What is a "Placemaker-in-Chief?" An Interview with Damon Hemmerdinger of Camp North End
What is a "Placemaker-in-Chief?" An Interview with Damon Hemmerdinger of Camp North End
A developer's point of view on why placemaking is essential to invest in.
Placemaking is the art of transforming spaces into vibrant community hubs that foster connection, creativity, and a sense of belonging. In recent years, a new breed of visionary leaders has emerged, dedicated to revitalizing urban areas and breathing new life into forgotten pockets of our cities. One such pioneer is Damon Hemmerdinger, co-president of ATCO Properties & Management and the driving force behind Camp North End, a highly ambitious adaptive reuse project in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In this insightful interview, Hemmerdinger shares his philosophy on placemaking, the challenges and triumphs of transforming a historic industrial site into a thriving mixed-use district, and his vision for creating truly inclusive and sustainable communities that celebrate Charlotte and its rich history.
What does it mean to be a “placemaker-in-chief”? What does that look like for you day to day?
I believe that high-quality real estate that makes people fall in love with it and feel connected to it has greater value than the generic products. And so placemaking is a whole set of things, activities, and techniques to think about real estate from a people-first point of view, as opposed to buildings first, and to create that emotional connection. And then the “chief” part is sort of tongue in cheek, but I'm working with a great team of people who are doing lots of that work in specific areas.
What does that look like tangibly? What are some examples of interesting placemaking in Camp North End?
I'll give you a couple of different angles to consider. First off, we've really utilized programming, marketing, and events in a unique way compared to most real estate owners. As a result, we have several thousand people visiting every week, and they love coming to our stores and restaurants to do business. Additionally, there are employees and companies eager to have their offices in North End. We'll soon find out if this interest translates into leasing apartments.
If we go back to the beginning of Camp North in 2017, hardly anyone in Charlotte had ever been to that part of the city unless they lived there or were using it as a shortcut on I-77. There wasn't much happening in that neighborhood to draw people from other parts of the city. Initially, our goal was to create an appetite and demand for office and retail spaces in this location. We did this by starting with events such as music performances, food truck gatherings, and art exhibitions every Friday night during the summer and fall of 2020. Additionally, we collaborated with other event organizers to bring activities like Vintage Charlotte and the Congregation Show to Camp North. These events not only attracted people to our venue but also piqued their interest to explore further.
Moving on to our current strategy, we now have regular weekly programming from Tuesday through Sunday. For instance, Tuesdays feature a book club, Wednesdays host a farmers market, Thursdays often screen movies, and the weekends offer various activities.
The second aspect revolves around architecture and design. We've set ourselves apart with our unique buildings, which are a rarity in Charlotte. People enjoy the ambiance of Camp North due to its distinct architectural features. Furthermore, we've focused on placemaking, a process similar to staging a house for sale. In this case, we've adorned the space with string lights, planters overflowing with vines, and repurposed shipping containers with eye-catching signage. These elements contribute to creating a lived-in atmosphere, transforming the space from sterile to inviting.
It’s really interesting that you're almost saying that good placemaking is good marketing. And I don't know if I ever really thought about the connection like that.
I mean, I think that's right, in the sense that the goal of a marketing campaign is to form an emotional connection with your customer, right? So it's like, that was a funny commercial or a sad one or whatever, you know, but they're playing on heartstrings to get you to feel connected to the brand when you walk into the grocery store or do whatever. That's how I think of placemaking.
In the real estate context, you can't really want to scare people. That's one way you can emotionally connect with them. So we focus on the ideas of surprise and delight. If you round the corner and see something you wouldn't have expected and you smile, that's a little bit of emotional connection. If that happens a couple of times, and then you think, "Oh, my parents are visiting from out of town, and I bring them to show it off as a place to go," now you're proud of it as your own thing or part of your community. So, yeah, I think that's exactly right. It overlaps a lot with marketing.
