5 creative ideas cities use to revive their downtowns. Could they work in Seattle?

Seattle leaders have been trying to boost activity in the city’s downtown core ever since the pandemic disrupted the economy. They’ve had some modest success, but there’s still a long way to go. So what have other cities tried that helped their downtowns?

City leaders from across the United States gathered in Seattle this fall for a big convention, held by the International Downtown Association. They attended to share their downtown revitalization ideas with one another.

RELATED: Seattle ticks through to-do list to revive downtown

Most cities are doing the obvious things: trying to build more housing downtown and filling vacant storefronts with popup businesses. But beyond these well-known ideas, each city has its own unique strategies. Here are five that stood out.

San Francisco

There are empty lots in downtown San Francisco, where planned construction projects have stalled out. They’re paving them over and turning them into parks, jam packed with food, sports, and a beer garden. They have a big happy hour scene.

"We've heard, anecdotally, from office workers who do come in that they decided, specifically, that they were coming into the office now because the space was there. They knew they wanted to go play pickleball, like, after work, or visit the bar," said Mike Rieger, Deputy Director at The East Cut Community Benefit District in San Francisco.

According to Jon Scholes, president of the Downtown Seattle Association, there has been talk of talking similar steps for some of Seattle's vacant lots, but nothing has so far happened.

"It’s all about how do we repurpose what is going to be underutilized space," Scholes said. "And I've heard ideas being talked about of three-on-three basketball courts on some of these sites."

Denver

The city of Denver has turned to pushcarts, where street vendors can sell various wares.

"Yeah, our push carts are wooden," said Sarah Wiebenson, Vice President of Economic Development at the Denver Partnership. "That goes back to medieval times. It's a very simple design."

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And what do people sell from these push carts?

"We have everything from jewelry to honey to hot sauces and even to handmade crafts that are imported by our immigrant population as part of their entrepreneurial journey," Wiebenson said.

The pushcarts are even smaller than the tiny, new kiosks made from small shipping containers on Seattle’s waterfront where people are now selling things.

"I think it's fantastic," Scholes said of Denver’s pushcart idea.

He started wondering if push carts could be used on the mezzanine level of the Seattle’s downtown transit tunnel.

“You know, we got thousands of people getting off the train each and every day or getting on the train,” he said.

Adding pushcarts there could let a greater diversity of people participate in the economic life of downtown.

“Great downtowns are porous downtowns where the barriers of entry are really low," he said. "And people that may have never run a business before have an opportunity to take a risk, make an investment, get something going, and then scale up.”

Berkeley

Berkeley, California has been struggling with a phenomenon that will be familiar to Seattleites: Businesses beloved by the community have been closing.

"It's always like a gut punch, when that happens," said Kieron Slaughter, Berkeley's chief strategist of economic innovations.

Berkeley studied the phenomenon, and learned that a lot of the businesses that were closing were started by Baby Boomers, who after decades keeping their businesses afloat, decided they needed to get out. Most of those businesses had no succession plan in place.

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Berkeley has been working with a non-profit to help those businesses turn into employee-owned businesses. One example is a restaurant called "Betty's Oceanview Diner." With only a week's notice until the closure, the economic development team helped employees buy it. The only change was the name. They dropped "Betty's" and simply went with "Oceanview Diner."

Slaughter says there are strong economic reasons to for both cities and businesses to pursue the path: better pay for employees, higher employee retention rates, and employee-owned businesses tend to stay.

“It also just maintains the legacy of the business," he said. "You know, you're not swapping out the sign, you're not swapping out all the recipes. It's not just some new business that doesn't have any connection with their previous business. So it allows that long term sense of history to continue."

In Seattle, Scholes said Berkeley's strategy reminded him of work by Seattle's Office of Economic Development (OED) to help startup businesses.

"We're doing a lot on the startup side," Scholes said. "What can we do on the transition side? And is there opportunity for organizations like ours, working with OED, to identify additional support for transition to employee ownership?"

Baltimore

In Baltimore, the city is following data to address the roots of crime, according to Hanna Love with the Brookings Institute.

This is a relevant strategy for downtowns, Love said, making the argument that the most effective way to reduce crime downtown may not always be spending limited funds to bring in more police. Instead, she said, addressing crime at its source can lead to better outcomes across cities, including their downtowns.

