Watch below: A strategic plan to revitalize downtown Gainesville not only focuses on the "core" area that includes government buildings and restaurants, but also a “greater study area” that involves the four adjacent neighborhoods and extends south to Depot Park. (Zoey Thomas/WUFT News)
Gainesville gained about three million square feet of retail space over the 11 year period ending in 2021, but less than 2% of that growth occurred in the city’s downtown area.
Vacancy rates downtown also exceeded the city average, though rent prices in the area centered by Main Street and University Avenue were a little over $5 cheaper per square foot, according to data shared in a 2022 strategic plan focused on revitalizing the area.
“Your downtown is supposed to be the hub of local culture, for live music and local food and where people congregate,” said Teresa Callen, a veteran real estate agent whose portfolio includes many downtown business listings.
Downtown Gainesville falls short of those expectations, however. That’s largely because shopping centers like Butler Plaza and Celebration Pointe – both much closer to I-75 and the busy Archer Road thoroughfare – outpace the area in retail development.
After a year of organized government, civic and community engagement, in October 2022 the Gainesville City Commission adopted the 130-page strategic plan to elevate downtown.
Recommended by a 15-member neighborhood advisory group, the plan’s central goal is transforming a place that many see as serving only government employees by day and college students by night into “a destination where the entire community comes together.”
The strategic plan offered 16 ideas that also focused on balancing the desires for more parking and walkability, strengthening the relationship with adjacent neighborhoods, increasing housing opportunities, creating a supportive local business environment and continuing to build capacity.
Nearly two years later, the city commission has recently created a new downtown advisory board and passed a controversial switch to a paid parking system. The city is also finalizing a contract with a third party ambassador organization – a move which some county leaders and advisory board members oppose, saying the downtown budget could be better spent internally.
Despite these developments, residents and customers say walkability and accessibility still need attention. Downtown vehicular accidents involving at least one pedestrian rose to a 13-year high in 2023. Sidewalk gaps keep nearby neighborhoods feeling disconnected from businesses.
Gainesville plans to spend $12.2 million on these and other downtown concerns through 2029.
“I think it’s a good time for a turning point in downtown, as far as handling some of the issues that have been plaguing it recently,” said Callen, who has lived in Gainesville for 23 years. “This is really the most proactive I’ve seen our city so far.”
Defining downtown
Downtown Gainesville, located a mile east of the University of Florida’s main campus, is defined in the strategic plan, which the city drafted using three consultant firms, in two ways.
The first boundary, called the “strategic focus area,” runs along Main and University and follows a cross shape about four to six city blocks wide on each arm from that intersection.
Most of the plan’s analysis and recommendations regard this area; most people focusing on them generally consider it the downtown “core.” It extends to Northeast Ninth Avenue, down to the Gainesville-Hawthorne State Trail, west to Southwest Sixth Street and east to Dell Street.
The core includes downtown’s most recognizable landmarks, including the Hippodrome Theatre, Bo Diddley Park, City Hall and Alachua County Courthouse, as well as hotels and restaurants.
But the strategic plan also identifies a rectangular “greater study area.” It expands the corners of the cross-shaped core to include the four neighborhoods bordering in all directions – Pleasant Street, Duckpond, Porters Quarters and Springhill – and extends south to Depot Park.
The city hopes improving the core will, by extension, impact the greater downtown area.
New advisory board
Among the strategic plan’s proposals was creating a management organization to oversee the other 15 ideas. In June, the city commission picked seven people from 16 applicants for the inaugural Gainesville Downtown Advisory Board.
The board includes business owners Sara Puyana, Timothy Hutchens and Jacob Ihde; former city manager Anthony Lyons; downtown developer Linda McGurn; Richard Allen, co-founder of several technology companies, and Callen, the real estate agent. McGurn serves as chair.
Callen said she hopes to encourage the city to set aside more money for incubating small businesses through grants. Doing so will help maintain downtown’s “kitsch factor” as a hub for unique local concepts rather than national brands, she said.
“Every dollar counts when you have a small business that’s burgeoning,” Callen said.
