Officials with Gateway Planning Group spoke candidly about the city’s growth and development at Thursday’s Rooster Booster breakfast, hosted by the Greater Owensboro Chamber of Commerce. It was standing-room-only for many as they listened to Gateway President Scott Polikov address the question lingering on many residents’ minds: Where does Owensboro go from here?
The planning group spent months developing the plans for Owensboro’s downtown riverfront in 2008, and now they are meeting with local leaders to see what are the city’s plans moving forward.
While the Owensboro Riverfront District Master Plan for downtown Owensboro is two-thirds complete, there is still more to be completed.
According to Polikov, people all across the country have taken notice of downtown Owensboro’s new layout. He said the growth in Owensboro had never been about the size of the city, but its authenticity.
As Gateway began planning and researching the city more than a decade ago, Polikov and his team realized there’d been a decades-long disconnect between the Ohio River and the downtown area.
“What we knew was that any great city or region isn’t healthy if its downtown isn’t healthy,” Polikov said.
After close observation, Gateway broke the master plan for downtown Owensboro’s into the focuses of housing choices, diversity, economic development and form zoning. On Thursday, Polikov focused heavily on housing in the downtown area, something local leaders have been working to develop with the addition of a new, high-rise hotel and condo/apartment complex.
However, much more needs to be done in order to make downtown a place where people not only want to visit but live, he said.
“[Developing downtown housing] was part of the original plan, and I spoke about that at the State of the City,” said Mayor Tom Watson. “That’s the problem with Fourth Street Live in Louisville — you’re solely dependent on transient traffic. They don’t have any people who live downtown.”
Polikov said that while downtown Owensboro is “rockin’,” many can’t visualize themselves living there because the area lacks a sense of cohesion.
“We have to establish a character, a scale and walkability, and then make the rules and keep them simple,” he said. “Money is going to go to the places that are sustainable and offers the quality of life they want.”
Polikov asked the crowd at Rooster Booster which demographic in Owensboro was suffering from a lack of housing more than any other.
“Who is the most powerful, in terms of spending power, low-risk liability purchaser or renter out there that we aren’t creating housing for?” he asked. “It’s the divorced mother, educated, and she does a great job, and she’s taking care of her kids. Maybe or maybe not, the father is involved. When we talk about the working class, it’s not necessarily white conservatives.”
Watson agreed with Polikov’s statement about housing but shook off the idea of having Gateway Planning develop another master plan for downtown Owensboro. Watson said he’d rather see the original master plan through first, with the focus on housing being one of its components.
“There were some people concerned about where we go from here. It’s good to look into the future, but to put another plan together would be extremely costly,” he said. “So much hinges on this last hotel. It’s a huge component of the downtown TIF (tax increment funding) doing what it’s supposed to do to relieve the debt right now. The downtown TIF isn’t paying its own way right now — the general fund is.”
While Watson said there are potential prospects for development at the MidAmerica Airpark and the land to the west of the riverfront, he’d rather see the original downtown master plan through, namely, the housing aspect, before getting involved with additional development.
“That plan was made 10 years ago and we’re barely two-thirds of the way through it,” he said. “We’ve got to find the land for housing downtown. I’m still honed in on what we can do in the next 12 to 15 months. We just have to keep going forward. When a community’s momentum doesn’t keep up, it gets extremely hard to find it again.”
Polikov echoed that statement in his own words as he concluded his speech at Rooster Booster.
“It is so important that you do not leave [the Owensboro riverfront] as a static thing. I think your opportunity is in reducing the increasing cost of housing by bringing apartments downtown and increasing supply and demand, and building on what you have,” he said. “You have so many things that a lot of other places don’t have, and they know about you, and they’re very, very envious of you. Use economic development to help the folks that don’t have the capacity to help themselves. Do this by giving them a great opportunity to live where those who do have the spending power to live wherever they want, can also live there.”
