STOREFRONT | 10 First Steps Toward Revitalizing Main Streets
Successful placemaking starts with small, individual efforts.

Written By Jason Cox
This piece was originally printed in Issue 2 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.
Introduction
The perception of a place is dominated by its Main Street. This is especially true in a typical small- to mid-sized Southern city where the core has remained largely the same for decades—or, worse yet, has slowly deteriorated. Main Street also tends to be a state road, carrying citizens and visitors alike to the city—but too often simply through it. The key is giving them a reason to stop, walk around, and stay for a while. That’s where small storefronts can have an outsized impact on their community. These businesses, their owners, and their teams act as a welcome antidote to repetitive and uninspiring strip malls and interstate exits. Put simply, they turn a street into a place.
Large parts of the South are at an enviable crossroads. As the fastest growing region in the country, opportunity abounds. We are peppered with small, walkable downtown cores replete with former mills and other industrial buildings ready to be repurposed and within a 15-minute walk of dense old neighborhoods full of smaller (and therefore more affordable) homes. Many of our cities are in a position to reimagine themselves, capturing their share of the region’s growth and meaningfully directing it into a form of fine-grained citybuilding not seen since their founding.
Of course, there are challenges. Many places bear the scars of what was billed as progress. Southern towns dependent on textiles or furniture have seen developments like NAFTA take their industry away. In these communities, the resulting stagnation and loss of population and pride has created a distinct fear of change. For them, change isn’t progress; it’s loss. This perception only exacerbates a tendency to move too slowly and invest too little to see meaningful results.
While change won’t happen overnight, Main Streets can begin by chipping away at obstacles that impede the revitalizing of their buildings, that slow or prevent new businesses from forming, and that otherwise work against the goal of building a vibrant place full of possibility.
Interventions can and should come in all sizes. Imagine a collective working on big, audacious goals such as zoning reform alongside individuals dedicated to pet projects. That’s the way forward. In this column, my focus is on the small things that can be done first by a handful of focused community members and local business or property owners. It’s only after these initial wins are recognized that larger next steps involving the city itself, collective development, and other community organizations will get buy-in.
To make this work in your city, just get started. Find the key themes that resonate with whatever initial group forms. But remember that just as no business plan survives contact with its first customer, no placemaking effort ever ends exactly where it began. The following 10 ways to rejuvenate Main Streets come from my own experience, and I hope they’ll help you and your city too.
1. Remember the triumvirate
Every great place begins with the three Bs: Beans (coffee), Beer, and Bakery. This recipe for revitalization has been an anchor in my own often-messy mix of programmatic place-making, involving real estate investment and development, the creation (and operation) of third places, and advocacy on behalf of Main-Street entrepreneurs. Food and drink have always been at the center of how relationships are formed, where ideas are workshopped, and where deals get done. The same is true for catalyzing a place.
2. Encourage public art
Your city’s brand is not the local chamber’s slogan or the city’s live-work-play-esque motto. It’s the perception of a place. Public art projects (like murals) are the simplest, highest-return-on-investment way to begin changing people’s perspective on a city. Main Street buildings are canvases that have the power to contribute to, or detract from, the public realm. Bad murals can be painted over; the risk is small. Meanwhile, good ones become a billboard for downtown and a point of pride for residents. If there are ordinance obstacles to creating public art, then remove or at least reduce them.
3. Encourage proprietor- and citizen-led efforts
Even relatively small cities now have an excess of rules on every topic. Too often, ordinances are piecemeal efforts at stopping something that someone doesn’t like. Unless there is a clear and direct health or safety risk, overwrought processes for city approvals of private efforts should be scaled back or simply unenforced. Allow individual or collective sidewalk events. Let those nonconforming sidewalk chairs and planters be. Stop with the restricted striped palette for store awnings. Get out of the way of private businesses creating rolling “through the downtown” events. Instead, view them as test runs for future larger city-sanctioned events that could become part of the civic calendar.
Sometimes the barriers between a good idea and its execution are needless, or at least needlessly challenging.

4. Proactively remove excuses
Sometimes the barriers between a good idea and its execution are needless, or at least needlessly challenging. A simple case in point is event insurance. A policy for a single-day event can run several hundred dollars. Yet an annual policy, which would allow someone to hold a number of events, is often just two or three times the cost. Such roadblocks are easy to overlook on an individual basis. But en masse, they can have a suffocating effect on activities that help breathe fresh life into downtowns. Study why different ideas don’t work, find recurring themes, and solve the immediate need.
5. Chip away vendor restrictions
It’s often claimed that temporary vendors (think food trucks) act in unfair competition to brick-and-mortar ones. In practice, however, restricting them actually harms those traditional businesses. Strip restrictions down to the basic elements that are truly needed, and get rid of those that make it unnecessarily hard for businesses to succeed.

