencies are bashful about the use of eminent domain or feel some constraints due to the growing public concern about the private expropriation of a power supposed to be limited to truly public projects like roads and schools, think again. Before word of this land grab along the Greenway got enough businesses and residents boiling that the Council tabled it and the Mayor even suggested his team stand down for the moment, planning officials told the small businesses who were first to speak out that the ordinance made no difference: “We could take your property tomorrow if we wanted to.”
Is such a thing possible? Well, as it turns out, yes. As an artifact of the geographic eugenics that accompanied the progressive notion of redevelopment from the onset of such government efforts, 75% of Providence is already a “redevelopment area”, including all the land in the Greenway. The council has essentially surrendered ¾ of the city to the PRA. This has been going on for decades, and just how has it served us to have so much of the city declared “blighted and substandard”?
Eminent Domain in Providence – political and capricious
Before considering any new redevelopment plans, the very first thing the Council should do is repeal these broad generic designations of blight. Just because a neighborhood is challenged is no excuse to subject residents and businesses to an insecurity of title where their property can be taken at will by the PRA.
The Tavares Administration targeted a building downtown. The Cianci Administration used the power liberally on Federal Hill. The ACLU in its limited wisdom drew a line when Buddy came for the Columbus Theater, an astounding vaudeville era house that had changed with the times and kept the lights on showing X-rated movies following an early 70s run of Last Tango in Paris after it was banned in Boston. For decades, the family that owned the Columbus made it one of few businesses the kept running on Broadway in the evening as they continued to pay their taxes and bide their time. They actually staged occasional operas and theatrical productions during that 30 years hiatus into X-rated territory. But Buddy – in his Napoleonic fashion – decided it shouldn’t be up to the owners when this interim strategy would end, and he had the PRA condemn the theater.
Of course, some folks will see the ACLU as champions here, coming to the protection of the speech of the owners, but that is surely an ironic portrayal and reveals how shallow is the ACLU’s respect for property. The X-rated fare was not their chosen artistic expression but was a chosen business model to help retain their property. At the very same time, Mayor Cianci targeted a longstanding jewelry manufacturing business on Despasquale Plaza -- another owner who had paid taxes and kept a business running through the darkest times on Federal Hill. But he wouldn’t, in Cianci’s view, conform his own business decisions quickly enough to the emerging chic retail and accommodation sector on the Atwells corridor; and this owner had the lack of vision to to be unwilling to sell cheaply to private suitors who wanted to move more quickly. To Buddy, but also to all planners who think you hold and use your property at their sufferance, this was the very raison d’etre of the PRA, a political animal for distributing spoils that wraps itself in the cloak of “redevelopment”.
In the American experience, a fellow running a jewelry business is no less engaged in speech than one running a theater. In both cases the city had simply concluded it preferred other speech to that exhibited by the property owners. But the ACLU only took the X-rated case. Thus, the only protection that most of us who don’t have boatloads of money for lawyers have from the voracious appetite of bureaucrats who think they know better what should happen on our property than we do is for the Council to rescind these broad generic designations of blight.
Whose Vision?
Well, the planners would say, their approach to the Greenway is a much narrower more targeted vision. Isn’t that what you are asking for? They only forgot to do one thing in this grand scheme, consult anyone who actually runs a business in the target area as to how these plans might disturb existing longstanding TAXPAYING industrial and commercial uses.
Sweet Lumber, holding down the Olneyville end of this corridor has seen visions come and go in the neighborhood during their 135 years on Harris Avenue! A decade ago, urban village utopians had a vision for a commuter rail station across the street from this business and drew similarly impassioned pictures of the future. The only thing missing in those beautiful depictions was Sweet Lumber, which had been erased from the neighborhood.
In this latest Greenway vision, the planning department erased work and lay down areas of Capco steel, that struggled through the recession but remains one of the largest employers in this district. Capco spans both sides of a ‘paper’ street, Charlotte Hope Way, which the city proposed to reopen after decades of disuse disrupting Capco’s operations and storage. And, just for a kicker the Greenway Vision drew a large multi-use public plaza outside the right of way and in the middle of Capco’s operations. While it’s true that the street is theoretically a right of way, its just as true that an industrial operation spanning both sides of such a street could petition to have it closed and such a request should be respectfully treated.
To engage in hundreds of thousands of dollars of study, and to have never even spoken to Capco about these plans is the kind of self-centered embarrassment that is Providence planning. This department operates in some kind of echo chamber where its own designs are seconded by an alphabet soup of non-profits who often receive grants and loans over which the city has influence. Geez, whaddya think they are going to say about what the city wants to do? And that is called a public engagement process?!
