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The city's approach to Market Square is making the same old mistakes

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

From the Winston-Salem Journal of Sunday, June 17:

"Downtown boosters now say that the city relied too much on Elkington, who is largely credited with reviving the Beale Street blues district in Memphis.

The Downtown Development Corp. has put together an ad hoc group to recruit restaurants and retailers. It is now working on a marketing plan.

In creating the group, downtown boosters realized that they needed to forge ahead themselves and involve local business leaders rather than depending on a white knight from outside Winston-Salem—like Elkington—to resuscitate the city's core.

'I think there's going to have to be more individual type of investment and ownership in moving a restaurant row and entertainment district forward,' said Mike Horn, a member of the group who is working on the marketing plan. 'We thought we were real lucky finding one person who could do the whole thing for us. That didn't work the way we hoped it would.'"

Hmm. Interesting. The "Elkington" mentioned above is John Elkington, developer of and putative savior of Beale Street in Memphis. He's one of the hats in the ring for developing our own Market Square. But the experience with him in Winston-Salem is a telling indicator of where our eternally hapless, clueless, blind-man's bluff city administration is leading us in its new, allegedly improved approach to the Square.

I was talking about all this on the phone the other morning, and I got angry. Well, maybe "angry" is too strong a word. Testy, let's say. But it was uncomfortable, because the person I was being testy with was Leslie Henderson, Knoxville's director of development.

Besides being a very smart and dedicated woman whose accomplishments as a journalist and non-profit director I have had ample time and reason to admire, Leslie is also the wife of Metro Pulse managing editor Barry Henderson. Which, as you can imagine, makes it that much more difficult when I think she is pursuing a wrong-headed policy on behalf of her wrong-headed bosses.

But with all due respect to Leslie and the various other well-intentioned people associated with this—which is, what, the third or fourth Market Square proposal in as many years?—they still don't know what the hell they're doing.

Of course, there's no reason they should. Nobody in the current city administration—not Leslie, not my old News-Sentinel boss Frank Cagle, certainly not the mayor or his law director Mike Kelley or his finance director Randy Vineyard—has any actual experience or demonstrated knowledge of how you go about "revitalizing" a complex urban environment or how you build a sustainable community from it. Nor does anyone on staff at Knoxville's Community Development Corp., as far as I can tell. KCDC has been involved in several big redevelopment projects, but nothing of the nature, complexity or scope of Market Square.

In fact, no one on the official scene of the disasters that have constituted Knoxville's downtown proposals in the past few years has much real background in the things they're trying to do. Developer Earl Worsham of Worsham Watkins International comes closest, because he's built a bunch of hotels in various cities; but many of those have since been plagued by controversy, and his long series of problematic deals and dissatisfied customers (one official from the city of Miami, Fla., told me bluntly, "I can't believe he's still trying to do this stuff") should raise serious questions for anyone who bothers to track them down. Then there are the Toms—Tom Ingram of the Knox Area Chamber Partnership, and Tom McAdams, attorney for the Public Building Authority and close confidante to Mayor Victor Ashe—who have both been mightily involved in various downtown efforts and who have a sum total of zero experience with such things and apparently a similar level of tolerance for anyone who tries to tell them so.

There are others—the blame is really too voluminous to spread around sufficiently, considering that a somnolent public and a cud-chewing media share significantly in the responsibility—but, as everyone who's trying to hide something likes to say, let's not dwell on the past. OK, fine. Let's not.

Here in the present, we have an opportunity. Last week, City Council tossed out the last official redevelopment plan for Market Square (which was announced way back in 1997 with much mayoral hoo-ha) and commissioned KCDC to do another one. To his credit, Ashe did not simply ask Council to hand over the Square to Worsham Watkins or any other developer, as was proposed by WW themselves and, in a modified version, by the Public Building Authority. (Are you following all this? I know it's complicated. Feel free to send me an email at mayshark@metropulse. com and I'll try to explain it. Or for that matter, write the mayor at vhashe@aol. com. If he tells you anything that makes sense, please alert me.)

