What Was Augustine Thinking?

During the September 19th radio interview with Ted Baker, Augustine restated her qualified-- actually, hypothetical-- support for a multi-use/residential building on Geneva’s lakefront. No need to adjust your radio dial. You heard right. Under certain circumstances, she’d seriously consider it. True.

Which is not to say she endorses the current visitor’s center as proposed in the Bergmann plan. The very idea and the process by which arrived on the scene bothers her. She’s opposed to keeping the Chamber of Commerce on the lakefront (granted, it would move a few feet over) and adding condos on top to offset structural deficits.

Meanwhile, Capraro’s been thinking nostalgically about Yankee Stadium. There’s a new Yankee Stadium going up right next door to the old. It will be upscale, with fewer, but more expensive, seats, and more lavish concessions. The old Yankee Stadium, “the House that Ruth built,” will simply be torn down, and carted off to the dustbin of history.

Capraro’s worried something similar could happen in the City of Geneva, if the Bergmann master plan for the Lakefront and Downtown is implemented as currently envisioned. While one of its principal goals is to integrate Downtown and Lakefront, it could well have the opposite effect. The plan could easily become a blueprint for an affluent suburb, between Downtown and the Lake itself, and lead to the further decay and ultimate demise of Geneva’s traditional downtown.

After all, if current residents who live within easy walking distance of Downtown have not supported Downtown, why does anyone imagine that more affluent residents and tourists choosing the Lakefront would? Who’s to say they won’t just hop in their BMW, conveniently parked in a parking garage just down the hall, and head off to some other suburban environment?

Instead, we need to repopulate Downtown itself, at its center, with folks, by definition, committed to small-city, downtown living, in all its interest, diversity, and nuance. Or, we need to make sure any development on the Lakefront, but especially residential, is multi-income, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-use— in a word, diverse. Otherwise, even though there might never be actual gates, the Lakefront could become a de facto gated community, with the existing Downtown further abandoned.

And that’s where Augustine and Capraro come round to agree. Augustine speculated that, perhaps, underlying resistance to residential is the concern that the lakefront would become privatized. After all, during the last election, the Beckley ticket was promoting the idea of McMansions or a condominium development along the waterfront. The community rejected that, for several reasons, including that it might actually be a ‘gated community.’

When people own land near the water, they might start trying to control who has access to that property. We know that the area immediately adjacent to the water’s edge is protected public property that could never be fenced off, but it’s not too far fetched to imagine that people in $500,000 homes would pressure the city to control the ‘type’ of people using that waterfront.

For example, would condo residents resist a public beach east of the current Chamber of Commerce building if it was essentially in the front yard of a new housing development? The interests of the well-heeled private investors would likely trump the public’s right to enjoy their collectively-held amenity. In that way, all the housing that's been proposed for the lakefront thus far equals privatization of the lakefront.

As it stands now, downtown could not survive a ‘new space’ expansion of this kind. New lakefront office or retail space would directly compete with downtown vacancies which is not only unfair to existing property owners and businesses, but furthers the division between downtown and the lakefront.

But what if the City first succeeded in shoring up Downtown as a viable residential neighborhood with a sustainable retail, arts-based, commercial, restaurant district? Then, Augustine believes, there would come a time to extend that configuration of Downtown across 5&20 to the Lakefront. Making a ‘new downtown’ on the Lakefront today will kill the existing Downtown, further drive down property values, and be a net loss for the community and her taxpayers. But pushing for downtown prosperity now and then looking to expand that model to the lakefront in the future could be a win for Geneva all around.

With that guarantee, what the Bergmann plan (final draft, pages 8 and 9) calls for, “development in key locations along East Castle Street that would provide the continuation of downtown’s urban form into the lakefront zone and provide strong linkages between downtown and the lakefront,” might work.

The key, again, is the timing. The sequencing must be correct. To be clear, Bergmann did not tag this action item as ‘immediate,’ so it shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of the visitor’s center concept. Instead, Bergmann listed this development concept in the second column (projects that are 6-10 years out) and Augustine believes that makes good sense.

In 6-10 years, if the City Council has done the work that is immediately pressing, the downtown will be a vibrant mixed-income community. To achieve that, Council will have removed the zoning and other barriers that are preventing upscale housing improvements to be made within existing buildings.

Additionally, new construction on the OEO and Cookery sites (including a new visitor’s center, which we believe should be located in the downtown core so as to drive visitor’s into rather than away from Geneva) will be building the critical mass of new residents and visitors. When the amount of disposable income coming through downtown increases, the retail/commercial climate will be greatly improved and we will see the growth that has seemed to elude us.

In short, if the Bergmann plan’s focus on Downtown can become public policy, if the community can take a step back and not let the Nozzolio money burn a hole in our pockets, then we just might be poised to build on Downtown’s potential and, eventually, we might get to the point where the community conversation, envisioned by Augustine and supported by Capraro, about building on the Lakefront can take place.