OPINION | Rethinking light rail's impact on business
In a recent two-year period, more than 200 businesses disappeared from storefronts along the streets between the Minneapolis and St. Paul downtowns where the Central Corridor light rail transit line is now being built. That represented a 15 percent loss of the kind of grass-roots enterprises our economy depends on.
Is this more evidence of the insidious effects of tearing up pavement and laying tracks down the middle of bustling commercial strips such as University Avenue in St. Paul and Washington Avenue in Minneapolis? Doctrinaire transit bashers will say they told us so. I say think again.
For starters, all those business closings were measured from March 2009 to March 2011, before major construction work this spring turned a stretch of University into a dusty two-lane nightmare for motorists. That period also was marked by the Great Recession and its slow-growth aftermath, which wiped out businesses and jobs in lots of places untouched by 21st century urban planning.
The Central Corridor big dig actually started just three months ago, and it coincided with a small but significant turnaround in business presence on the light rail route. From February 1 to May 31, 22 businesses opened along the corridor while 12 closed. Of 10 operations that relocated, seven moved somewhere else on the same corridor.
These findings of the Metropolitan Council's latest business status report—amended Monday with some small changes discovered after the report was posted on the Web, according to spokeswoman Laura Baenen—show anything but a mass exodus of economic drivers from the Central Corridor. In fact, the figures suggest the exact opposite: That smart businesspeople understand a multimodal corridor will likely attract more customers to their sales floors, not fewer.
Among the new operations moving in are professional offices, eateries and retailers. Those shutting down included Porky's drive-in and a video rental shop, victims more of changing tastes and technologies than anything else.
Still, news reports too often focus on beleagueuered merchants complaining that the coming of light rail is the source of all their troubles. This facile view overlooks the facts that tell a different story:
- University Avenue in St. Paul, by far the longest single stretch of the Central Corridor route, was long overdue for a necessary rebuild that would have disrupted business access just as much as the current project, even without light rail. Lake Street and Chicago Avenue businesses in Minneapolis recently suffered through years of reconstruction with no light rail components. In fact, Lake Street business leaders were enlisted to educate those along University on how to survive construction because the projects were so similar.
- News reports frequently mention that Central Corridor construction will go on for three years without noting that no individual section of the project will be torn up for more than six months. The work is being done in stages, just as on Lake Street.
- Public and private funders have pledged $15 million in assistance to Central Corridor businesses to help them sweat out the construction hassles, replace on-street parking and upgrade facilities during the downtime. Little or nothing like this is typically available to businesses affected by normal road rebuilding.
Cities around the nation and the world have demonstrated that modern rail transit is a great boon, not a bane, to trackside businesses. The Twin Cities haven't seen that yet, because our only light rail line so far, the Hiawatha, serves practically no traditional commercial districts on its route from downtown Minneapolis to the airport and the Mall of America. Nonetheless, it's been a great success in terms of ridership and cost efficiency.
I'm betting that when the Central Corridor trains start running in 2014, we'll learn first-hand how much more good high-quality urban transit can do for riders and businesses alike.
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Comments
In response: Rethinking light rail's impact on business
What is missing from your assessment is the businesses that are experiences losses of between 30 and 60 percent since construction has begun. These business are being weakened every day by the streets torn up right outside of their doors.
I would add that some of the 22 businesses counted by the Central Corridor Project as "new" are actually relocated businesses that were not counted as such because they were not at "street level".
They knew it was coming
I agree that light rail will have a positive effect on our economy in the long term, but my aunt moved her small business off of University Avenue last year in anticipation of the challenges similar businesses are now facing. It seems likely that numerous other businesses were thinking the same thing.
CCLRT is a scape goat
Those of us who live on the corridor knew construction was inevitable. If not for CCLRT, then just to repave the entire street and fix sidewalks like they have done on Lake and Chicago in Minneapolis. The road was in terrible shape and would have had to be completely ripped up and relayed regardless.
There was no escaping this necessary road construction, and for those of us living along University CCLRT is going to charge our communities in a polisitive way. Detractors just don't understand that with or without the train, they were going to see this construction.
Cashflow and cash-poor
I really like a lot of Mn 20/20's work but your writing on the Central Corridor has had a lot of minimization of possible business loss and neighborhood impact and really counters my experience in the corridor. On the same day that an article about customer losses of 15 to 50% you're saying 'now wait, it's not all bad'.
Depends on who you are and how deep your pockets are - you say "smart businesspeople realize that the rail will draw more" and that the folks moving in are "professional offices, eateries and retailers". True if you can weather a full season at 30% down. True if you're a capitalized business looking for somewhere to go with growth potential.
Not true if you're a hand-to-mouth Vietnamese lunch counter, or a small grocery, or any of a number of businesses that made it on tons of hard work for cheap to make up for the lack of big money to begin with.
I also am offended by your strawman construction that everyone who raises these concerns are transit bashers. That's just not true, either. But frankly after reading your articles for several years on the corridor, I get the feeling you're more interested in your preferred outcomes and finding data that support your theory (look! 22 new businesses).
There has been a depressing effect on the corridor for several years, as people say hey, this will be bad, hard time to open a business. Want to get a loan for expansion or maintenance? What bank will loan you money when your cashflow is messed up?
Also, 'everyone knows University is messed up' up and down the corridor. People are avoiding the whole area and not bothering to find out that the construction is, say, only as far as Hamline.
And the Met Council's orginigal plan was to do the build in chunks, not tear up the whole thing from 280 to Hamline. Stages were in the plan until AFTER ground was broken, and then they just changed their minds. Without telling anyone.
So if they're your favorite data source, more power to you. But as it stands right now you're coming off as a big-concept middle class liberal with no time for the minority, poor and working class reality that makes up a lot of the corridor.
Defiebre's De-thinking
The article would more appropriately be titled "De-thinking" rather the "Rethinking" the impact of the Central Corridor concrete project. Defiebre sites the Central Corridor Project Office as his source of data. Where in the Met Council "study"does it show the businesses and organizations that were evicted from the Chittenden and Eastman Building? Where in the project propaganda does it describe the used car lot that opened at the planned LRT stop at University and Carleton Avenues and the grocery and deli that closed next door? It's not "Doctrinaire transit bashers" who oppose the project, but rather, clandestine transit trashers and road construction fetishers who support it. A 40-yard wide strip of pavement to accomodate LESS right-of-way for transit, pedestrians, bicycles, green space and motor vehicles is not good for transit, not good for local businesses, and not good for neighborhoods. The $100 million road construction project, with an additional $billion or more of scim for lawyers, planners, contractors and assorted road construction gangsters, is about one thing - only one thing.
Bad Times and Public Works
A lot of the infrastructure that has served us for the last half century was built during the Great Depression. Truth is that that can be the cheapest time to do major works like this. If everything stopped because it is bad times, the economy would grind to a halt as infrastructure slowly becomes useless. All those workers out doing the excavating and building are receiving incomes, money that will get spent all over the Twin Cities. The project is sucking money INTO Minneapolis and St. Paul. Without it, that money would go elsewhere and existing businesses would never see it.
Every silver lining is connected to a dark cloud. But our whole lives have been enjoyed using public works built by the workers of the Great Depression. We took it all for granted, just as today's children and tomorrow's will never know a world without city train service.
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