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Golden Icon Turns Green
Publisher’s Letter
By Robert V. Colangelo
Just north of O’Hare airport you will find Des Plaines, Illinois, where the first McDonald’s sits frozen in time, memorializing what the restaurant looked like when the chain started to franchise operations in the early 1960s.
For many cities around the country, McDonald’s symbolized that a town had the right economic “stuff” and had arrived. Meeting McDonald’s siting criteria and securing a restaurant was an almost-certain catalyst to attract other developments that would grow the community. For many smaller cities McDonald’s was the home run, vindicating the efforts of the local economic development agency.
Fast-forward to 2004 and the golden icon is now green as a new logo symbolizes economic success and shows your city has arrived.
One of my true pleasures in this industry is the ability to travel the country meeting with people and learning how they employ creative strategies to redevelop brownfields. All this travel makes for long days and late hours and a good cup of coffee is not only an enjoyment but also a necessity to help make it through the day. Like many, I have become loyal to a particular brand of coffee — Starbucks.
Traveling to cities like Akron, Ohio, Trenton, N.J., Taylor, Mich., Troy,
N.Y. and Hamilton, Ont., it is apparent that in addition to having a legacy
of industries past, they have no Starbucks. Is it that these cities lack coffee
drinkers? Do they lack space to build a Starbucks? The short answer is no —
they have the wrong demographics and don’t fit the siting model.
Observing this trend, we came up with the idea for our article, “The Starbucks
Factor.” Most investors want to be ahead of the curve and buy and develop
real estate before an area begins to turn. But how do you tell when the market
is ready to improve — get in before Starbucks comes to town.
Starbucks has experienced tremendous success and is expanding operations; they have a good feel for an area and can be an excellent indicator that an area has turned. Providing the information required to secure a Starbucks would allow mayors, planners and economic developers a variable to measure economic success and provide new uses for old brownfields.
Starbucks plans to open 1,500 stores in 2005. The company’s long-term goals include 30,000 stores, about half of them in the U.S. Many of these will be located in the secondary and tertiary markets. While holding the specifics of their siting criteria close to the vest, they look to lease stores rather then own them and preferably locate on corners where they can serve more than 600 customers per day. With 8,337 stores in operation today, they are creative in building locations and don’t use a cookie-cutter approach. Locations vary in size from 500 to 5,000 sq. ft. and Starbucks has partnered with retailers that sell books, groceries and home furnishings to locate kiosks in their operations. Stores can also be found in retail centers, strip malls and stand-alone locations, some even with drive-through windows.
Just like McDonald’s in the past, Starbucks, while not a big box anchor, can be a catalyst to spur development in an area. They are trendy, create a meeting place and become part of the fabric of a community. But how do you attract a Starbucks to your town?
We asked Eugene Goldfarb to investigate measures of success and show some indicators that let you know that your brownfield program works indicators that let you know that your brownfield program works and your city has arrived.
With our magazine going to print just days before the election, it is important to note how low environmental issues have sunk in the national priority of issues. Neither party has chosen to make the environment or brownfields an issue during this election. During the three presidential debates, only one question was devoted to discussing environmental issues and the candidates’ combined response was shorter than five minutes.
With many of the Midwestern states in swing, you would think one of the candidates would have seen the importance of the brownfield issue. Many of the swing states have strong brownfield programs and have a loss of jobs rate higher then the national average resulting from plant closings. As our readers know, putting brownfields back to productive use increases the property tax rolls, creates jobs and cleans up the environment, making our cities better places to live.
As an industry, we must be vigilant to keep this issue on the radarscope of our elected officials. As our industry matures, we are left with the more difficult sites, and to redevelop these we will need, in addition to private sector creativity and resource, incentives that will have to come from the public sector. For the tougher sites in the secondary and tertiary markets, these incentives will often be the catalyst to make redevelopment occur.
If we want a strong economy, then we must build strong cities and redeveloping brownfields is an important part of the economic puzzle.
Regardless of which party wins, I hope that one candidate wins by a decisive margin and we get back to the business of running our country and improving our cities. To this goal we have packed this issue with a range of regional news and articles to help you in your endeavors.
Enjoy the read!
Robert V. Colangelo, Publisher
Robertc@brownfieldnews.com