Downtown 2.0, Livingston County Commercial District Assessment

The Livingston County Development Corporation (LCDC) engaged Streetsense (formerly Larisa Ortiz Associates) to develop the Downtown 2.0 Commercial District Assessment, a comprehensive plan for the County and its nine downtowns that identified shared downtown challenges and established a set of clear strategies and tactics for the County to collectively address business attraction and sales growth, capital investment, and redevelopment.

Components: The downtown planning approach combined qualitative and quantitative data in four key areas of analysis, the Physical Environment, the local Business Environment, Market Demand and Demographics, and Administrative Capacity for Livingston County and each of its nine downtowns: Geneseo, Mount Morris, Dansville, Avon, Caledonia, Livonia, Nunda, Lima, and Leicester.

Challenges: For small towns in rural communities across the country with dwindling population and limited discretionary income, defining a set of strategies and policies to effectively address downtown challenges is critical to ensure that downtown revitalization efforts effectively leverage limited pubic resources for high impact investments. Having a community-based plan, rooted in sound economic principles, helped coalesce support from a broad spectrum of elected officials, business owners and residents while also providing powerful evidence-based recommendations to support multiple successful grant applications and policy initiatives.