Getting Real About Blue Heron

Back in September when we got the first inklings that Selig Enterprises’ Foundry on Broad was foundering on Broad, I wondered here whether Selig’s troubles might open a window for reviving Project Blue Heron, the mixed use development that was roundly touted as our shot at becoming the next Chattanooga, Greenville and even Research Triangle.  Now that Selig’s project has crashed and burned, others have been musing about Blue Heron possibly lifting off again. Jim Thompson, over at the Banner-Herald, devoted an Editor’s Desk entry to the subject, citing a $300 million development in Glassboro, New Jersey, home of Rowan University, as an example of what might be possible. And shortly after, Tony Eubanks, also writing in the Banner-Herald, urged, among other things, that we get serious about developing the River District. Most recently, Melissa Link took to the pages of Flagpole asking that we “take a step back to three years ago and see if perhaps Blue Heron can rise again.”

We all recalled the illegally closed meeting (and here I am recalling it yet again) at which the former Economic Development Foundation, learning from Mayor Denson of Selig’s interest in the Armstrong and Dobbs parcel, a critical component of Project Blue Heron, abandoned it. We keep picking at that scab as if, but for the Mayor’s perfidy, Blue Heron would be airborne by now.

I didn’t vote for Mayor Denson. I’m not a fan of hers, which I’m sure wouldn’t cause her a nanosecond’s distress if she knew. But the conspiracy theory about why we’re heron-less imputes magical powers to the Mayor that she doesn’t have. Blue Heron never got anywhere for reasons that run much deeper than what happened at the storied secret meeting. Those same reasons make the odds of reviving it now vanishingly small.

Thompson, in his account of Glassboro’s Rowan Boulevard, as that development is called, notes that our situation isn’t “analogous” to Glassboro’s, the difference being that we have a “thriving downtown” while Glassboro doesn’t. But that isn’t just a minor disanalogy. It’s a difference that makes all the difference.

Chattanooga and Greenville were dying cities. Redevelopment wasn’t just a matter of upping an already pretty good game, but a matter of civic life and death.

That’s critical because people living in dying cities are likelier to accept risk than people living in more favored circumstances. When the choice is between some degree of risk that redevelopment will fail and virtual certainty that the slide into the abyss will continue if the risk isn’t taken, civic leaders have a much better chance of generating public support for massive, transformative renewal efforts.

That was the climate in Chattanooga that brought early private investment to major projects that gave local government the political cover to get with the program. For example, the Tennessee Aquarium, the centerpiece of the city’s acclaimed river district, was built entirely with private funds, much of it from a single donor.  

And in Greenville, over a twenty-five-year period from the early 80s to the mid-2000’s, $78 million of public funding drew $152 million of private money to seven projects that have transformed the center of the city into today’s spectacular cityscape. Anyone who’s been to Greenville recently will see that major projects are still going up downtown.

Because it was widely understood in Greenville that small bore projects wouldn’t rescue the city, there was public support for bold action involving generous use of “tax incremental financing,” aka tax allocation districts, and in a few instances for invoking the eminent domain power to put together the parcels that would make a project work.

Glassboro, operating in a similar climate, has also resorted to eminent domain and tax incremental financing.

Meanwhile, back home, except for a very rare project like the Classic Center, our development efforts have been almost entirely regulatory. That is, we jigger our zoning regulations and design guidelines and then wait for the market to work its magic within that framework. When we don’t see any magic in what the market delivers, we petition and demonstrate. But the basic regulatory approach remains in place because it’s cheaper and less off-putting to risk-averse taxpayers who don’t think they live in a dying city. That isn’t the development strategy that made Chattanooga and Greenville what they are today.

When the Blue Heron idea was first floated, there really was no urgent civic distress that it would relieve. Its earliest champions made vague suggestions that maybe it would make a good home for the Georgia Music and Sports halls of fame. There were also ritual promises that it would create jobs and make a dent in our embarrassing poverty stats. The most concrete suggestion came from David Lee, the University of Georgia’s Vice President for Research. He warmed to the idea of including research facilities in Project Blue Heron saying, “We don’t have as robust a research enterprise as I would like to see. We really stand out in not having that, and it affects the caliber of faculty we can hire.” Although the University would’ve been the primary beneficiary of such facilities, I don’t remember the UGA Real Estate Foundation stepping up to offer its capital raising services.

If I could wave the proverbial magic wand and turn the River District into the office-residential- entertainment area that heronistas envision, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’ve been to Chattanooga and Greenville enough times to appreciate what invigorating, I’d even say uplifting, downtowns they have now. But I’d do it with no illusions about the economic benefits we all think flow from cityscapes like theirs.

An August article in the National Journal reports about Chattanooga, “Many of the city’s elite and economic development officials suggest that a knowledge-based economy will create wealth, which will trickle down to a greater swath of residents.” Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, you haven’t been paying attention.

For all it’s appeal as a tourist magnet graced by Google’s super high-speed Internet network, a new Volkswagen plant and an Amazon installation, the unemployment rate in Chattanooga is 8.5 percent, higher than the August national average of 7.4. Its poverty rate is about 23 percent while Tennessee’s state average is 17 percent.  

And according to a recent Brookings Institution study, during the period from 2000 to 2011, notwithstanding Volkswagen and its suppliers, Chattanooga lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs averaging $47,753 a year. But tourists, one of our principal cash crops, haven’t taken up the slack there. During the same period Chattanooga gained only 3,316 hospitality sector jobs, mostly part time with no benefits, paying on average  $14,665 a year.

So get serious about Blue Heron? Absolutely. But we’re not getting serious until we get real. Even if the infamous secret meeting had been held outside Starbucks on College Square, we’d still be exactly where we are now.