Often, this strategy means going against public perception, Love said. Many people think that downtowns have more crime that in other neighborhoods. Love says that is not the case in most cities, including Seattle.

“So there really was a gap between perception and reality there," Love said. "The reason that we point to that gap is not to say, you know, perception doesn't matter. It's to really highlight the importance of following data about where crime occurs in order to find solutions.”

Love said higher crime in Baltimore concentrates in neighborhoods with few job opportunities, crowded apartments due to a lack of affordable housing, and vacant buildings. So Baltimore created a program to employ residents there to take down vacant buildings in a labor-intensive process called deconstruction. It's also focused on creating more affordable housing in those areas.

Another program pays people to look for work, rewarding them when they do things, such as completing a job interview.

Since the program started in West Baltimore, shootings and homicides have been reduced by about a quarter, and car jackings there have dropped by about a third. Those crimes have not moved to other neighborhoods, according to an analysis of the program's first 18 months by the University of Pennsylvania's Crime and Justice Lab.

Based on the program's success, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has said he hopes to expand it city-wide.

Hollywood, Los Angeles

Final city on our tour: Los Angeles. Specifically, Hollywood. They held a giant rave, two city blocks long, starring Electronic Dance Music megastars Fisher and Lake.

"It was magnificent," recalled Kathleen Rawson, president and CEO of the Hollywood Partnership, the group that organized the concert. "The streets were filled with laughter and fun."

Rawson explained that Hollywood doesn’t have a lot of open space in the form of parks and plazas. But the area does have streets. By putting 11,000 dancing people on Hollywood Boulevard, it brought a lot of new energy to that neighborhood.

The concert was a ticketed event, but Rawson said the music filled the whole neighborhood — people were dancing on the rooftops. The artists and organizers donated $100,000 to the Hollywood Partnership, which used the money to buy new trash cans.

"And you know what the beautiful thing about it was?" Rawson said. "I got a complaint. I got a text from one of the residents right there. [It said] 'Holy cow, Kathleen, what are you doing? It's so loud.'"

"I said, 'Oh Anita, it's going to be OK. It'll be a hard stop at 11, I promise.' I get a text an hour later, and she said she's on the rooftop of the Astor, which is right up Vine a little bit. She said, 'Oh my God, this is the best thing ever.'"

Other cities have experimented with large scale street closures. Philadelphia closed seven blocks near a park on Sundays in September, and filled those streets with activities.

"There were these kids that have been told, little kids, their entire lives, 'stay off the street,' and now they're being told to play in the street. And it was magical for them," said Prema Gupta, president and CEO of Center City Districts.

In Portland, there's a grass roots organization that encourages people to take over streets for bizarre bike rides, including one in which participants blast whale songs and little mermaid riffs from speakers as they ride, stopping periodically to sing karaoke in animal voices.

"Imagine meowing to Alanis Morrisette," recalled avid Portland cyclist Ryan Hashagen.

Here in Seattle, Scholes says the city has held some outdoor concerts in Westlake and Occidental parks. But they were smaller, nothing on the scale of Hollywood’s.

Seattle has had some successful small scale street closures, for things like pickleball and basketball tournaments. And there's permanent one block closure of Pike Street near the Pike Place Market.

But Hollywood's concert shows how far a street closure can be scaled up, and how, if you scale things up enough, it creates an aura of FOMO (fear of missing out) that can permanently change the stories people tell about a downtown.

Of Hollywood's epic concert, TikTok user Alicia wrote, "I’ll be sad every day for the rest of my life that I missed this."

Hear a lot more about other cities’ secret strategies on the latest episode of KUOW's economics podcast, Booming.

O

ne thing heard over and over at last fall's International Downtown Association conference was that other cities look up to Seattle, despite its problems downtown. They’re looking for ideas from here, too.

But Claudia Jolin of Baltimore says that for all the wealth in Seattle, its leaders should be able to do a lot more, especially when it comes to strategies that make its downtown more equitable.

"I want to be able to point to Seattle and say, they did it, we should do it too," Jolin said.

Seattle has tried a lot of things, to revive its downtown, but other cities' strategies demonstrate there's a much bigger garden of ideas that Seattle could harvest from.

Listen to this story, and more, on this recent podcast episode of "Booming."