Ferry On!
A couple of years ago, a local developer bought a group of buildings on Ferry St. and gave them the TLC they needed for their next chapter. These buildings have already served the town well—they’re the type of humble first-floor storefronts with apartments above that form the building blocks of any great downtown. In their current iteration, they host a donut shop, an ice cream shop, and an upscale neighborhood bistro/bar. As the end cap of the downtown area in Fairhaven’s center, this little block is a natural focal point for the neighborhood. Add to that the fact that it’s at the start of a beautiful (and expanding) bike path, and it’s clear that Ferry Street is a canvas of potential, waiting to be transformed into a vibrant area that people gravitate to.
The spark I’ve written about here is still lit. On summer nights, the street is filled with people who come for the ice cream and stay to hang out and chat with neighbors and friends. The date night and bar crowd spills out from Olivia’s on the corner and makes a town center that is otherwise pretty dead at night feel like it may have just some life to it after all. If you squint, you can see the makings of a place greater than the sum of its parts, where people would go just to be there.
I’ve also written about how our downtown blocks, neglected as they may have been through the years, still make up our town’s most valuable land on a per-acre basis. Likewise, there’s been a lot of discussion recently about how a potential overlay district can make the half-empty big box parking lots along Route 6 more economically productive for the town. I’m here for that conversation. But addressing the places in town that suffer from poor land use decisions (which are closely tied to bad transportation engineering) is a much longer-term and riskier bet than people think it is. While the 40R conversation has everyone talking about walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, I’m over here waving my arms on Ferry Street, trying to get all of you to see the great potential in what we already have!
With the help of the small but mighty Livable Streets Committee and the Town Administrator and the support of the Select Board, I recently created a policy that allows for businesses to apply to create parklets and sidewalk dining. I did this because everyone in the street outside the ice cream shop always talks about how great it would be to have tables there. Putting outdoor tables on Ferry St. is the next logical step to feed the spark that’s already aglow on this block. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, and it isn’t. That’s the point. Putting tables on Ferry Street is the kind of low-risk, incremental move that, if we keep making them over time, can transform a neighborhood to make it more vibrant and contribute to the economic sustainability of our town.
The Economic Flywheel
A while back, I interviewed planner Todd Thomas, who helped cultivate the revitalization of Morrisville, VT, by encouraging local developers to invest in its downtown. His brilliant and boring strategy relentlessly focused on finding owners and tenants for the town’s most valuable (but somewhat overlooked) land. As investment begat investment, he was able to gradually ratchet up design standards for the area, knowing that increasing property values made these higher standards pencil out for the developers. There’s no reason to think this same tried-and-true strategy wouldn’t work for our downtown areas. I wrote about local developer Julio Barbosa, who has invested in Fairhaven Center and Benoit Square by fixing up mixed-use properties there. Julio’s projects are another spark— a real investment bringing a small but tangible step forward toward more housing and vibrancy— that we ought to pay attention to. The town needs to be looking at projects like these and asking how they can cultivate more of them. Town leaders need to ask, what will make it possible for the next downtown project by a local developer to pencil out?
Humble Observation
It’s tempting to think that we can “strategic plan” our way to economic sustainability, more diverse and affordable types of housing, and safe and vibrant streets. It’s likewise natural, given negativity bias, to focus on the places in town we’d like to fix (seriously, Route 6 is bad!). But the most viable path to where we want to go is through the messy, iterative work of observation, trial and error and small bets. If, like me, you love this town and want more of what’s great about it, we should be focusing on what’s already working, no matter how small the scale, and figuring out how to cultivate and encourage that. Where are people naturally congregating? Where are small developers already starting to invest? Where are people walking and biking? Once we see them, then we start asking what the next right step is that we can take to make life easier for them. When we focus on real people here in the present, we can see the way to what works.