Last Monday, 11/1/2021, the Galesburg City Council voted to reconsider the project chosen for the Rebuild Downtown and Main Street Grant Program, a small but important victory. This came after I spoke in front of the council, presenting my feelings on the flaws of the chosen project and a possible replacement project. This was the subject of my last post HERE if you want to go read it.
Through communications with City staff and obtaining an email sent to downtown business owners, there is progress being made. The City is currently asking downtown building owners to see if they would be interested in receiving a grant to put apartments in their unused upstairs. So if you know any downtown building owners it would be a great time to encourage them to pursue the grant.
The grant will work a little differently, as the City is not directly applying for the grant money but applying on behalf of the building owners. The businesses will need to put up a 50% match instead of the required match of nothing for municipalities, but that’s still a great deal. I would love to get a 50% match on a business capital project.
But as pointed out to me by a reader, one of the big reasons downtown building owners may not have already put in apartments is due to asbestos. This cancer causing substance was once a major building material. According to this website the cost to remove asbestos from a 1500 square foot house is over $11,000. This would have been a major barrier to renovation projects, but with a grant that provides 50% of the funds it suddenly becomes much more economically feasible.
The Need for Walkable Neighborhoods
I just started reading the book called “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time” by Jeff Speck and I’ve been absolutely loving it. I was inspired by it enough that I decided to go for a walk.
So last Saturday I went on a proper walk around downtown. I drove in, parked my car and got walking. My first stop was Innkeepers. This is a tangent but I don’t go there enough and it is truly an establishment to be proud of as a citizen of Galesburg. That is a business that knows what it is doing and presents itself well. It’s truly a local gem that has shined during the years in which we’ve seen local business fade.
With my coffee I went on to walk around and admire the details. There are lots of nice little details and plagues all around downtown letting you know the history of the places. Our downtown has been versatile over the years, and it just makes me so excited to help rebuild it.
Despite some big issues, like highway lanes running down Main Street and the resulting noise, downtown is still a very walkable area. If you are a Galesburg native and haven’t gone on a walk downtown in your adult life I highly encourage it. If you are willing to see the small details there is a lot to be seen.
Fortunately it seems people want to live in a nice walkable area. According to a poll in 2018, 53% of Americans want to live in a walkable neighborhood, and that number has been increasing. As you can see in the image below, downtown and it’s surrounding areas are the only walkable neighborhoods in Galesburg.
This is important, as Jeff points out in “Walkable Cities” using the work of walkability researcher Chistopher Leinberger:
“In the Detroit region, he finds that housing in walkable urbanism fetches a 40 percent price premium over similar housing in drivable sub-urbanism; in the Seattle region, that premium is 51 percent; in Denver, it’s 150 percent. New York City, unsurprisingly, tops the list at 200 percent—that is to say, people are paying three times as much per square foot for apartments in walkable neighborhoods as for comparable suburban houses. In most markets, the demand for walkable urbanism dramatically outpaces the supply: in Atlanta, only 35 percent of poll respondents who want to live in a walkable urban place are able to find and afford it”
People are willing to pay more to live in a walkable neighborhood. If we are wanting to make Galesburg stronger it is important to build more units in our most walkable area. There aren’t too many smallish towns that can offer a walkable, urban core.
I will explore in future posts about what we can do to better improve walkability to the rest of our neighborhoods, and it wouldn’t even really cost any money. But for now it is good that we may be moving towards getting more units downtown which will be beneficial to the town in more ways than one.