Downtown Cleveland Retail Report Stresses Big Aesthetic Changes Needed for Neighborhood Rebound

A Retail Strategy Plan released this week by Downtown Cleveland Inc. offers harsh critiques of the current landscape — dead zones, poor design, 20-25 percent vacancy rates — and offers a dozen or so possible solutions to the center city's retail woes.

Compiled by Streetsense, a New York City-based place consulting firm, offers a corollary of DCI's "Reimagining Downtown Cleveland" Plan that kicked off in June and provides a roadmap to reverse the perennial treatment by so many visitors of Downtown as a get-in, get-out event space.

"There's so much bringing people downtown, but they’re not customers," Audrey Gerlach, DCI's vice president of economic development, told Scene. "Yes, some come to East 4th Street, to Progressive Field. But really, if you’re going to Playhouse Square, and not going out to eat or whatever, we’ve lost you as a customer.

"If our goal is to shuttle people out of Downtown in their cars after a show?" Gerlach added. "Then we’ve lost."

Breaking apart Downtown by its business values, its retail demand, its political willpower and its overall prettiness, Streetsense offered 15 suggestions for immediate and long-term improvements, from a pop-up market in the Warehouse District to a Downtown night market, a much-needed clean-up of the East 9th Street Bridge to totally "refreshing" the outdated aesthetics of Euclid Avenue.

Through batch analysis of credit card data, and surveying of Downtowners and the like, Streetsense concluded that the neighborhood has essentially fallen short of its mixed-use intention.

Downtown is not only saturated with bars and restaurants that cater to outsiders (70 percent of all money spent is from them), the report reads, but it also lacks the local weight—only three percent of its retail demand comes from actual Downtowners. Of the 73 retail businesses in the Gateway District, one of the four "micro climates" Streetsense categorized, just 10 of them fall in the realm of residential needs.

"While neighborhood goods and services make up the smallest share of demand, it also accounts for the smallest share of supply," the report reads, "indicating a need to realign Downtown retail to serve local residents and customers’ daily needs if growth in the Downtown population is a priority."

Besides pointing out the area's high retail vacancy of "20 to 25 percent," the report seem to laud ongoing development and beautification efforts in progress that would enhance Downtown as a place to be. The North Coast Master Plan, Bedrock's Riverfront project, the city's five-year Mobility Plan—bikes and trees galore— and its ongoing Storefront Renovation Program, all seem to be given the thumbs up by Streetsense's diagnostics team.

In contrast to the Crocker Parks and Beachwood Malls of the suburban world, downtown's existence as a public space is inherently valuable.

It begs for a good land bridge (in progress), a rehab of the dusty East 9th Street Bridge (badly needed), a solid bike lane from Playhouse Square to the Flats (currently non-existent), a revival of our trolley system (somewhat there?) and a testing of a Downtown wayfinding system—to "convince retailers," the report says, that "Downtown is one single market."

Although the report stresses focus on the four micro climate concentrations, one wonders about the rest: the blocks of eerie parking garages along Superior, the ghostly clothiers, the long-vacant (and expensive) restaurant spaces on Public Square and the parking lots dotted in between.

Streetsense posits using Huron as a test street for a concentration of shops and the like. (Night market?) "Over time, we anticipate that higher footfall will naturally facilitate interest from retail uses that increase the level of ground floor activation," the report reads.

But, Clevelanders have long thirsted for the same national chains they're used to seeing in suburban shopping clusters. Will Streetsense's diagnosis somehow lead to Target drinking the Kool Aid?

"This plan is not that. It’s not the roadmap to getting your first national chain—besides CVS," Gerlach said. "But what Streetsense is telling us: Don't try to go out and get a Target yourselves, because you’re not going to be successful. We have good brokers trying to do that. And hey, the market may or not be ready for that."

The chorus of eager Downtowners still wonder: It's possible, right?

"I would never say never," she added. "We have to crawl before we walk."

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