But Ashe's preference, and the blind, cult-like mantra that continues to guide the city's thinking (if you can call it that) about Market Square, still revolves around the notion that only a single-party developer with total or near-total control of the Square can possibly save us. Save us from what? Well, frankly, from all those ugly bills we're going to have to pay for that big new convention center over on the World's Fair Park. What's that, you say? You thought the convention center was supposed to make money for Knoxville? Oh. Didn't you know convention centers never make money? Heck, everyone knows that. Except maybe the mayor who mortgaged our city to the tune of $160 million for this particular pretty box, but hey—what's a couple decades of debt between constituents? Sorry, that's the past creeping in again.

The city government still sees as one of its primary goals for Market Square that it generate as much sales tax revenue as possible from every square foot of space. This is because of a state law that allows the city to keep extra sales taxes on revenues from private development related to the convention center. That's why Leslie Henderson told me that she "does not advocate" people living on the upper floors of Market Square's buildings, despite the stated preference of many current Square property owners for doing so. Residential occupation doesn't generate sales taxes. Never mind, apparently, that it does generate a fixed population and consumer base for the goods and services of downtown.

The focus on squeezing money out of the Square precludes any real discussion about what the Square is, could be, should be, and who exactly it is supposed to be for. The whole reason Market Square keeps coming up again and again is that it is a beautiful and strange and unique place. It has gorgeous buildings, whatever their current condition. It has the largest open pedestrian space in Knoxville. It has a storied, gloried and gory history, as anyone who's read Jack Neely knows. It attracts winos and artists and children and old women walking their dogs. When it is full of people, as it is some lunchtimes and every recent Thursday night, it is one of the most dynamic, energetic, exciting places in East Tennessee.

In drawing up its redevelopment plan, KCDC could take all that into account. It could also bring in experienced urban planners and economists with the charge of designing a participative, hands-on, broad-based process to generate a.) a community consensus on what we'd like Market Square to be and b.) a plan to get there. Once the priorities are set and some agreements reached, and only then, KCDC could submit the plan to City Council, which could in turn solicit proposals from property owners and developers. Those proposals could be judged against the participative, hands-on, broad-based goals established earlier in the process.

KCDC could do that. But they almost certainly won't. For one thing, the city didn't ask them to. In fact, the city didn't give much direction at all except to ask for a plan that will produce a "festival marketplace." (Festival marketplaces were an urban development fad of the 1970s. Apparently now that we're building a convention center, an urban development fad of the 1980s, we're going to go back and latch onto all the other half-baked ideas we missed.) So KCDC plans to have two public "hearings," the kind of semi-farcical affairs where officials sit impassively while a parade of petitioners (many of whom know a good deal more about what they're discussing than the officials) presents various opinions. At the end of the hearing, one of the officials says, "Thank you. We'll consider all of that." And then they go and do what they were going to do anyway. Which, in this case, is insist that Market Square can only "work" if some monolithic power takes control of it, by hook and crook and carrot and stick.

This approach will generate continued fear, ill will and confusion among the people who own property on the Square. (And doesn't it bother anyone in the city government how blithely they've defined those owners—the people who most palpably give a damn about Market Square—as problems rather than allies?) And it also, as experiences in Winston-Salem and many other cities attest, is neither the best nor fastest nor smartest way to do things. The problem is, it's the only idea the collective heads of our city-state have—and even though it's a pretty fuzzy idea and one they don't actually understand, they lack either the willingness, the ability, or the sense God gave a pig to figure out how to generate other, better ideas. A good planning process for Market Square could make an amazing difference in attitude and approach within the next six months. Instead, at that point, we'll probably be fighting the same old battles all over again. It's too sad to be funny, too pathetic to be sad, and mostly just frustrating as hell.