Hyping Urban Revitalization and a New Nursing Home

You might remember back in 2017 a proposal for a nursing home and senior living on Front Street between D Street and Mill Creek.

Front Street Senior Community (2017)

The paper today has an update on it. The warehouse and former turkey processing plant is being demolished, and the project finally looks to have momentum for construction.

Pushing the "vitality" angle

Five years ago, planners and developers were hitting the theme of "revitalizing," and they are doing so again.

Certainly, in the sense that there will be a shiny new building with people living and working there, the site will have a new vitality.

But the concept is not going to generate much foot traffic. Between the rail road, the empty warehouse across the street, and other adjacent uses, as well as the reduced mobility of those living in the facility, it's just not going to occasion much walking. Grocery Outlet is just a block away, but how much walking to it will there be? If foot traffic is the foundation of urban vitality, it's hard to see much revitalization. 

The nursing home and senior living is instead on a suburban, autoist model, more like a mall.

People will point to the riverside path. There is potential there! It could be one segment connecting with others north. But for the moment it will be narrow, ten feet only, and terminate at the creek. It's also not clear that it will be built. It may just be an easement only for some future action. We'll see.

North Downtown/Waterfront - SCI report 2011

A nursing home complex does not seem likely to prompt the sort of redevelopment envisioned - more than a little utopian to be sure - by the students in the Sustainable Cities Initiative of a decade ago.

But what they envisioned was truly "vital," a bustling urban fabric.

When we talk about revitalizing, that bustling urban fabric is the desideratum, and we should be clearer about pale imitations.

Something is better than an empty shell and its nothingness. The view of the river will be nice for those who live there. A nursing home does not seem like the kind of thing that is going to catapult the district to a new level of vitality, however.

See also:

• All notes on the Sustainable Cities Initiative, which really is due for a critical reassessment now by the City. What were actually accomplished projects? What were productive leads that led to other actual things? And what were the dead-ends? Happily, even after two iterations of a new website, the City retains a page on the project and with the reports.
  
• "A Century Ago: Truitt Bros Building on Market and Front to Celebrate 100th" (2017)
• A passing note on one of the City's oldest bridges, of 1913, across Mill Creek (2014)