One of the board’s responsibilities is making recommendations on the annual budget for Gainesville Community Reinvestment Area, the city department leading the strategic plan and which funds grants for downtown events and business improvements.
The city has distributed over $600,000 to 10 businesses in what Gainesville Mayor Harvey Ward called a “wildly successful” grant program over the last couple of years.
One of Callen’s former clients, Dick Mondell’s Burgers & Fries, secured a grant from GCRA to renovate the building that opened as a popular fast food drive-thru in 2018.
Connor Castelli, one of Dick’s co-owners, said low rent prices helped to make the property, on Southwest Fourth Avenue just west of the downtown core, attractive as a business venture.
“I think the location is really wonderful,” Castelli said. “There’s not a whole lot about the location that I would change. I just think downtown Gainesville is really nice.”
The advisory board has held two monthly meetings so far. In June, its members shared their respective goals for downtown. In July, the discussion was more contentious.
Proposed program draws mixed opinions
The Gainesville neighborhood advisory group drafting the strategic plan studied other comparable cities that had revitalized their respective downtowns to gain inspiration for its own plan. Three of those cities had hired an external ambassador organization to provide outreach, cleaning and hospitality services.
GCRA has pledged about $400,000 of its $700,000 annual allocation for homeless services from 2025-29 to do the same, officials shared at a joint city and county commission meeting in March.
The city will soon sign a contract with Block by Block, a for-profit organization based in Louisville, Kentucky, which operates 150 programs in cities nationwide, Ward said. Several of those cities, including Columbia, South Carolina, and Austin, Texas, contain large universities.
Block by Block would recruit local residents as “ambassadors” through creating job postings, filtering applicants and scheduling interviews, according to its website.
Each recruit would undergo online and location-specific training before heading out in bright uniforms to clean streets, check in with local businesses, offer outreach to those residents without housing and generally reinforce a safe perception of downtown.
Block by Block should begin in Gainesville in the fall, Ward said. He called the program “a good way to help lots of different people with one source, whether they’re people who are new to town and just trying to find that address, or whether they’re folks who were sleeping in the doorway.”
Not everyone agrees, however. At thejoint commission meeting, Alachua County Commissioner Anna Prizzia asked if the money spent on Block by Block could better helpGRACE Marketplace and other organizations serving those without housing.
“You are funding ambassadors, which are nice people in pretty shirts downtown welcoming people, pointing them in the right direction, wayfinding,” Prizzia said. “Maybe they are talking to some homeless individuals, and asking them to move along when they are in a park, but ambassador programs are typically not about unhoused people or about homeless outreach.”
She declined to comment further to WUFT News on the issue.
Derreck Hughes, Block by Block’s vice president of operations, also received mixed feedback when discussing the program’s benefits at a downtown advisory board meeting.
Ambassadors can help ease the local police department’s responsibilities, Hughes said when the board asked how Block by Block could manage interpersonal conflict and improve safety.
“What our ambassadors are not going to do, they’re not going to have a shootout in the street,” he said. “The lower level stuff that happens, like drinking in public, or somebody’s having a mental health episode … we can fill in the gap for that – and that lets understaffed police departments respond to bigger things.”
Block by Block would establish a hotline for local businesses to voice concerns, and its ambassadors will also contact store owners daily, Hughes said.
McGurn said the $70,000-$80,000 – including salaries, payroll taxes and overhead – that Hughes said would be needed per each ambassador could instead go to existing city institutions.
“We’re looking at a middleman between services that our city already has,” she said.
Ward told WUFT News that he “can’t imagine” the city not going through with the ambassador program. Calling himself a longtime advocate for funding homeless services, the mayor insisted that Block by Block could add another puzzle piece to address the issues plaguing downtown.
“I think it’d be a huge mistake not to do that,” he said. “What I’m hoping from the downtown advisory board is to be more forward thinking and creative, not backwards looking saying, ‘Well, let’s redo this and that and the other thing.’ This is where we are. Let’s be creative.”
A false narrative?
Rebecca Nagy said she believes unfounded fears of people without housing drives a false narrative that the area is unsafe. “I don’t know why people think downtown is any more dangerous than anyplace else,” Nagy said.
