My hope for downtown
continued from page 3

available. So here’s the thrust of my rant: while I realize that office rents are higher than apartment rents, there’s no demand for office space and hasn’t been even long before Blago sent the state offices to Chicago. In addition, the TIF financial incentives will end in 2016; having already been renewed once, they cannot be extended again. It is, therefore, imperative that downtown building owners access TIF (call Economic Development at 789-2377) to rescue their buildings from self-induced blight and fill them full of rent-paying apartment tenants who will eat at the restaurants and buy from the retailers.

And the parking problem? Where possible, apartment tenants must park their cars behind the architectural wall of the rehabbed buildings. If no space exists back there, they must grit their teeth and pay to park in the numerous ramps throughout the downtown — most of them within a block of central downtown buildings. I discovered that most people, once they decide to live down here, have already dealt with the parking problem in their minds.

Other cities have done it, why can’t or won’t we?

Carolyn Oxtoby was born in Springfield and has lived here except for four years at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Her husband, the late Robert Oxtoby, was an attorney.