Main Spotlight: Breaking Barriers to Acquiring Commercial Properties
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As Main Streets leaders, we talk a lot about how to create spaces that feel truly welcoming — to visitors, to residents, and to newcomers. We listen to and consider the opinions, preferences and cultural backgrounds within our communities and work hard to build Main Streets districts that reflect the people there. As many of us know, this can be a tricky balancing act — communities are never a monolith, and it can be a struggle to reconcile the competing visions, ideas, and needs of our stakeholders. Sometimes this struggle leaves us feeling like we’ve fallen short, even like we’ve failed some in our communities who we’re committed to including.
I’m interested in surfacing these moments of tension and struggle, because I think we have a lot to learn from each others’ experiences of grappling with the questions embedded in creating inclusive Main Streets. I want Main Streeters to know they’re not alone. By sharing not just our joyful moments of success, but our tough moments of indecision, doubt, and yes, even failure, we can build a more honest, more reflective movement together.
I recently sat down with Cathleen Edgerly, the Executive Director of Downtown Lansing, whose staff has recently been grappling with difficult and diverse conversations centered around public spaces. Over the past few years, in the face of an increasingly prevalent unhoused population with a high degree of care and social service needs, Downtown Lansing has discussed issues of who they’re serving and why. Although her team has found no easy answers, they’ve grown stronger and more committed to their core values of creating a downtown where all people and all places truly matter. I’m grateful to Cathleen for her courage in sharing her story — her team’s commitment to learning and growth through difficulty is emblematic of the strength, compassion, and leadership that’s so core to our network.
Lansing is Michigan’s Capital City, located in the center of the state, and is home to more than 100,000 people. It’s a diverse city with a wide range of incomes. Downtown Lansing has a high percentage of senior and lower-income people, particularly in the area around Reutter Park, the city’s oldest park. For years, the park had been a space many people turned their backs on — many residents of the surrounding buildings reported feeling unsafe there because of visible drug activity and the perception of crime. Reutter Park is across from a library, and had recently installed a playground, but it still wasn’t drawing many families. Residents around the park had been clamoring for something to be done, and the City’s Parks & Recreation Department held a series of public input meetings about the park. Alongside the City, Downtown Lansing was committed to listening to residents through that process. Many residents and daytime workers were calling for more activities and activations to help make Reutter Park an accessible and welcoming space throughout the year.
In 2022, Cathleen and her team landed on a pop-up holiday market as one way to activate Reutter Park. The Kringle Market would be great for downtown’s start-up businesses and entrepreneurs, and would draw families, tourists, and daytime workers — a natural customer base to help activate the park. As Cathleen says, “Winter feels like it lasts forever in Michigan, so we were looking at a number of ways to get people outside and embrace it.”
For months, Cathleen and her team worked hard to get the market off the ground. When it launched in November of 2022, they were surprised to be met immediately by a very critical press article. The piece, which quoted advocates for the unhoused, accused the market’s organizers of ignoring the needs of the unhoused and purposefully displacing them from the park. The article honed in on the market booths — small shelters with heaters inside — as a symbol of the market’s cruelty. If Downtown Lansing could create temporary shelters for commerce, why couldn’t they do something to help the many, many vulnerable downtown residents who were forced to endure the Michigan winter outdoors?
The article sparked several more news stories, brought protestors to the market, and brought TV news cameras to the doors outside Downtown Lansing’s headquarters. Cathleen says, “This felt deeply emotional for our staff. We had worked hard to be inclusive. But instead of dismissing the pushback, we decided to take it to heart.” This moment of choosing to be open to conversation and reflection would change the way Downtown Lansing operates and how they think about their relationship with the communities they serve.
Cathleen knew immediately that her staff needed a guide for their reflections, and that that required a specific skill set. She brought on Dr. Linda Bailey, a DEI consultant, to lead her team over the coming months in some tough conversations about the organization was serving and why. One such conversation centered around whether the organization had an obligation to help provide social services for unhoused residents with a great many overlapping physical and mental health needs. Downtown Lansing was not set up to be a social service organization — would focusing on this area of great need pull them away from their core mission and the needs of others within their communities?
