City officials are continuing to work on ways to make downtown Owensboro more liveable. At a recent City Commission work session, commissioners discussed Article 21, which focuses on creating a constant movement of people in the downtown area and stimulating private investment.
City officials said concerns have been raised about the potential for residential living in downtown Owensboro. Right now, consultants are working to formulate a strategy to put the City’s downtown master plan into place.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested into downtown Owensboro over the last few years in order to bring more people to the area.
Older, residential neighborhood areas are protected from major development, Shelton added, and showed City Commissioners the only areas that will allow for residential living — namely, a number of ground-floor spaces that sit behind storefront commercial properties.
$373 million has been invested into downtown Owensboro and the total land assessment has increased by $106 million between 2002-2016.
A horizontal mixed-use option — where storefronts sit in front of the potential residential properties — have been successful in cities such as Victorville and Pleasanton, California.
“Everybody says the commercial storefronts are strongly encouraged because it does give the idea of people walking on the sidewalk and being able to easily access,” she said. “Of course, there’s safety issues if you have residential in the front.”
Commissioner Jeff Sanford said he hated to compare Owensboro to Bowling Green, but that their downtown area had several, very nice properties that had first floor, residential frontage.
“If that’s strongly discouraged, why would they do that, and we wouldn’t try do that?” Sandford asked.
Shelton said she could look at the changes made to their ordinance that encouraged that, but that Owensboro’s Article 21 focused highly on commercial storefronts.
“I understand the movement of people, but if you don’t have people to move, it doesn’t do any good,” he said. “My question is, ‘How do we get people to move to the area? Whether it’s on the backside of a commercial or all first-floor, we just need to figure something out.”
Mayor Tom Watson said first-floor Florida condos were much cheaper than higher-floor condos because of the lack of privacy.
“It doesn’t seem logical to me, but maybe I’m old-fashioned,” he said.
Owensboro Fire Department Chief Steve Mitchell said vertical living would be easier for fire codes to be upheld.
“Let’s say you do commercial front with any type of residential behind — with new construction it wouldn’t be that hard because you could [build it to fit] the fire codes, but with a current structure, it would be very expensive to do a retail front and apartments in the back with an existing structure. It’d have to be at least a two-hour firewall,” Mitchell said.
Commissioner Pam Smith-Wright said the problem was that there wasn’t enough affordable downtown property for young people.
“I can’t live downtown,” she said. “We’ve got to find a way to have some affordable spaces for people. Until then, we’re right here, we’re stuck.”
Shelton said downtown could be expanded and that affordable housing could become a reality with the Northwest revitalization Shelton is currently working on.
“I know you can’t borrow $250 million to make your downtown nice, and then not have your property values go up, so which way do you want it?” Watson asked. “Do you want a super nice downtown, or do you want to have the old downtown, so that’s the [problem] you get into when you have progress.”