So what do you think have been, obviously you've been working on this project for many years. And so, how is your approach from 2017? How does that differ from your 2024 approach?
Yeah, I mean, lots of details and tactical things change, but the strategy has, at least at a placemaking level, remained consistent throughout the overall campus development. Obviously, we've experienced a slower pace in leasing office space than anticipated, mainly due to the impact of COVID-19. With fewer people working in the office every day compared to pre-COVID times, there's a noticeable decrease in weekly weekday traffic on site.
We've transitioned from one-off events to more regular ones. It takes as much time to plan one movie night as it does to plan ten movie nights, and promoting ten movie nights takes much less than ten times the effort compared to promoting just one. So, we've learned to adapt our approach. Our leasing strategy remains focused on local tenants for the retail side. However, on the office side, we've had to reconfigure some spaces to be smaller than initially planned due to the disruptions caused by COVID. But now, we're finally at the stage where we're about to welcome our first residents on-site, which marks the next significant milestone in the project.
So how are you managing? Camp North End used to be a military area from World War Two, right? So how are you balancing the historic preservation of that with the things that are popular now or like the neon signs and the, you know, crazy, funky patterns? How do you balance that?
So, in my opinion, there are historic preservation projects, and then there are adaptive reuse projects. And they're not the same thing. The Historic Preservation Project, which is what we'll do for the building, will have very few changes to what's there. We'll essentially restore its old glory to what it was. Do you spend time in New York at all? I do. Grand Central Terminal's main arrival hall is historic preservation. Adaptive reuse is different.
So we're embracing lots of changes to the buildings because they were not functional for their current purpose. For example, they basically had no windows in these buildings because they were warehouses and had clerestory windows overhead that let sunlight in, but you didn't need to see at the same time because there were stacks of products and things against the walls. So, we're doing adaptive reuse, making changes where it makes sense. Some of those are changes we want to make, while others are changes we have to make, like adding more windows. Some changes are both what we want and good planning, like cutting Cosmic Avenue through those quarter-mile-long buildings. I think when you're not doing historic preservation, it's actually better for there to be contrast. So what's old is old, and what's new is new. We're not trying to pretend that what's new is old. Neon signs are fun; bright signs are fine on an old building. If you're trying to express some of the history while still appealing to modern tastes.
While you're doing this type of placemaking, do you ever consider things like sustainability or energy efficiency or equity, like a lot of these bigger bucket issues?
We do. So let's talk about equity first. Camp North is in Charlotte's poorest ZIP code, in a neighborhood still suffering from the impacts of redlining, urban renewal, and several generations of disinvestment. We're really proud of the fact that our neighbors in the seven neighborhoods of North End now use Camp North as their backyard. Their block parties often spill onto our property, and a community organization called NEC has its office space donated by us on our property. By opening it up, we've become the center of that neighborhood. We're fortunate that there were no residents and essentially no businesses being displaced by what we're doing. There certainly are effects on land value, which have systemic impacts on people that we acknowledge and are addressing as best we can.
For sustainability, there are like a dozen different frameworks that developers choose to use. LEED is one, Well Building is another, and Living Building Challenge is a third. We've chosen to work with Fitwel as the rubric we use. Fitwel is focused on occupant health and well-being, particularly on nudging occupant behavior in more healthy ways. Our campus is Fitwel certified, our completed office buildings are federally certified, and our apartments will be as well. This encompasses a variety of issues ranging from walking trails to drinking water, lighting, artwork, and more. We're not cutting-edge in terms of sustainability, but we're doing an appropriate level of work there. Any development that cleans up a brownfield in a dense urban location is, by definition, more sustainable than most LEED Platinum suburban projects. We're starting from a very good place, cleaning up a dirty site and creating a place where people can park their car once or maybe even eventually not by car, and then walk around.
So based on all this experience that you've had with this large development, what advice would you give to other developers who are maybe trying to specifically relate to placemaking and are maybe creating another large mixed-use commercial project? Like, what should they do? What should they avoid?