Small businesses noted small but significant changes, buildings cropping up on their lot where there were none. And residents who were imagined to support the plan because it called for beautifying public spaces asked: “couldn’t we just get the railing on our bridge that’s been missing for years replaced?”. Without spending $200,000 we might have easily realized that residents would favor doing the simple and obvious stuff first. Graffiti is a much tossed about symptom of blight that the planning department seems to blame on the businesses there, rather than plan how to help with.
‘Artists’ Lofts vs. ‘Arrested’ Blight
To be fair, infill on vacant lots with uses that make the neighborhood less deserted at night are strategies that would, in the long term, lessen depredation by vandals and make the area less solicitous of illicit transactions. But, if this were overnight magic, the Rising Sun Mills, and the Plant would be paradise. The experience has been otherwise for some upscale tenants in and adjacent to those developments who have made the decision to move on. There is simply no substitute for a graffiti squad and police patrols at present. The businesses and residents struggling with the current state of affairs are uninterested in supporting a plan that ‘destroys the village to save it’, premised on development that can push out current occupants – because more swishy lofts and farmers markets are not what your average resident or business in the Greenway needs.
This isn’t just a question of eliminating eminent domain language. It points out a need to go back to the very beginning with this effort, if not scrap it altogether. There is little doubt in the mind of businesses and residents that the subtext of this plan is to remake the neighborhood by providing land to private developers to renovate or build from scratch more projects like the Rising Sun Mills and American Locomotive. These developments are no ugly ducklings, but they are no more an asset to the city than Sweet Lumber, Capco, Twin City Supply, the Coca-Cola plant, the Providence Journal printing plant or the Portland Group, etc. Nonetheless, there is the distinct impression that the Planning Department is not interested in mixed-use that extends so far as any effort to retain these old-line businesses which fall under the department’s heading of “arrested blight”.
This term is a grudging admission that there might actually be going concerns there, providing jobs and paying taxes. But planners think: “it will never be more than a lumber yard” or a “plumbing store”. In other words, the state of development is ‘arrested’, as if a going business paying its taxes is a bad thing. That is not the language of infill uses that find a comfort with their industrial neighborhood and synergistically provide more round the clock use and habitation that together over time make the neighborhood less of a free for all of graffiti and drug dealing. Rather it is a roadmap in which existing businesses remain by sufferance -- to be pushed out at will when some mayor or planning director decides the time is nigh.
The Planning Department seems stuck on the old model of neighborhood clearing. In this context they substitute bureaucracy for bulldozers. They don’t knock down the buildings, necessarily. They don’t do it all at once. But they intend to clear the neighborhood eventually. This is a tactic, whether using eminent domain or regulatory policy, that is reminiscent of Suzette Kelo losing her home in New London to the greater good of weed-filled acres in New London.
Lower profile could be higher return on our planning investment
The redevelopment apparatus, of course, has another reading: if Suzette Kelo didn’t have the nerve to object to her property being taken, maybe the development would have been built before Pfizer moved out of town. Great, so they would have had an office and retail park serving a lost signature employer. This is why the job of planning departments shouldn’t be dictating private investment as if the city were their own game of monopoly but consider improving the business and regulatory environment and seeing to transportation and parking needs as areas develop.
Another challenge which may not seem like one for the Planning Department but is: the city’s preoccupation with making every major project prevailing wage. Given that Providence politics are left and lefter, it is unsurprising to see support for labor – specifically laborers -- unions (albeit fairly clear 1st circuit precedent hazards their method of union requirements for subsidized private projects disguised as “apprenticeship”). Maybe it is time, if the city is going to subject major developers to prevailing wage until forced to desist that the city department that writes and reviews agreements with such requirements should be charged to question whether that prevailing wage should be so close to Boston’s. Yes, they are geographically close together. But developers consistently demand subsidies since returns on projects in Providence are 2/3 or less of what they are in Boston but construction costs are close to the same. Maybe we should address those costs instead of becoming eminent domain real estate agents and dispensing tax subsides for any crane in the sky.
Yes, some local construction workers could chose to work in Boston if the pay were much better – as some already do just because there is more work there! But Rhode Island business owners could also invest in Boston. Our smaller investors don’t because they know and love the state and are willing to work here for less money. Just saying. . . . I’m unconvinced that a significant discount on Rhode Island’s prevailing wage would not still attract workers committed to our state.
These are tough questions, a far more difficult and delicate mission for the Planning Department than deciding to put a house on Park Place and a hotel on Broadway. But its what they ought to be doing . Seeing that infrastructure is maintained and modest improvements made coordinate with private investment and neighborhood growth is more mundane -- definitely less master of the universe stuff. But its what they ought to be doing. And when private investment without tax or eminent domain subsidy displaces existing businesses and residents, finding alternative locations to house these people and enterprises is nowhere near as high profile as playing broker for Google or GE. But its what they ought to be doing.
Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, over-regulation and perverse incentives in tax policy.
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