The DI did a nice long piece about the future of retail in downtown Iowa City which made some good points but the editorial they ran along with it undid a lot of the good points they made. I'm not going to babble on about this old chestnut- my general stand is that the quality of shopping needs to improve downtown if they want to get people back down there. While I understand the new parking policy is designed to get more people into the ramps (first hour of parking free) cutting the meters to one hour and enforcing them until 9PM is just going to mean that people aren't going to fight the inconvinience of parking downtown- they just won't go unless they have too.
What I don't like about the current retail strategy is that every time something new opens up, somebody undercuts it with a chain. Whitey's has been around for awhile- so they bring in Coldstone just down the block. YoTopia brings back froyo to downtown for the first time since Freshens closed waaaaaaaaay back in the day- and what happens? Orange Leaf and Aspen Leaf show up. It's stupid-- and whatever we do, we shouldn't be duplicating quite that much. (Maybe one more froyo place. Two is just overkill.)
Yes, the local business flavor of Iowa City is part of what makes downtown unique- we're not going to be Coralville with its acres of free parking and plastic shopping malls all over the place. But boutique shopping isn't working for us either. If I want to buy a pair of jeans there's nowhere downtown for me to do it- and any lady that's bigger than a sorority girl from Schaumberg with an eating disorder is shit out of luck too.
I think there's plenty of room for carefully crafted diversity downtown. We can't go hog wild with chain retail but if there's a chain that's a good fit and there's room for it, why not? We can afford to be picky about it.
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