Will Nonprofits Save Or Destroy Main Street? | Local urban centers struggle to attract business investment
Photo/Livia Gershon
DRAWING CUSTOMERS: Thomas Leblanc plays pool at Premier Subs in downtown Fitchburg. The business's owner, Michael Voisine, says nonprofits in the city aren't the economic drain that some claim.
Early this year, when Planned Parenthood announced that it would open a clinic in downtown Fitchburg, many city officials and local residents protested loudly. There was some talk about abortions (which won’t be performed at the Fitchburg location), but that wasn’t the biggest issue for many.
The local paper, the Sentinel & Enterprise, summarized much of the opposition in an editorial, writing that opening the clinic on Main Street “would send the signal that social-service agencies are welcome in the downtown when what the downtown needs is new businesses that can bring consumers here from throughout North Central Massachusetts to shop.”
It’s a refrain that would sound familiar in many cities, large and small. Government and nonprofit social service agencies draw people who are homeless, addicted or poor, who scare the potential patrons of sit-down restaurants and retail destinations.
Owners of downtown businesses, and experts who study urban planning, say there’s some reason for that kind of concern. But the presence of social service agencies is far from the root cause of decaying downtowns, and in some cases they may actually play a role in strengthening the urban neighborhoods’ economies.
Image Problems
Angela Nguyen manages Tracy’s Beauty Salon, a storefront operation on Fitchburg’s Main Street located next door to an office of the state Department of Transitional Assistance. She said she tries to bring in an upscale clientele from more rural towns like Townsend and Ashby. But she said her customers are sometimes bothered by yelling and fighting on the street, something she thinks stems partly from the presence of DTA and other agencies.
“I have to walk clients to their cars,” Nguyen said. “They want me to do that for safety.”
A little farther down Main Street, though, Premier Subs owner Michael Voisine said he has a very different relationship with people who go to local social services for help with health care, housing and other basic needs.
“They’re a big part of our business,” Voisine said, adding that people often stop by to get a coffee or muffin after an appointment at one of the nearby offices. “It’s not big money, but it’s consistent money.”
After running the sub shop for five years, Voisine and his wife, Beth, have close ties with some of the people who use the local social services. They collect baby clothes and supplies for young mothers with limited resources and give unemployed men free food and a warm place to hang out in exchange for help with shoveling and odd jobs.
Voisine said the downtown environment isn’t ideal for economic growth, but getting rid of the social service offices doesn’t seem like a solution. If it had been done 20 or 30 years ago, he said, it might have made a difference, but now, there’s not much else left.
One of the men who does chores for Voisine, Thomas “French Fry” Leblanc, said that, as he sees it, there’s not too many social services in the area but too few. Leblanc, who is formerly homeless himself and is currently getting state aid while he looks for a job, said he’d like to see more programs to keep people from hanging out on the streets. At the same time, though, he said the presence of so many social agencies does draw homeless people from around the area to downtown Fitchburg.
Subtraction and Addition
To some who study urban economies, the trouble with places like downtown Fitchburg is not so much what’s there as what isn’t.
Karl Seidman, a professor with MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning who has studied Fitchburg, said its downtown suffers from the same problems as many others: retail has moved to malls and suburban shopping centers, leaving a gaping hole. And once social services are the main remaining use, it can be hard for an area to recover.
“If it’s perceived as having that image associated with social services and attracting a low-income population because of that, it may be hard to attract new users,” Seidman said.
Since many downtown areas are home to relatively poor renters, they are in some ways a sensible place to locate services that cater to low-income people.
Robert Donnell, a professor of geography at Framingham State College, said such services are helpful for many in downtown Framingham. And he said it may make sense to simply accept the idea that the area is a social services center.
“There’s no real hope of getting downtown Framingham to be super great, I think,” he said. “So if something’s got to go down there then some of the social agencies should be down there.”
But to Rob Krueger, director of Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Worcester Community Project Center, reviving urban downtowns is both a worthy goal and entirely compatible with allowing social services to thrive.
Krueger said he has studied urban areas in Europe and Asia, as well as the United States.
“The best cities, I find, are the ones that have mixed downtowns,” he said.
Right in Worcester, Krueger said, there’s good evidence that varied uses can coexist peacefully. He noted that Armsby Abbey at 144 Main St., “maybe the most successful restaurant in recent years in Worcester,” is located across from the city courthouse and downstairs from the Sheriff’s office.
But Krueger said it typically takes something beyond a reliance on pure market forces to create a mixed-use downtown. Left to their own devices, the low rents typical in many modern downtowns attract nonprofits and government agencies.
Martinis On Main Street
In Fitchburg, the best analogy to Armsby Abbey may be Destare, a martini bar that opened in 2007, just as then-mayoral candidate Lisa Wong was promising to revive the downtown. Founder Christopher Iosua said many observers expected the bar to fold quickly, but instead it increased its business by more than 30 percent last year.
He said public and private work to improve the downtown is paying off. Now, he’s getting ready to open a gelato and fondue restaurant next door to Destare. He said one thing that encourages him in the new venture is the farmers’ market that city officials and community advocates started last year at the nearby Riverfront Park.
“As a business person, it gave me a lot of confidence I’m going to see more people than I might otherwise have seen in that space,” he said.
Iosua said he hopes new businesses on Main Street will push social services into less prominent parts of the downtown, but he said Destare has not suffered from its proximity to nonprofit and government agencies.
“We’ve never had an instance of any individual or groups of individuals on Main Street that has presented our organization a challenge,” he said.
In fact, Iosua said, the bar has probably benefited from being in an unusual location that helps it stand out from the bars and restaurants found in the local strip malls.
Celebrating Variety
If a high concentration of social services can drive away development, a smattering of the agencies can actually have some benefits for a local economy. For one thing, Seidman said, truly devastated downtowns simply need someone paying rent. He said one example is a redevelopment effort in one Dorchester block that benefited from a counseling group that rented a significant amount of space, acting as a sort of anchor tenant.
“Sometimes government agencies and social service agencies can help provide lease income and resources that can be positive,” he said.
Kruger said another plus from social services is the middle-class wages paid to many people in the social work field—wages that they tend to spend locally.
“You want those organizations, and you want those jobs because they’re good jobs,” he said.
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