Over the past months I have heard quite a bit about how Winston Salem's downtown is really hopping and how Greensboro should be modeling itself after the Twin City. While there is no doubt that there is much to be optimistic about regarding prospects for a true revitalization over there, this morning's Winston Salem Journal reports a cautionary tale.
Restaurant owner Drake Joyce and others were "sold on downtown by the hype over the coming revitalization" as presented by the City's power brokers according to the article, but everything comes down to paying customers, who are staying away in droves. "We thought that people working downtown would support us" laments Kabob's Indian Bar & Grill owner Ved Amarsingh at the corner of Fourth and Marshall.
Amarsingh and Bistro 420 owner Ken Martin were two of five entrepreneurs who took advantage of the City government's $1.1M pool of loan money that was earmarked for getting eateries to open downtown. Of course getting a business started with the help of cheap City backed money is the easy part and now they need customers to keep them afloat and that part of the equation is obviously not in place. and may not be for years. Martin points out that there is only so much government can do towards downtown development, "I don't know what the city's supposed to do... I think it's more the people of the city"
To my mind slow, steady, consumer driven growth is key to the long term health and vitality of a downtown's resurgence. Greensboro's downtown has been experiencing a sustainable level of growth for the past seven or eight years without much in the way of governmental incentives or artificial "hype". Right now most of the eateries and bars are doing well in downtown Greensboro because the number of new customers is in line with the pace of of new businesses that are opening.
Let us hope that the government or some other well intentioned entity doesn't come in and attempt to upset the balance by bringing in some new attraction or incentives that will skew the natural numbers. There is a finite (but growing) number of customers with dollars to spend in Greensboro's downtown establishments. Any new "incentified" project would only serve to steal those downtown customers from the people who brought them back to the center city in the first place by introducing an artificial market force towards our revitalization efforts.
This was one of my main arguments against the economic benefit claims of a new baseball stadium in our Central Business District - it won't create new spending but will simply steal discretionary spending from other establishments. In the seminal sports economy book "Sports Jobs and Taxes" by Noll and Zimblist, it is stated this way, "Nearly all spending at the Stadium is simply shifted from other forms of entertainment like restaurants and movies".
I hope that Greensboro is the exception to this rule.
1:06:37 PM 
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