Growth is good

By Temple Ligon

This past Tuesday morning, June 9, at the Capital City Club there was the first of three breakfast meetings concerning the growth of downtown Columbia. Developers Don Tomlin, Tom Prioreschi and Ben Arnold sat at the front table while each presented his recent housing developments and projected what to expect in the near future.

Tomlin recognized two problems. (1) The City of Columbia and Richland County and the schools inside the city limits miss out on about 60% of the property because by law that property is tax-free. (2) With some 6,000 new private student housing units under way, what happens after they graduate? Right now, there is nowhere near the housing available downtown should they want to stay in Columbia to begin their careers and their families.

Prioreschi suggested suburban growth in single-family housing is far too expensive for government to support. The typical infrastructure accommodation in the suburbs is too much in public money, something like $125,000 per unit was Prioreschi’s guess. The same infrastructure is already pretty much in place downtown, so government greatly benefits from city core development. An efficient concentration of brains and wealth and property taxes is what we need, said Prioreschi.

Arnold shared his statistical search for what was happening elsewhere in the region, and he claimed Columbia was almost all right. The numbers in demand and occupancy in similar cities in the Southeast led Arnold to say Columbia was in an inviting and enviable position.

Arnold then itemized a downtown wish list, including a Main Street grocery and a movie theater.

Publix at the corner of Huger and Gervais appears to be doing well, but it is still too far for a sensible walking distance from Main Street. Arnold wants a smaller facility right on Main Street.

A single movie house can’t make it unless it’s the Nickelodeon model with classics as a niche market and membership subsidies. For the past thirty years or more movie houses have made their money off the concession stand, while the sold tickets put money in the hands of the distributors, not the movie house management.

Six screens, say, could make money because the volume of tickets sold should send just so much business from six theaters to the one concession stand. One of the best in the country at this is the Angelika Film Center, which I found in Houston in 1997, the year it opened. It closed in 2010, mostly due to the lack of residential growth downtown. Angelika made good use of a defunct convention center in the heart of the city, and now the residents are locating downtown maybe enough to bring Angelika back.

I may remember this wrong, but I recall six screens in the Houston Angelika, the other one being in New York’s Greenwich Village, still a success story. In Houston Angelika had one or two theaters dedicated to the classics, kind of like a Nickelodeon schedule, and one or two at the other end of the movie market with blockbusters and current releases chasing the mass audience. Then a foreign film or two might fit in. Point being, Angelika sold a hell of a lot of popcorn but also all kinds of food, good food – so good I gather some people weren’t going to the movies, really, but going to dinner.

Angelika needs to be checked out, Mr. Arnold, to include its flagship in Greenwich Village and its far-flung branches in Dallas TX, Fairfax VA and San Diego CA. Careful, these are all big cities, but somehow Columbia could slide in with a proven attendance count around town in the existing theaters.

The next gathering on downtown growth at the Capital City Club will be again on Tuesday, but this time it’s July 14, Bastille Day, so maybe someone will pull in an influence or two from Paris, the world’s most beautiful big city. The second talk is on our riverfronts. And the third and final talk on downtown development, Columbia Common, is coming on August 11, anotherTuesday morning at 7:30. Check with Lisa Marie Field at the club for any available seats, [email protected].

By the way, you self-employed, breakfast is on the house. The good people at Free Times and the club are carrying the costs.

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