Consider this scenario:
A small brewery gets started in a newly restored building. They want to expand with a beer garden, including space for a food vendor. But being small and new, it’s difficult to get three different food trucks to come to their unproven location each week. Meanwhile, they have an acquaintance with a pizza trailer who wants to open a permanent location but doesn’t yet have the funds and isn’t sure if this downtown is ready for them.
The brewery’s fate would play out differently depending on how the city regulates vendors. In hypothetical Cities A and B, food trucks are allowed three days per week with typical restrictions, such as operating hours and distance from a comparable brick-and-mortar establishment. But City B gets more specific, allowing each vendor to post up only one day per week outside a given business.
Under those conditions, City A gets a financially stable local brewery—plus the bonus of wood-fired pizza in the beer garden (or to pick up on the way home). Suddenly, you have two successful small businesses that are sure to bring new friends into adjacent storefronts. City B has an anemic brewery struggling to keep the doors open.
6. Stop hampering micro and temporary businesses
Anything that promotes short-term or small-scale business activities, including pop-ups and seasonal endeavors, should be encouraged. By the same token, ordinances that stand in the way of these efforts should be eliminated. Allow for the temporary to be imperfect—even nonconforming. After all, it’s not permanent, and that’s the point. Temporary vendors are cost-effective incubators that allow for low-risk audience testing. They also give owners who aren’t ready to invest in full redevelopment or rehabilitation a chance to try things out. The successful businesses inevitably open a fixed location in the same place they first built their following.
7. Risk becoming a first mover
Businesses contributing to the early stages of a downtown’s revitalization are taking a big chance in an untested market. They are often long on creativity but short on capital and business acumen. Without that shortfall, they would likely be opening somewhere that’s already “made it.” So to attract a strong cohort of entrepreneurs who will help form the foundation of a city’s rebirth, it’s important to help make their success less uncertain.
To attract a strong cohort of entrepreneurs who will help form the foundation of a city’s rebirth, it’s important to help make their success less uncertain.

8. First, make it smaller
Encourage small spaces that can match the size of your city, the skill of the owner, and the talents of the local labor pool. A 35-seat restaurant that’s packed on Saturday with a wait too long for a customer’s schedule is a momentary disappointment, but they’ll come back and try again. A 120-seat restaurant with only a few occupied tables in a cavernous dining room is depressing (and financially untenable). If people experience the latter, they’ll probably stay away for good—from the restaurant and maybe even from all of downtown.
9. Make it non-fragile
Single-revenue-source businesses need a large catch basin. To cover rent and make a decent living, a cool record store has to start with a huge pool of potential customers to find enough vinyl aficionados. But a record store that serves beer and wine while hosting live music once or twice a month works—in even a small city. A creperie is weird (I should know). A coffee shop with crepes is still weird, but in all the right ways. This kind of mixture of offerings captures overlap- ping audiences. It gives would-be customers permission to come in, even if they are uninterested (at first) in one of the offerings. In addition to encouraging businesses that offer more than one product, promote ones with an experiential element that causes customers to linger.
10. Make it easier
Commercial real estate brokers have a tendency to treat initial tenants and leases like standard commercial transactions. Don’t let them. They shouldn’t come anywhere near marketing or leasing. In up-and-coming areas, at least at the start, incentives are partially about money but are more so driven by purpose. If an idea fails, the landlord will still have a building. The tenant, on the other hand, may have a loan payment to make long after the store goes dark—or, worse yet, a bankruptcy. Get creative and give the two parties ideas that are mutually beneficial. For instance, help landlords bring light and life to a darkened storefront by allowing some of the temporary vendors I talked about previously. It’s a low-risk test run, and it helps prevent “empty teeth’’ along Main Street. Relationships like these create true believers and passionate ambassadors who will band together as downtown grows.
A vibrant Main Street cannot be designed or curated in one fell swoop. The very thing that makes a downtown special is that it evolves slowly until it finds its own cast of charac- ters. No single property owner controls the narrative, and that’s exactly how it should be. Avoid the tendency to be overly prescriptive, to create your own “snow globe” of an imagined place.
Conclusion
Placemaking involves a messy mix of navigating individual incentives and personalities while also engaging in large-scale dealmaking. Revitalizing a Main Street can be deeply gratifying, intensely frustrating, or both at times. Every community needs more daring people to invest in it. Having an incremental approach is critical to surviving the marathon.
Start small, stay forward-focused, and let’s create more great places where people can live and gather.
Jason Cox is an active restaurateur and real estate developer who uses both to engage in active placemaking and revitalization. He focuses heavily on incremental development and the creation of third places that activate and contribute to the public realm.