Real Estate & Construction  November 17, 2008

Downtown Loveland: Build around art

LOVELAND – With a vibrant arts-and-culture scene as the foundation, Loveland can revitalize its downtown core and create a new economic engine for the city, a prominent urban development expert told about 200 mostly Lovelanders interested in the process.

William Hudnut, senior resident fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute, was the keynote speaker Thursday evening at “Destination Downtown,” a presentation sponsored by the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado at the Fountains Events Center in west Loveland.

His audience — elected officials, city staffers, artists and activists — gobbled up Hudnut’s advice before hearing from a panel of downtown development experts from around Colorado talk about the nuts-and-bolts of putting it into action.

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“Downtown provides the signature for the community,´ said Hudnut, a former three-term mayor of Indianapolis who presided over the resurgence in that city’s core district. “You have to make places in a downtown worthy of our affection.”

Addressing the polarization in Loveland — with 1.5 million square feet of new, gleaming retail space along Interstate 25 contrasted with a downtown district in need of a makeover — Hudnut said the two can coexist and thrive.

“I want to have my cake and eat it, too,” he said. “I want to have that development along I-25, but I want a vibrant downtown, too. It’s important. You can’t be a suburb of nothing.”

Hudnut walked his audience through a 10-step process whereby public officials, developers, arts groups and citizens would collaborate on the revitalization of downtown Loveland, turning it into a place where thousands more people would live, work and play.

Keys include paying attention to basic services; fixing broken infrastructure; sticking with a plan; mixing uses to include residential, retail and office; preserving heritage and, most importantly, building on arts and culture.

“Be what you are,” Hudnut said. “You are the No. 2 small arts town in America.”

Loveland City Council member Cecil Gutierrez, a strong supporter of downtown redevelopment, said after the presentation that members of the Loveland Downtown Team — a group made up of elected officials, city staff members, business interests and citizens — had taken steps to prepare for implementation of the vision Hudnut described.

“The team has done a lot of research, a lot of information gathering, and a lot of legwork,” he said in a Business Report interview. “The issue facing the council now is how to make the funding happen. We do this about every 10 years in this community. We get to this point, and then the wheels kind of fall off because the funding issue can’t be solved.”

The city likely will spend $1.8 million in the next few months to acquire land for a multi-level parking garage — a key piece of the downtown puzzle — but will need more than the $4 million appropriated to build it, Gutierrez said.

“What we have planned is not enough,” he said. “We’ll have to be creative in putting together a public-private partnership to make it happen. … It’s a matter of convincing the rest of the city council. The next step is a big sales job, to be honest.”

LOVELAND – With a vibrant arts-and-culture scene as the foundation, Loveland can revitalize its downtown core and create a new economic engine for the city, a prominent urban development expert told about 200 mostly Lovelanders interested in the process.

William Hudnut, senior resident fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute, was the keynote speaker Thursday evening at “Destination Downtown,” a presentation sponsored by the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado at the Fountains Events Center in west Loveland.

His audience — elected officials, city staffers, artists and activists — gobbled up Hudnut’s advice before hearing from a panel of downtown development experts…

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