Your post got me to thinking about a Spokane TV
station news story on the aftermath of the recent restaurant fire. seems
the owner of the building had left it empty for over three years before the
fire. This is similar to another "empty building" fire that took place in
Spokane a couple of months ago.
The thrust of the news story was that many owners
of abandoned or "empty" buildings leave them sit and rot. There is very
little upkeep done, roofs leak, wiring goes bad, and eventually a disaster
happens.
One interesting side bar to the story mentioned
Baltimore, where the downtown had many such rotting buildings. In order to
create a more vibrant downtown area, and spur owners of buildings to maintain
them, the city of Baltimore passed some kind of law that allowed the city to
place liens on any building that the city deemed empty or not kept up. The
city would them assume ownership of the building at no cost.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 11:08
AM
Subject: alturas, office depot,
downtown
Our recent discussions about the movement of
business from downtown to the tech park and the competition from Office Depot
and Hastings has me looking out my front window onto Main Street and thinking
that the future of downtown can't be determined by badmouthing the
alternatives, but by making the downtown a more attractive
alternative.
Many of the buildings downtown are old. Some
of the office spaces have very limited natural light, or no windows at all. My
office has had serious flooding in the past due to a leaky roof. There are
HUGE cracks in my ceilings and walls. If there were an explosion or an
earthquake near downtown, I fear many of the buildings would crumble. When
I've looked at other office space downtown, much of it would require a
tremendous investment just for cosmetic improvements. If I were moving a lot
of high tech equipment into an office, I would have some serious questions
about the wiring in some of these buildings and whether the roof was going to
fall in on my expensive equipment. I'm sure some landlords have made such
improvements, but when I see lawyers who own their own downtown building
moving to the 'burbs, I wonder if there isn't more reason they are moving out
of downtown besides lack of parking. Perhaps the cost of maintaining a
building downtown is just not cost effective. Yet at least at street level,
the rent for these buildings can be quite high. And that reduces the extent to
which a downtown merchant can compete with a chain. (I recently bought 5 zip
disks at a downtown computer store for about $67. The same 5-pack at Office
Depot was $45 (with rebate).)
Is there something we can do as a community,
not just to encourage people to shop downtown, but to make sure that the
infrastructure of the downtown area remains viable without increasing the cost
of renting downtown so much that merchants are even less
competitive?
Lois
Melina