On December 18th, the Piqua Improvement Corporation purchased the old Town and Country Furniture buiding, a large structure conviently located right next to Piqua’s City Building for $545,000. The 45,960 suqare foot building sites on just under four tenths of an acre and current designs is for the building to be a potential boutique hotel. The plan makes sense, the Fort Piqua Plaza is still a popular venue for large events and having a lodging option downtown would be welcome for out of town visitors to the Plaza.
But even in a larger context this purchase make sense. By purchasing the property through their Community Improvement Corporation, the City of Piqua is exercising a level of control on the site that will give the community leverage over what will eventually be there.
One of the aspects of community life that is always somewhat entertaining is watching social media chatter talk about how certain communities need certain retail establishments or stores. These comments usually say someting like, “This City Needs to put X-Y-Z here.”
Well, “The City” (and it doesn’t matter what community we are talking about) isn’t quite that powerful. Local communities can’t choose what restaraunts and retail shops set up shop in their community, unless they control the land. Many times controlling that land only comes through by outright purchasing property. And only then, the City would still need to work with developers and these establishments to convince them to come to town.
One such business is Trader Joe’s. Everyone tends to think that this grocery store needs to be in the community. Here’s the catch, the folks at Trader Joe’s often know more about the community than the people who actually run it. They hire employees and consultants to know very granual demographic data to see if certain communities are a fit for their products; they look at median household income, household size, educational attainment, how many cars families have, etc. If a community can’t meet their stringent requirements — the business isn’t coming to town. Regardless if the local government owns a site or not.
There is a story that before he was California Governor for a second time, then Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown tried to court Trader Joe’s to come to the community. He personally drove Trader Joe executives all across his town showing off potential locations. Trader Joe’s didn’t buckle; the sites had potential but didn’t meet their demographic profile. In other words, Trader Joe’s isn’t in the business of making a community; that community better be there before Trader Joe’s even thinks about setting up shop.
By purchasing the old Town and Country Furniture, the City has stacked the odds in their favor that the development that will occur there will be the kind of development that the city wants to see in the future. Otherwise, someone else could come in purchase the property and redevelop the site to anything that is currently allowed in the zoning code — those might be end uses that are great, but there is a risk that the end uses could be less than optimal.
Granted, a price tag of north of $500,000 for a vacant building is certainly going to raise eyebrows, but the City of Piqua is not leaving it’s future to chance, it’s trying to control the destiny of their downtown by making these kind of strategic investments that will pay off in the future. The City did the same thing by tacking the Fort Piqua Plaza project and the Lock Nine project, it is taking the same approach here as well.
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Well done, Piqua!
Again, such a marked difference in strategic planning and community involvement as compared to Troy. Kudos to Piqua for picking some leadership that is actually LEADING and not in it for their own interests.
It must be exciting to be a part of that rebuild. I really support pulling in ideas and buy-in from the actual community, and it seems like example after example, that's what Piqua is doing. Troy feels like it's pulling further away from its hometown roots. More and more outsiders with money are being catered to. Who's moving into all of the new expensive houses? Generally, it's not people who grew up in Troy.