Trenton as a Fixer Upper

To a certain degree, trying to market the city of Trenton as a place for potential economic and business opportunity is a lot like trying to sell an old house in need of a lot of repair and restoration work. You talk about a great past, solid foundations and “great bones.” You point to nearby houses in great shape, talk about a terrific neighborhood and great location. You emphasize what a fantastic bargain it is, and the potential that can be realized with a modest additional investment, a lot of elbow grease, and a little time.  Yeah, a lot of this kind of pitch is hype. But a lot of people who are into fixer uppers, or places like Trenton, appreciate the hype. They share the vision of a future after the investment, the elbow grease, and the time. They relish the challenge, which makes the eventual payoff – financial and emotional – all the sweeter.

The thing is, you have to know the difference between hype and hallucination. Any old four-bedroom center-hall Colonial is not going to become Buckingham Palace. Most real estate agents know this. I’m not sure the City of Trenton does. Because some of the statements coming out from City Hall these days are so fanciful and so unrealistic to the point where they cloud the legitimate forward progress that genuinely seems to be stirring  here. And local press so eager to breathlessly and un-critically print these more fantastic claims do their readers no service in trying to figure out what’s really happening.

Take today’s Trentonian story by Penny Ray. The headline reads, “Former Bell Building to become mixed-use retail and residential property, expected to boost Trenton economy.” The project referred to in the headline does not even get mentioned until the 10th paragraph of the piece. Altogether, it merits only two paragraphs in the entire piece. What comes in the nine paragraphs before and the eleven after is little more than uncritical reportage of all the great things that are under way in Trenton that the current City Administration is claiming credit for. A lot of these claims stretch the City’s marketing attempts well past normal, boosterish hype and into the realm of hallucination. That strains the Administration’s credibility, and that of the Trentonian which  printed what is really just an extended press release.

The City’s Director of Housing and Economic Development, Monique King-Viehland, is quoted extensively in this article, in what Mr. Ray describes as a “recent interview,” apparently not one specifically about the Bell Building development mentioned in the headline. Ms. King-Viehland in turn refers to the findings contained in a city-wide Market Study dated Fall 2014 commissioned by the City of Trenton and performed by an outside research firm.

The main conclusion of this study is that, with Trenton’s population of over 80,000, there is enough disposable income available to be spent inside of the city limits to support much more economic activity in this town than is currently the case. According to this study, more than $40 Million dollars are being spent by city residents outside of Trenton on goods and services such as gas, groceries, shoes, health and personal care. This excess $40 Million, called “leakage,” is enough, according to Ms. King-Viehland, for her to claim, ““We have enough leakage in the community that there’s about 55,000 to 170,000 square feet of retail space that can be supported by the city of Trenton.”

That’s a very bold claim, indeed. According to Ms. Viehland, this study provides the numbers to support some further very specific goals.

King-Viehland said the city can support a grocery store in the West Ward as well as Downtown. She also said the city could support clothing stores and other businesses that sell the typical items found at big-box retailers such as Target.

“People are getting all of those things outside of the city,” King-Viehland said. “People are also obtaining services from lawyers, doctors, accountants and yoga instructors outside of the city of Trenton.”

This background mentioned in the article is the context, then, for the news about the Bell Building in downtown Trenton. Mr. Ray reports,

The former Bell Telephone building located at 216 East State Street is scheduled to be renovated into a mixed-use property with a retail store on the first floor and residential lofts on the upper six floors…  The mayor’s office said there is already a retail tenant lined up to lease the property, but city officials declined to release the name of the tenant. Ajax declined to comment because the project is in its infancy.

“The first floor is going to be 12,000 square feet of retail and the upper six floors will be 85 units of residential market rate loft apartments,” King-Viehland said. “We’ve always had a strong office market in the city, but this is significant because we’re talking about increasing retail, which is one of the five pillars of our citywide market study. It’s also significant because it increases walkability in the city, which is very important to us downtown. We want to fill storefronts, not with office, but with retail from a walkability perspective.”

Having disposed of the news about the Bell Building in those two paragraphs, Mr. Ray and Ms. King-Viehland then talk about some other wonderful things going on in Trenton.

