National Landing BID’s DEI-focused plan sets forth a roadmap of actionable goals for the BID, its businesses and the greater National Landing community to work together to build a more inclusive community. Working with these stakeholders and businesses, the BID will seek to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the forefront of business operations.
Best Practice
Type: Best Practice
ShopFairbankVillage2Win Contest
ShopFairbankVillage2Win was a sweepstake designed to influence shopping behaviour immediately and in the long term. For six weeks, the community was encouraged to shop locally and submit receipts for purchases over $20. These became entries into a weekly draw for $1000 ($500 to keep and $500 to share with the issuing business).
CIP Campaign
The language of community improvement plans (CIPs) are typically highly technical and demand specialist knowledge to parse funding regulations, bylaws, and zoning restrictions. Consequently, the City of Hamilton sought to create a clear, inclusive, and narrative-focused approach to promoting the City of Hamilton’s suite of CIP incentives to small business owners, developers, property owners and entrepreneurs.
Baird Urban Sports Park
The Baird Urban Sports Park was created to capture downtown Louisville’s urban experience and historic character while expanding and reimagining its use. What was an underutilized and undeveloped 20,000 square-foot vacant lot in the heart of downtown is now a public urban sports park, intended to encourage public community use through open play hours, and offer a unique downtown experience.
The Community Engagement Team
The Community Engagement Team (CET) is a unique, business-led outreach team that provides rapid response support and intervention for non-violent crisis situations and traditional street outreach services in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The CET partners with Toronto Police to divert vulnerable individuals from the criminal justice system and into local community support programs.
Downtown San Francisco Public Realm Action Plan
The Downtown San Francisco Public Realm Action Plan was commissioned by DSFP, the community benefit district serving the city’s Financial District and Jackson Square. The plan emphasizes place-based, pedestrian-oriented strategies focusing on creating a resilient and inclusive downtown to counter fallen pedestrian traffic from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bloor-Annex BIA Parkettes
Four parkettes, situated at five-minute walking intervals from one another, transformed what was formerly underutilized and impervious areas in the Bloor-Annex neighbourhood into dynamic public amenity spaces. The collaborative and cross-disciplinary approach to the project helped incorporate new methods and techniques into the design process that highlight’s Bloor-Annex’s uniqueness.
Grow Golden
Grow Golden addresses a problem many office-dominated districts have grappled with since the COVID-19 pandemic: how to fill and enliven vacant ground floor spaces? Grow Golden harnesses the talent of the diverse small business community and pairs them with property owners who need spaces filled, along with providing wrap-around technical assistance.
DSM Workforce Trends & Occupancy Study
In early 2022, Downtown DSM, Inc. and the Greater Des Moines Partnership commissioned a first-of-its-kind, hyperlocal study of knowledge workers in Greater Des Moines (DSM). The DSM Workforce Trends & Occupancy Study (WTOS) provided regional employers with insight into the workplace and work preference styles of knowledge workers.
Downtown Farmers’ Market Incubator Program
The Downtown Farmers’ Market Incubator Program was created to support underrepresented, small and/or startup businesses and improve access and economic growth for local small, minority and historically underrepresented businesses across Greater Des Moines (DSM). To participate in the Incubator Program, a business must be owned, operated and actively managed by one or more persons who fall into one underrepresented communities.
Grow Downtown
Grow Downtown is an initiative of the Saint Paul Downtown Alliance that connects landlords and tenants to offer short-term lease opportunities to small businesses, adding vibrancy to the central business district of downtown Saint Paul and its skyway system. Selected tenants occupy vacant storefronts with the potential for long-term occupancy.
TGIFood Trucks
TGIFood Trucks was a summer pop-up of a rotating variety of food trucks and cuisines. Open to the public and free of charge, the goal was to encourage community connection and gathering in a safe outdoor space during the pandemic, and increase the area’s reputation for being fun and a foodie haven.
Pop-Up Shops at Martin Street
Pop-Up Shops at Martin Street is a pop-up retail store program in downtown Raleigh to provide affordable and attractive short term retail space for minority and women-owned businesses to improve diversity in storefront ownership in downtown and Raleigh.
Opa-Locka Downtown Master Plan
Despite a 2016 bankruptcy, political instability, and widespread stakeholder skepticism, the Opa-locka Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) launched a 2020 Downtown Master Plan to reverse downtown’s decline. The plan started to overcome past failures by creating public/private partnerships (P3).
