by Joe Sullivan
Market Square should be one of the liveliest places in town, but except at the lunch hour it's largely dormant.
With recent changes in ownership or control of much of the property around the square, however, have come the seeds of a renaissance. At least five of the square's Victorian buildings are undergoing renovation as loft dwellings by owners who plan on renting out their ground floors for retail use. At the same time, the square's entrepreneurs extraordinaire, the wife-husband team of Mahasti Vafaie and Scott Partin, have acquired options on all of the dilapidated buildings whose long-time owner Frank Gencay has appeared content to leave them boarded up forever. Vafaie and Partin envision turning these buildings over one-by-one to small-fry businesses with the same potential for success in other fields that they have manifested with their Tomato Head and Lula restaurants.
Yet even as these new owners are striving to make Market Square flourish from within, they mostly feel threatened from without by the grand but vague designs for the square included in the Public Building Authority's master plan for downtown redevelopment. A PBA recommendation that restrictions be placed on the use of Market Square property is a source of much anxiety, especially in the absence of any definition of how they would be expressed and imposed. Veiled intimations that condemnations by the city could be required only compound these fears. (All that is leaving aside the PBA's statement that "consideration should be given to an unobtrusive glass enclosure," which Market Square traditionalists view as oxymoronic.)
Nor are the PBA and its master developers Worsham Watkins doing much to allay these concerns by way of meeting with affected property owners and their tenants. PBA consultant Mike Edwards insists that it's premature to discuss development plans that are still in a formative stage. But a show of solicitude at this juncture could at least assure those with concerns that their voices will be heard and perhaps achieve some mutual understanding.
In its absence, the welling up of hostility towards the developers is getting acrimonious.
"This isn't Stalinist Russia. It's not up to some bureaucrat to tell me what hours to keep my business open," blurts J. Scott Guyton, proprietor of J. Scott's popular breakfast and lunch spot on the Square. This in response to an Edwards' indication that Market Square businesses might be required to keep mall-like evening hours.
"We don't want to be in anything like a shopping mall," says Vafaie, whose success in making Tomato Head a nocturnal destination in an otherwise desolate part of downtown has established her as almost an icon. "Instead of a master plan, we want to see Market Square development occur in an organic way, more of an Asheville environment where lots of small businesses have blossomed." And now that she's acquired Gencay's blighted properties, woe unto any official who attempts to condemn or to impose restrictions on them in the face of Vafaie's own redevelopment efforts.
Precluding "undesirable" establishments such as tattoo or video game parlors is most often cited as the basis for restrictions in order to make the square more conducive to a trendy retail and restaurant scene. But there's virtually no precedent for imposing such restrictions on the use of commercially zoned property except by the consent of all the property owners involved. And the chances of getting them all to agree on what's undesirable or to vest any authority as the arbiter of same appears remote. The city's only other apparent recourse would be to bring all the property under common ownership through condemnation or other means. But this would be anathema to the square's growing residential population, not to mention Vafaie. Moreover, the type of establishment they would most like to proscribe is a NASCAR Cafe or other loud late-hour place—the very type of place that master developers might want to foster.
It needs to be recognized that if Worsham Watkins succeeds with its overall downtown redevelopment plan, it will draw a lot of visitors and residents alike to Market Square's doorstep and thus contribute to the success of many types of ventures that have tried and failed to make a go of it in the square in recent times. Conversely, successful redevelopment of the square is important to building a critical mass of patronage for the downtown development as a whole. And it's just possible that high-stakes developers like Worsham Watkins have more wherewithal to attract the type of tenant that all concerned covet—such as a first-rate grocery store—than the square's indigenous entrepreneurs.
In sum, the outside developers and the natives have a lot of commonality of interests, and these should be accentuated rather than the differences that are now provoking strife. A place to start could be the formation of a Market Square property owners association to work with the PBA on getting historic overlay zoning for the square. "We really want to maintain the structural integrity of Market Square," says Edwards. And this is surely a goal that all concerned can agree upon. From that point of departure, there may be some other creative form of overlay zoning that could govern property use in a mutually agreed way. Beyond that, the PBA, Worsham Watkins, and their legal operative have got to dispel perceptions that they are conjuring up ways to pull a fast one on the natives. Hopefully, they can do so before Market Square turns into a Chechnya.
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