Real Hartford

Improving Hartford and Attracting People Downtown in Three Easy Steps

Julie (Live in Hartford) dug through the archives, and found that these concerns were addressed about a decade ago. It’s kind of what we tell students learning how to do research– you are joining an ongoing conversation; the conversation did not begin with you. Go read her blog entry about it.

Downtown Housing: Workshop and Panel Discussions

UPSTAIRS DOWNTOWN, an all day event, is planned for Friday July 25th at the Lyceum Center at 227 Lawrence Street. Connecticut Main Street Center is sponsoring this workshop. They host four workshops each year, which are based on the “Main Street Four Point Approach.” This approach deals with organization, promotion, design, and economic restructuring.

The Connecticut Main Street Center provides the following description for the UPSTAIRS DOWNTOWN workshop:

There are thousands of buildings in America’s older downtowns with vacant upper floors. These spaces boast a central location, high visibility, complete community infrastructure, and are prime candidates for redevelopment. UPSTAIRS DOWNTOWN is an award winning initiative created to help owners reclaim and reuse these vacant upper floors, and turn them into income producing properties.

Continue reading Downtown Housing: Workshop and Panel Discussions…

Update

I’ve been very busy with work lately, so updating the blog has not been a priority for me. Getting back into the semester schedule has been a particular challenge this time around, for reasons I have yet to figure out. Anyway, I posted something about the NHL arena feasibility study over at Undercurrents.

Toni Gold Nails It

Here’s some ink that tells it like it is– The Hartford’s Plan: So Last Century.

A few highlights from Gold who comments on The Hartford’s desire to acquire and destroy:

Many others will talk about the city’s disappearing heritage, the stupidity of tearing it down to save it, the thuggery of The Hartford’s threat to leave the city if its needs are not met, and the crassness of bribing city officials by offering a hard-to-find site for the poor beleaguered Pathways magnet school project.

and

Sure, The Hartford should buy the MassMutual site. But save much of the building, perhaps by putting the school in it, and institute — right now — the kind of 21st-century disincentives to driving that start with charging for parking and more heavily subsidizing transit for employees, and end with developing the site more densely as mixed-use walkable urbanism.

Okay, stop wasting time here and read Gold’s entire article.

Future for “Front Street”?

As the plans for Front Street are revealed, I think about how there is an opportunity to create something like Blue Back square without the yuppie air to it (and yes I’ve been there, I like it, but I can’t justify spending $80 on a single pillow). I don’t think it’s our god-given right to build on every inch of the earth’s surface, but I don’t see the point in leaving certain areas vacant and run-down either. Both the Blue Back and (new) Front Street areas have been eyesores in recent memory. Continue reading Future for “Front Street”?…

Other Rising Stars

Heather at Urban Compass  posted this amazing assessment of what is going on with these renewal campaigns, as well as what is not going on. She points out that not enough is being done to make the public schools marketable. As she says, it’s like the only people that are being seduced into the city are young professionals and empty-nesters.

I want to say more, but it’s better if you just go read what she’s written.

Hartford Artists Omitted from Discussion

Today’s Courant informs readers of how legal details are creating financial problems for ArtSpace Norwich, a mixed use building that includes a built-in artist community. It’s true that if a place receives public funding, they can not discriminate regarding who they rent to. But, as the article notes, most residents are not even full-time artists.

What is not included in this discussion is what is happening to ArtSpace Hartford. Continue reading Hartford Artists Omitted from Discussion…

A City Without Food

Bliss Market will not be moving into downtown afterall.

Where will all of the hip new downtown residents be able to do their grocery shopping, you ask? Well, where they’ve been able to do so for a few years now– Rose Gourmet, a small shop on Pratt that is stocked with everything from organic snacks to fruit to soap.

And pray tell, where is this store in relation to Hartford 21, where Bliss Market was intended to go? Pratt Street is just across the street from the Civic Center. The H21 plan to put some grocery store of their own inside their building anyway.

Hartford 2010 Blueprint

Press Release:

(June 4, 2007)— The City of Hartford and the MetroHartford Alliance will present the third and final phase of the Hartford 2010 initiative — the blueprint to sustain the Capital City’s unprecedented growth and revitalization.  This press and community event will take place tomorrow, June 5th at 11:00 a.m. in City Council Chambers on the second floor of City Hall, 550 Main Street in Downtown Hartford.  Mayor Eddie Perez, Oz Griebel, president and CEO, MetroHartford Alliance, Andy Bessette, chairman of the board of the MetroHartford Alliance, and Ken Greenberg of CBT Architects will take part in this presentation. A presentation for the community only will also take place tomorrow at 7:00pm at the Hartford Public Library, 500 Main Street, Hartford, with Griebel and John Palmieri from the City of Hartford.  Future neighborhood rollouts will also be scheduled to answer any additional questions.

Hartford 2010 is “The Framework” that will build on the considerable accomplishments of the past five years by the City and the Alliance and is designed to attract additional private investment in the City to make the region more competitive in the global economy while providing a great place to live, work, and play for residents and visitors alike. The framework reflects the entire community’s vision for a dynamic, livable, healthy, and economically vibrant Capital City.  It successfully builds on Hartford’s natural, economic, cultural, social and physical assets that include its compact Downtown, relationship to the Connecticut River, major educational institutions, transportation infrastructure, key employment concentrations, and energetic residential neighborhoods.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who decides to go to this.

Northland Investment Corp.: Smarter Than George W. Bush

…not that that means anything.

In the paper today, Northland rep, Coursey, expressed what it seemed to take forever for the developer to figure out–people would rather spend a shitload of money on something they’ll get a return on, than throw it away on an apartment.

 As his staff continues to lease out the 262 apartments at Hartford 21 - they recently rented their 100th unit, making the tower 38 percent occupied nine months after it opened - Gottesdiener is slowly working with the city to get between $5 million and $10 million in funding for the Jewell Street project. The original plan included 200 condos and 100 apartments. The current plan targets only those people who want to buy: 250 condos and 30,000 square feet of retail.

“At this stage, it’s all condos,” Coursey said. “There’s a lot of rental product on the market right now. There’s not a lot for sale. What we’re finding from a lot of people at Hartford 21 is that there are people that do want to own something downtown.

They can spin the Hartford 21 debacle all they want– only having half of the units rented, at this point, in Connecticut’s capital city shows failure. But the old YMCA site is more troubling, as the homeless who’d been living there will be displaced. At least the only loss with Hartford 21 was a dungeon of a shopping mall.

I hope that Jeffrey Cohen simply made a typo when he wrote:

With more than 40 stories of residential units built atop the old home of the downtown YMCA, a glass tower of luxury homes alongside Bushnell Park, it’s the kind of image that enthuses city enthusiasts.

City enthusiasts? Did Cohen perhaps mean city developers?