The retired Harn Art Museum director said she feels safe walking from her condo, around Northeast Second Avenue, to the Alachua County Library or a local restaurant. However, she concedes that she’s not out at 2 a.m., when people are “drunk and on a short trigger,” she said.
Gainesville Police Department data confirm that crime spikes downtown late at night: From 2011-2023, 22% of incident responses in the greater study area occurred between 12 and 2 a.m.
Violent crimes, including homicide, robbery, and aggravated assault or battery, counted for just 13, or 8%, of the 145 incidents reported in that same two hour window during 2023, according to GPD. But the small figure still doubled the citywide average of a little less than 4%.
As he and Grace Hill, 23, sat in a wooden booth playing chess at Maude’s Café on a recent Friday afternoon, Thomas McInnes, 24, questioned downtown cleanliness while confidently clearing his companion’s pawns and bishops off the board.
The construction accountant usually heads downtown on his lunch break from The Collier Companies, a real estate developer whose founder and chairman, Nathan Collier, is a major donor for the UF College of Journalism and Communications.
McInnes said he could take a shortcut from his office to the café if not for a recurring hazard.
“On the sidewalk that would take us over to that area, every single time, we find shattered glass,” he said as Hill nodded in agreement. “We’d have to walk in the street or across the road.”
McInnes suspects the glass comes from patrons of nearby bars. He wishes downtown had more lunch spots and fewer venues that close before nightfall.
Hill, a UF Health Shands Hospital data analyst, agreed. A few of hers and McInnes’ former favorite daytime food spots, like Crane Ramen, have closed in recent years. Others, like Flaco’s Cuban Bakery, are still open but no longer serve lunch.
“I think there’s opportunity,” she said. “There’s a lot of cute coffee shops, and we’ve got a little jazz bar and places to hang out. But that’s what I guess I’d like to see more of.”
Walking and parking concerns
Another change came in March, when the city commission approved converting one-third of downtown parking spaces from free to paid, beginning in August.
Andrew Schaer, who has owned downtown record store Hear Again Records since 2006, opposed the decision. Lack of parking is the main factor restricting customers from his store, Schaer said. He said the city should enforce existing two-hour parking limits more consistently.
The city’s parking staff works diligently, but their job is “among the worst,” Ward said.
The city plans to offer additional free parking in areas just beyond the downtown core, but Schaer said that and nearby parking garages won’t help much when the heat becomes harshest.
"People don’t want to be inconvenienced when it’s 95 degrees outside,” he said. “They want to be able to park as close as they can to their destination.”
Summer already is a huge challenge for downtown businesses, said Adam Porambo, manager at The Hyppo Gourmet Ice Pops on Southeast Second Avenue. Even for a popsicle store, sales lag when much of the UF student population leaves the city, Porambo said.
“Downtown Gainesville, I feel like it’s so much different than UF Gainesville,” he said.
Porambo said he wants parking permits for his and other downtown employees, so they don’t have to scrounge the area for parking lots or move their cars mid-shift, just to be able to work.
Ward said the city’s paid parking solution, aside from a few small tweaks, is about “90% baked.” Parking poses a challenge, but it shouldn’t be the city’s only focus, the mayor said.
“Every mayor I talk to that has a substantial downtown, people have concerns about parking,” he said. “Every single one. But people walk a football field and a half away from the front door of Target and feel like they got a good parking space. Parking psychology is a fascinating area.”
John Mamo, co-owner of the vegan restaurant Frenchmen Street Food on South Main Street, doesn’t see more garages as a solution to transportation issues.
“I want less parking – more walkability,” Mamo said from his restaurant’s wooden counters, while prepping ingredients to load onto his food truck for a local farmer’s market.
He opened the restaurant in 2023 alongside Hutchens, the downtown advisory board member, who has lived in the city since childhood. As they bustled around each other, filling pans and slicing vegetables, Hutchens said improving pedestrian routes would help solve parking issues.
With better street crossings and less crime, visitors would feel more comfortable walking the two or three blocks from parking garages to various downtown restaurants, he said.
