How much has Smart Streets driven downtown South Bend's turnaround?

SOUTH BEND — Because the primary draw was the Century Center’s close proximity, the new Courtyard by Marriott’s developer says he would have built the hotel regardless of Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s Smart Streets initiative.

But A.J. Patel said Smart Streets, which has eliminated one-way streets, narrowed them to slow traffic, widened and beautified sidewalks with new trees and decorative brickwork, and created new bike paths, was a key secondary factor behind his company’s $14 million investment.

“Overall, with the two-way streets and the apartment people, it’s a livelier downtown,” said Patel, president and CEO of JSK Hospitality & Development, which hopes to open the hotel April 3. “There’s retail coming in. Other companies are investing in downtown. Everything kind of came together and it’s cleaned up the whole area. You’ve got a different image when you go down there now, compared to five years ago.”

In his annual State of the City speech Tuesday, Buttigieg said Smart Streets “has already been credited with helping to attract over $90 million in private investment — a nearly four-fold return on the public investment.”

Could that really be true? Or would that private investment naturally have materialized as the economy recovered from the Great Recession of 2008?

Michael Burayidi, a professor of urban planning at Ball State University, said there could be credence to Buttigieg’s claim. In researching his book, “Resilient Downtowns: A New Approach to Revitalizing Small and Medium-City Downtowns,” Burayidi traveled the country, interviewing city and town officials.

He found that smart or “complete” streets were a common thread running through success stories. In the mid-20th Century, as America fell in love with the automobile, cities designed their downtown streets to decrease congestion with one-way thoroughfares that moved traffic to the suburbs as quickly as possible, Burayidi said. Over the past decade, cities have increasingly reversed course, embracing a “new urbanism” that seeks to return downtowns to their initial function as a community’s backbone.

“Communities that spend money to improve the quality of place and to make their downtowns pedestrian-friendly, such as Kokomo, South Bend and Lafayette, those are the communities that are seeing a resurgence of their downtown,” Burayidi said. “A community can’t simply sit back and say, ‘Well the economy is improving so we are going to attract business investment anyway.’ … It’s not going to happen.”

Indeed, after national economic recessions in 1980, 1991 and 2000, there was nowhere near the private investment downtown that the city has seen over the past two years. Ed Bradley, principal with Cressy Commercial Real Estate and lead developer of an $8 million renovation of the One Michiana Square office building at 100 E. Wayne St., has been a commercial real estate broker in South Bend for 30 years.

“There’s been more that’s happened in the last 36 to 48 months in downtown South Bend than has happened probably in the two decades prior to,” Bradley said. “When you and I go down Main Street that’s going one way, five lanes, and you’re blasting through town as fast as you can, and you can time those lights perfectly, you’re never having to stop. You don’t see what’s on the street. You don’t care because you’re trying to get to the end of it. That’s real. I really do think it’s had a significant impact on people’s desire to be downtown.”

Buriyadi said downtown revitalization requires more than just complete streets. Cities must incentivize private investment to create housing, restaurants and retail downtown. They must retain public amenities such as courthouses, museums and libraries. They must create and maintain public plazas and gathering places, and preserve historic structures “to help you tell your story. Every community is unique and the uniqueness of every community is in its downtown, not in the suburbs.”

Lynn Fitzpatrick, chair of the St. Joseph County Republican Party, said she doesn’t agree with the Democratic mayor on some issues, but she prefers two-way streets downtown and she likes all of the new investment.

Still, she said all the new private investment cannot be attributed to a single factor.

“It’s more complicated than that,” she said. “I don’t know what percentage of the investment is attributable to Smart Streets, but if we continue to get that kind of investment, then that’s a good thing for everybody. Apparently certain developments did hinge on the two-way traffic, and that’s good.”

Fitzpatrick said she hears criticism of Smart Streets from South Bend natives who return to the area, but they may just be objecting to such dramatic change. She said some people also think the city spent too much on the project, which is being paid for with about $21 million of tax incremental financing district money — property tax growth collected within a confined geographical area.

“He took a big risk doing this,” Fitzpatrick said. “Anytime you do an initiative with a significant cost, that’s a risk because you’re not going to make everyone happy. We have to take risks. It benefits all of us if investment in South Bend continues.”

Bradley said his investor group bought One Michiana Square at the end of 2015 from an out-of-state firm that had neglected maintenance, causing occupancy to dip to 40 percent. After the renovation, the building is 95-percent occupied.

Bradley was asked whether he thought his project and the others downtown would have happened without Smart Streets.

“It’s really hard to say if this would have happened anyway,” Bradley said. “Not as many (new investments), I can tell you that. Was it the single factor? Probably not. But was it a contributing factor? Yes. And does that contributing factor create momentum for the next decision that’s made? Yes.”