They came to bury Smart Growth, not to praise it, at LiveableCity‘s community forum on the Sixth + Lamar project Tuesday night. If anyone thought City Hall was still keen to grant $2.1 million in fee-waiver incentives to the project — which is currently slated to contain a Borders Books and Music, right across the street from locally owned BookPeople and Waterloo Records — they can probably rest easy. (“There’s no appetite for Borders right now,” one City Council insider told us.) For more than two hours, the assembled crowd at La Zona Rosa, including several current and aspiring City Council members, city staffers, and community leaders, movers, shakers, scenesters, and even ordinary citizens, preached to the choir with nary a dissonant note. Chain stores are bad. Incentives, if they must be granted to anyone, should be designed to help small businesses. Austin is not just like anywhere else. D.C. al fine.
Actually, LiveableCity itself — a community nonprofit led by a well-filled roster of Austin progressive all-stars — probably killed the Sixth + Lamar deal last month, when it released an economic-impact study showing that the losses to local businesses would well outweigh any boon from Borders. Though few in attendance discussed it directly, the economic downturn has made all the difference for Sixth + Lamar, which was a much different project when first proposed back in the mid-1990s and was originally viewed by both City Hall and community activists — including some of the current LiveableCity leaders — as a positive step toward a more vibrant, walkable, compact urban core. Now, we have different priorities, and the project — and the Smart Growth Initiative — is being judged by different standards. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons Downtown over the past three years, and this is one of them,” Council Member Will Wynn told the crowd. “We have to think in broader terms.”
It’s unlikely that Schlosser Development, the folks behind Sixth + Lamar, can do much with the “solutions” offered by the LiveableCity attendees and still make the project work. (Seeing the project collapse for good did not seem such a terrible fate to many at the forum; several attendees called for green space, open space, more housing, and other nonretail uses.) While many felt the project should cater to small businesses and not big-box beasts like Borders, Schlosser has struggled for years to get major chain players (it originally was to contain both a 12-screen theatre and a Target, both now mere memories) and would be hard-pressed without some sort of subsidy to maintain its financing while serving often-underfunded small local businesses in a down economy. Many attendees echoed Waterloo Records owner John Kunz’s call that “everybody needs to become an evangelist” for small businesses. The best way to keep Borders out, in other words, is to not shop there.
An irony of the Sixth + Lamar saga is that Schlosser — whose principals did not attend the forum because they were presenting to the city Design Commission at the same time — is itself a small local business. “If the developers were here, they would look like us,” said LiveableCity board member Robin Rather. “They’re not bad guys, but they have a really bad idea. What would the really bad guys do here?”
This article appears in January 24 • 2003.