Adding that South Main Street should be more pedestrian friendly, Hutchens also said that a raised intersection platform or roundabout where it meets Southeast Fifth Avenue could help.
The downtown strategic plan identified Fifth Avenue and South Main, Sixth Avenue and North Main and along the 200 block of South Main as three intersections needing a crosswalk.
Gainesville allocated $743,000 for installing these crosswalks, as well as building bike lanes and planting street trees downtown, between 2022 and 2025, according to the plan. The outline, however, did not mention a raised intersection or roundabout in the South Main and Fifth spot.
Another concern for local residents and business owners: University Avenue. Not only does the street house several late night liquor establishments, it’s a state highway where drivers go by “flying and cruising,” said Kyle Spor, who co-owns two bars: Cry Baby’s and Baby J’s.
“We just hear about it all the time,” Spor said, from “employees that are closing the bar late – just, you know, ‘Somebody got hit by a car again.’ It happens all the time.”
Traffic crashes downtown involving at least one pedestrian soared to 105 in 2023, over three times more than the previous year, according to GPD data.
Spor also said he wants the city to widen sidewalks and increase police patrols on the weekends.
Neighborhood and greenway factors
The four neighborhoods bordering downtown have broken and dirty sidewalks that keep their residents disconnected from the core, especially in the historically Black communities of Pleasant Street, Porters Quarters and Springhill, according to the strategic plan.
Vivian Filer moved to Springhill with her family as a third grader and recalls downtown fondly.
“If we were going downtown with my mother on Saturday, she would get us all cleaned up and dressed up, and we would walk to town,” she said. “That’s where everybody went to shop.”
Now 86, Filer lives in Lincoln Estates, about 2 miles southeast of the downtown core. She founded the Cotton Club Museum, an African American cultural center in Springhill, in 2019.
Any visitors traveling to the museum via Fourth Avenue would encounter sidewalk gaps, the retired Santa Fe professor said. Better walkability would make the museum seem more connected to Depot Park and to surrounding area at large, she said.
“I don’t feel that we’re part of the downtown,” Filer said. “I feel that people accidentally discover us.”
To connect downtown to the neighborhoods, the city suggests a greenway loop of existing trails along the Sweetwater Creek corridor – from 10th Avenue in the north to Sweetwater Creek in the east to the Gainesville-Hawthorne State Trail in the south to Southwest Sixth Street in the west.
Residents have clamored for the greenway for years and have a Facebook pagededicated to it.
Cody Keef, 39, drives 15 minutes from his house near Northwest 39th Avenue about twice a week to bring his 2-year-old daughter to Depot Park or visit a restaurant with his wife.
Keef hovered around his daughter as she splashed with a cousin in Depot Park sprinklers on a recent hot July day. He said he enjoys downtown’s natural offerings as much as he does its bars, especially after parenthood left him with less time for going out.
“We can always find something to do downtown – you can just walk over there and find the Hawthorne Trail and walk all the way to Hawthorne if you want,” Keef said. “I just love the parks around Gainesville … any kind of stuff that they can incorporate with nature, they do a good job at it, but I would like to see more.”
The Sweetwater loop would take in Gainesville-Hawthorne Trail and multi-use paths on Depot Avenue and Sixth Street and run along Depot Park and nature respites like Sweetwater Park.
Kamarie Latson, 24, doesn’t often visit downtown despite living nearby. A Sante Fe College graduate who is pursuing an online degree from Florida Atlantic University, Latson said she has adapted to shopping centers such as Butler Plaza and the choices and amenities they offer.
Still, she misses businesses, like Family Dollars, that used to be closer to her home.
“Some of the stores that you were used to just going by and getting the supplies you need, you’re suddenly seeing them just going out of business,” Latson said while resting under a shady tree at Depot Park on a weekday afternoon. “So it’s disheartening.”
She said she supports all efforts to revitalize the downtown area, but hopes the downtown advisory board and others focused on the process do a better job of communicating.
“A lot of times, business comes to the area – and we don’t know about it,” Latson said.
Copyright 2024 WUFT 89.1