Yeah, so let me touch on another aspect, the sustainability of the equity piece. Four years before we became the owners of Camp North, there had been ten or twelve years of planning work in the North End by various groups: neighbors, city officials, advocates, and others. They identified the site for the development of something dense. The assumption then was that everything would be scraped and started over with new buildings. But the idea was there, a pre-existing support in the city and the community for doing something big here. So, number one, I think, to the extent you can find a site that the community wants to see something happen in or where you're able to collaboratively create that feeling, you're going to work with the community to get them on board. I think that's important.
Being able to buy the site at a price that allows you to make the kind of investments that are more than the standard is crucial. Having capital partners and investors with a longer-term time horizon helps. In our case, that shows up as the land value of each phase should increase over time as the market becomes more mature. Finding talented teammates, artists, vendors, and merchants who can do the things that are needed is also crucial. It's all very small-scale stuff, right? Developers, contractors, and architects are geared up for big projects, but doing something like painting a shipping container on-site is very hard to do in a traditional architect-contractor-owner relationship. So, finding the right team, either in-house or with trusted vendors, where you can work it out is important. And I think also being in a community that's growing is another important dynamic. If Charlotte were not experiencing population and job growth over time, this would be much harder than it is.
Yeah, so then narrowing again into placemaking, specifically. I think thinking about events as a way to create value, and furniture, and string lights and plants and all that as being the creative value is probably the most important of those lessons I can think of.
And then, are there any pitfalls, any mistakes that you made that you maybe learned from? Has anything gone wrong?
You know, actually, I'll give one more tip, which addresses mistakes. We save a pretty meaningful portion of our placemaking budget. After we're finished, we think we're all done. So, in other words, we think it's whatever $80,000 to do placemaking; in a big project, we would budget $100,000 and save the $20,000 for the end because there will always be either things that you want to add or things that didn't work right and need to get fixed or whatever. There's a book called Learning from Bryant Park that is about placemaking. And they talk about rapid iteration and small-scale pilots of things to test them before you make a big decision and a big purchase. And that's a similar idea.
There are plenty of developers out there who probably don't necessarily see placemaking as an integral part of their development, or they might not budget as much money for it. How would you respond to that type of argument? Why do you think that placemaking is important to do?
I sort of wouldn't respond to arguments, mostly because they don't have to, you know, they should do what they think is right. And I think diverse points of view among developers is totally healthy. I would say that if they don't [see placemaking as important], they're probably then prioritizing a quick exit to somebody else. And that's fine. But I think if you want to create, again, enduring value over a long time, more, it changes the way you think about it. For example, think about Rockefeller Center in New York City, where the developers built an extra street, an ice skating rink, and garden, and all that. Nobody made them do that. But that's what makes those blocks a coherent place with a center with bigger rents and bigger land value over time. So ultimately, it's an investment that generates value.
Why do you think it's important to have a quote-unquote, “placemaker-in-chief”? You're the only person I've ever spoken to that has a title like that. Why do you think somebody should invest in having a specific person in this type of role?
I mean, I think it's really the developer's job. Probably I think every developer, you know, is conducting a big team with lots of different skill sets and expertise and is sort of the in-chief coordinator who's got the vision and is, you know, organizing that team to execute on it. So, honestly, I'm just used to sort of a tongue-in-cheek way of describing it.
But I think ultimately, I don't know that you can outsource it to an employee on the team. It's got to be somebody who's at the center of the team because it's where all the pieces come together. It’s a big job almost like you need to be able to see the overarching vision.
That's true of every developer, whether it's something like a camera then or, you know, somebody who says, I can put a gas station on this corner of these two roads, and have to figure that out and, and execute on that vision. So I think the developers, you know, have lots of different interests and, and skill sets that kind of overlap. And your job is to bring those people together.
Sonia Birla is a student at UNC Charlotte majoring in Finance, Geography, and International Studies. She is the James Hardie Fellow for Urban Development Spring 2024.
 |
|