Business View Civil Municipal June 2023

74 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 6 the heart of the community, noting that the key to a thriving commercial district is having the people utilize it. “In terms of planning in the uptown area, the first thing that we attacked was new housing. All the studies showed that we had a huge number of old houses that had become substandard,” he reports. “The city has been incredibly aggressive in tearing down old houses, and there are now three new apartment buildings uptown. That’s going to bring 100 families into the uptown area within one block of the commercial district. When people live uptown, they have to have breakfast uptown, they have to buy toothpaste uptown, they’d like to maybe have a glass of wine and have dinner uptown and buy a pair of shoes. But you can’t sell the shoes until you have the people.” The next step was to revitalize the uptown, making it attractive to potential residents, and as a shopping destination. “Image counts. We knew we needed people, and one of the things that we had to do is make it look better,” conveys