State of Cape Town Central City Report
This is the ninth, and largest, edition of the State of Cape Town Central City Report, produced at the height of South Africa’s various harsh lockdowns. Its mission is to illustrate in financial terms the investment opportunities of the most successful downtown in South Africa through meticulous research.
Peacock Alley
Peacock Alley emerged as a location from an initiative led by Centro to gather feedback from the community to develop a placemaking action plan for the Houston Street corridor. The placemaking effort set out to provide novel play experiences while supporting local small businesses and artists.
Root 107 Pop-Up Park
For decades, there has been a deficiency of park space in the downtown core. Recognizing this gap, the City of Edmonton set aside 1.7 hectares of underdeveloped and vacant land in west downtown to be the future home of a central downtown park in 2026.
Reading Downtown Strategic Plan
The confluence of a rich architectural legacy; vibrant downtown communities; and the advent of unparalleled change unlocked an unprecedented opportunity for downtown to again lead its region toward a more economically competitive, equitable, livable, and resilient future.
Market
Market was a series of outdoor summer artisan markets in collaboration with local artist collectives. On three weekends in the summer of 2021, visitors could enjoy an outdoor craft fair, and then stick around to see what else was happening in the neighbourhood.
Main Street Pocket Park
What started as a weedy, deserted eyesore became a beautiful, welcoming parklet in May 2021. Sponsored by Ben E. Keith Foods, the Main Street Pocket Park is a collaboration of love, sweat, and a desire to see downtown Little Rock continue to thrive and grow.
DTSF ArtBox
The DTSF ArtBox gallery is a collection of 26 traffic signal control boxes wrapped with vinyl artwork from artists of all abilities from the area. Proposals were solicited in many languages, resulting in 176. A jury ultimately selected 66 artists, who were all paid stipends for their work.
Delightful Downtown – Grafton Park
As part of our DELIGHTFUL DOWNTOWN lighting installations, we developed a new light projection series that is being displayed onto the former Halifax Memorial Library building at Grafton Park from October 2021 until the end of March 2022. The series features a total of 12 different light shows over five months that changes to reflect relevant seasonal, heritage and cultural themes. Each month comprises of a main show that is accompanied with a shorter show.
Allegheny Overlook Pop-Up Park
The Allegheny Overlook, or ‘AO,’ was a brand-new pop-up park that transformed a portion of Fort Duquesne Boulevard in Downtown Pittsburgh, highlighting live performances, arts, and culture while showcasing one of Pittsburgh’s most iconic riverfront views. The pop-up park reimagined a peripheral boulevard and an underutilized riverfront park in the city’s urban core, creating a more vibrant Downtown in a city rebounding from the effects of the pandemic.
$3 Food Walk & Station Opening Festival
The $3 Food Walk and U District Station Opening Festival was an all-day event planned and executed by the U District Partnership to celebrate two neighborhood milestones: the return of 73,000 students, faculty, and staff in-person at the University of Washington, and the opening of a Light Rail Station. The event featured street closures, colorful decorations, a main stage with eight local performance groups, a beer garden, and a $3 food walk with 45 participating U District businesses.
Creating Confidence for Returning Workers During COVID-19
To ensure workers were comfortable returning to the office in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDBIA worked with our members to develop a Best Practices for Return to the Office report. Advocate for indoor mask mandates, and we created promotional videos about returning to the office and public health measures.
Bellville Zero Waste Schools
The Bellville Zero Waste Schools project is a replicable, scalable waste-reduction project that enables schools to save money on waste disposal and to reduce their waste footprint, towards a zero-waste environment. Landfills in South Africa are close to full capacity. Schools are culprits as much as businesses and individual homes. The Bellville Zero Waste Schools project takes a systems-based approach to providing schools with a sustainable, cost-effective solution.
Lift Up Local
Lift Up Local is comprised of three smaller projects: Expanding sidewalks, a grant program, and a downtown voucher program. This Best Practices dives into the logistics and details of each component.
Bedford Street Piazza
To support struggling restaurants, DSSD worked with a multi-department team from the City to implement StrEATeries within one week of re-opening the state to outdoor dining. The initiative created ~1,000 outdoor dining seats beyond those typically allowed on the city’s sidewalks through two complementary approaches.
Portland Downtown Tree Cam
In lieu of our traditional, “one night only” tree lighting event, Portland Downtown, Hood® Eggnog, and Portland Public Library launched something all new for 2020: a 24/7 live-streaming “tree cam” overlooking an iconic downtown park called Monument Square. The cam created a virtual window so that visitors locally – and across the globe – could enjoy the illuminated tree & its surroundings anytime, anywhere throughout the holiday season.
