Downtown’s “community” partner
Recently, the Community Foundation of North Louisiana announced the winners of their 2013 grant cycle, and two awards were speci cally aimed at spurring development in Shreveport’s downtown. Twenty- ve thousand dollars was pledged to assist in jump-starting the new nine-block art and culture district called Shreveport Common and $75,000 went to a program to assist in the rehabilitation of important historic downtown buildings.
These are not the Community Foundation’s rst investments downtown. The philanthropic organization joined with the Downtown Development Authority and the Downtown Shreveport Development Corporation in the 1990s in the transformation of 710 Texas St. from a vacant furniture store into lively artspace. Artspace uses art exhibition and classroom space, its café and gift shop to create energy and foot traf c in the city’s West Edge. Our important partnership with the Shreveport Regional Arts Council, which manages artspace, has led to a renaissance in the block. It is now home to Tipitina’s Music Co-op, and has seen three recent building renovations that include the trendy Joseph Guin Hair Salon and a full scale rehab by architect Kevin Bryan. It was always the belief that vibrancy and foot traf c would encourage others to locate nearby and that belief
is being borne out. This is the same plan with the Shreveport Common art and culture district, an area that is currently equal parts blight and opportunity.
The vision for Shreveport Common is a grand one and includes 36 transforming projects and 30 public/private partners. Important to the revitalization of the area is market-value and artist housing and mixed-use retail spaces. These elements will help create the density so needed and will assist in animating the space to attract people to both live there and visit. Some of the excitement will be created by a series of monthly events called UNSCENE! an effort of the SRAC- again- with assistance from the Community Foundation.
The goal of these Downtown Neon Saturday Night-type events is to show off the area in a whole new light. As exciting and fun as events such as UNSCENE! and the Makers Fair are, developers and businesses want more before they jump into an expensive project in an unproven area.
That “more” is generally some sort of assurance that there is money to be made, or at the very least, the very real possibility of it. This is where the Community Foundation-supported Shreveport Common Market Study comes into play. Partners SRAC,
DDA, DSDC, City of Shreveport, Caddo Parish and the JP Morgan Chase Foundation have all invested in a market analysis which, at the end of the day, should provide hard numbers for potential developers on capacity, desire and feasibility of market rate and artist housing and mixed-use retail in Shreveport Common. The analysis will include forecasts for growth and assessments of the potential of individual sites.
The second grant, the Develop Downtown Historic Renovation Assistance program, is a partnership of the Community Foundation, DSDC and DDA. It will allow DSDC to expand upon its popular downtown façade grants program and work with developers of important historic buildings on grants for “soft costs” such as architectural design and structural analysis. This will help incentivize developers to take on the costly chore of adaptive reuse of longvacant but important structures, such as the old Arlington Hotel. We are thrilled with our downtown partnership with the Community Foundation of North Louisiana and appreciate their willingness to pursue our vision of a more vibrant, exciting and commercially-diverse downtown.
Liz Swaine is the executive director of the Downtown Development Authority. She can be reached at [email protected].
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