Dr. Bailey’s advice for staff, as Cathleen recalls, was the reminder that their role was not to “be the firefighter and fight the fire” but as those standing next to the fire, look at what they could do to help. In other words, lack of specific training, expertise, or even stated mission should never be a barrier to helping where need is the greatest. The team began looking for specific ways they could use their resources and connections to do outreach, and help make social services more accessible to those who need them.
The difficult conversation that began with the Kringle Market has spurred Downtown Lansing to take on several new initiatives. They joined property owners and businesses in funding a street outreach team, and worked with partner organizations to raise additional funds to cover year-round services and outreach. The street team is trained to approach unhoused residents, especially those in crisis, and connect them with care and services. Downtown Lansing has also made use of physical community message boards around downtown to highlight information about shelters, free medical and substance use services, and other offerings.
Cathleen and her team have focused on strengthening ties to social service and advocacy organizations that work with unhoused residents. Downtown Lansing has a strong partnership and growing relationships with nonprofit shelters and other groups in the district, and has followed their lead in how best to advocate and serve downtown’s most vulnerable residents. Among other initiatives, they have helped shape a norm among business owners and residents around who to call if they see someone in crisis. Knowing that police involvement can sometimes make a crisis worse, the community has a shared practice of reaching out to frontline service organizations first.
None of this has been easy. Business owners have raised legitimate health and safety concerns. Even deeply compassionate business owners say that unhoused people in visible crisis are driving customers away by adding to the perception that downtown is unsafe. And the sheer volume of need shows no sign of abating: many of the unhoused people are elderly, with health and care needs that even the social service sector is struggling to meet.
The Kringle Market ran again in 2023 with greater visibility for nonprofit social service and advocacy partners, but it will likely not be renewed in 2024. Cathleen cites a higher cost due to new, tighter regulations for what’s required to build out temporary commercial spaces. She says, “It’s just not a good use of resources with so many other needs downtown. It does feel like a loss after all this time — it feels like giving up, and that’s been hard.” She says she’s grateful to Downtown Lansing’s Board of Directors who has been deeply supportive and understanding of the difficult questions around the market’s future.
Cathleen points out that for the two years that it was in place, the Kringle Market did achieve many of the initial goals of activating the park, which had been important to the mostly older, low-income residents of the surrounding buildings. It brought more people to Reutter Park at more hours throughout the day. Residents reported seeing less drug distribution and crime, and feeling safer in the park. Market participants pointed to increased sales and visibility for their businesses. For many in the community, that was enough to consider the market a success. But for Cathleen and her team, the picture that has emerged has been a more nuanced one: the market was a moment of growth, the backdrop for a difficult but deeply necessary regrounding in the organization’s values of treating all people as they matter.
“What’s the role of a Main Street organization?” asks Cathleen, “Is it just business support and marketing? We are beholden to those things, but we’re also beholden to community development, to meeting the specific needs of our specific communities.” She says that at Downtown Lansing, they have come to recognize their obligation not as just an organization with a narrow purview, but as connectors with access to a broad range of businesses, residents, nonprofits, and partners. Why not leverage this network and its resources to help the most vulnerable?
She says that through the difficulty of the past few years, Downtown Lansing has grown stronger as a team, and has made choices truly rooted in their shared values. And she knows that the tough conversations are ongoing and that there will be disagreement and conflict not just among stakeholders, but also among the team itself. But she also believes that despite this, the team has built an incredible amount of trust, and is better equipped to meet the ongoing challenges of the future.
Criticism can be an opportunity for reflection that leads to growth.
You’re not the firefighter but you might be standing next to the fire. You do not need to be an expert to help where there is need.
Tough conversations sometimes require an outside facilitator such as a DEI specialist.
Think of your role as a connector of resources: How can you leverage that role to meet community need?
Creatively brainstorm beyond policing; consider the example of the street outreach team as a model.
I am deeply grateful to Cathleen for sharing her story so openly and honestly so that I and others can learn from her and her team’s experience. To me, one of the most valuable parts of the Main Street movement is that it is a network rich in collective wisdom. There is so much lived experience that we all hold, and to be able to share the tough parts of this work with others who may be facing something similar means that no one of us needs to face these challenges alone. To me, this is what it means to lead with strength and vulnerability.