Crystal City to National Landing BID Rebrand
In 2019, the Crystal City BID expanded its boundaries by 70% and began the process of selecting a new name and brand for the organization. The brand needed to provide a cohesive sense of place that unified the downtown while still highlighting the existing neighborhoods of Pentagon City, Crystal City and Potomac Yard that the BID now encompassed. The BID began a rebrand effort with the design firm Pentagram, but misconceptions around the new name necessitated extensive community engagement.
Make It Bright on Fifth Avenue
Fifth Avenue, the world’s most famous street and the centerpiece of New York City’s holiday splendor brightened the Big Apple like never before with Make it Bright, a new campaign that takes two-holiday staples – toys and lights – to a new level.
Halloweek
Downtown Vision designed Halloweek as our first foray into holding safe events and promotions during the pandemic. This multi-pronged holiday celebration allowed us to promote and support Downtown Jacksonville’s small businesses and to create socially distanced, family friendly events for Halloween week 2020. Three key elements composed Halloweek: Decorating Downtown, Driving Traffic to Small Businesses, and Creating a Socially Responsible, Family Friendly Event for the Community.
Hero Meals
Facing one of the first COVID shutdowns in the country, our restaurants were faced with immediate lost revenues, extra food, and a desire to help those fighting on the front lines of the pandemic. The Downtown Tacoma Partnership stepped in creating a site for people to purchase Hero Meals from downtown restaurants we delivered to the front-line workers keeping our community moving.
Downtown Download Webinars
From the start of the pandemic our members, residents, and BID properties were clamoring for reliable information they felt they weren’t getting from existing channels. There was confusion about government relief programs, business shutdowns, liability if someone gets sick, and changes to city permits and fees. So we created a free webinar series that directly connects our audience with top government, public health, and business decision makers.
Curbside Baltimore
This program was created, and scaled up quickly, to support local restaurants and retailers during COVID shutdowns in the spring and fall. It had two components: a universal hashtag #CurbsideBaltimore that we created for businesses to promote their pivot in response to COVID, and; a subsidized gift card program for locally-owned shops, restaurants, and makers within our BID. For each $20 gift card purchased, we added an additional $10, giving the purchaser $30 to spend.
Holiday Movie Food and Drink Week
Downtown Norfolk Council produced the first ever Holiday Movie Food and Drink Week. For this special holiday celebration, Downtown Norfolk chefs got creative and had a lot of fun reimagining iconic food and drinks from everyone’s favorite holiday movies and specials. For one week from December 4-11, Downtown Norfolk restaurants put their own unique spin on recognizable food, drinks, and memorable scenes from holiday classics for a creative and delicious helping of festive nostalgia.
Mall Retrofit Strategy: Unlocking Downtown Moorhead’s Revitalization
From the beginning of the Downtown Moorhead Master Plan process, the number one topic of concern was Center Mall in the heart of downtown Moorhead. With its complicated public-private ownership structure, high number of vacancies, physical connection with City Hall, and yet beloved history, we knew repositioning or redeveloping the Center Mall site would be a focal point of the planning effort.
al Fresco off Main and Downtown Dash
The City of Mesa and the Downtown Mesa Association (DMA), introduced a great way to “extend” patio dining for all of the restaurants in the downtown Mesa District—no matter the restaurant’s outside capacity. al Fresco off Main is a fenced off area with plenty of outdoor, distanced seating where people can bring food they ordered from any downtown Mesa restaurant or their brown bag meal to enjoy their refreshments in the middle of downtown.
2019 Downtown Memphis Parking Study
The 2019 Downtown Memphis Parking Study was commissioned to craft a new approach to parking in Downtown Memphis, shifting policy from simply building more parking to a holistic approach centered on mobility. The great success of the study was it’s intention from ideation to go far beyond parking management, and Memphis’s wherewithal to immediately put the plan into action.
Re-Start Downtown Fresno Grant Program
In the early months of the COVID emergency, Downtown Fresno businesses were facing limited re-opening after nearly 3 months of limited operations due to closed in-person retail, no in-door/ out-door dining, no events or pedestrian traffic, and no office workers. The Re-Start program aimed to assist small businesses by providing grants ranging from $1000 – $2500 that could be utilized to help alleviate some costs and help businesses re-open safely.