On Thursday, New Jersey Association of Realtors will break ground on the site of their new headquarters at 10 Hamilton Avenue, which will be a 20,000 square-foot mixed-use building, expected to be completed next year. The building will host the NJ Realtors staff on floors two and three, and the ground floor will be leased out as retail, restaurant or office space.

“They had been looking at the city for some time, but they weren’t able to purchase the land necessary to build their building,” King-Viehland said. “We helped them facilitate that purchase. Their $9 million project will bring about 80 jobs into the city.”

That’s the second time in Jackson’s 11-month tenure that his administration has helped jumpstart a stagnant project that will bring jobs into the city.

By this point in the article, the fantasy quotient (or, less charitably, the bullshit) is running real high, and does Mr. Ray, the Trentonian, Ms. King-Viehland or the Jackson Administration no favors. There’s a lot here that needs a little unpacking.

In reverse order: the “stagnant project” that the Administration helped “jump-start”? The NJ Realtors (NJAR) project was announced back in January 2013 by Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes, in his annual “State of the County” address. This project, according to NJAR at the time, was facilitated by the Mercer County Improvement Authority (MCIA), and involved the sale of County-owned land. It was an accomplishment announced by the County 18 months before the Jackson Administration took office.

In fact, the City of Trenton’s role seems to have been more one of obstruction rather than “jumpstarting a stganant project.” In order to build a parking lot for the NJAR building, the project needed the city to vacate the right of way on an unused street called Conovers Alley. The County offered $1 (that’s $1 – One Dollar) for the alley. In June of last year, City Council balked at the price, holding out for $250. That impasse was settled, for $250, in September. This week, the NJAR construction project finally breaks ground.

If Ms. King-Viehland and Mr. Ray consider the City’s action on this project a “jump start,” remind me to look elsewhere when my battery’s dead. Or, God forbid, if I ever need a defibrilator.

Also, it seems to me that the City is leaning a little bit too much on the potential suggested by this Market Study, and ignoring Trenton’s actual experience on the ground. We read today that the Bell Building will offer 12,000 square feet of retail space, for which there is at least one signed, unnamed tenant. This may put a dent in the “55,000 to 170,000 square feet” of potential space we are “leaking” to other towns. But what about the thousands of square feet of retail space in the Broad Street Bank Building that’s been vacant for the near ten years since that property was rehabilitated? What about all of the other retail and commercial spaces shuttered and closed all over downtown Trenton? If there is so much “leakage,” why do so many buildings lie vacant and abandoned, and why do so many of the attempts to open stores downtown fail?

Ms. King-Viehland uses the Market Study to assert that the “city can support a grocery store in the West Ward as well as Downtown.” Then why did a grocery store on a Hermitage Avenue site in the West Ward fail more than six years ago, after two different operators? The same site, incidentally, for which the City of Trenton paid almost $700,000 in back rent back in 2012 after an ill-considered plan to use the site as a municipal courthouse. And why has the Ward’s only other grocery store on Pennington Avenue struggled to stay open, after a few changes in operators at that location?

And how can Ms. King-Viehland say “We’ve always had a strong office market in the city,” when so many buildings, even several right in the heart of downtown, have so much vacant space, such as the 39,521 square feet in this one modern building alone. A lot of the narrative in Trenton for the last several years has been of office closings and downsizings, so it is more than disingenuous to say something like “We’ve always had a strong office market in the city;” it’s positively batty.

As I said up top, a certain amount of hype is understandable, whether you’re selling a fixer upper, or a broken-down city. I get that. But this Administration is crossing the line from hype to hallucination. They are taking credit for actions not theirs, they are promoting a lot of their plans and aspirations based on a Market Study whose findings in many cases simply do not align with current conditions on the ground nor with recent actual history. And they are being aided and abetted by a local press too willing to print good news at the cost of accuracy and critical journalism.

I am encouraged by the news about the Bell Building, and the potential represented by some of the other projects on the drawing boards for the next few years. Any of them individually, and all of them collectively, suggest that this fixer upper on the banks of the Delaware may have some life in it yet, and that it is capable of drawing in folks with money, elbow grease, and time. Good Luck to them, and Good Luck to us all.

But, please, let’s be a little more real about things. OK?