David Michael Miller
Mayor Paul Soglin has an obsession about State Street. When he was first elected to his latest stint in office, he went after taxi access to the pedestrian mall. He even complained about the lights on an ATM machine.
Now, he worries about the makeup of establishments. He notes that State Street was once composed of mostly retail stores, but now he believes that bars and restaurants dominate, and he defines that as a real problem. The evidence for that is mixed. According to the city planning department, the percentage of retail went from 71% in 1989 to 49% in 2014. During the same time, the number of bars and restaurants more than doubled, going from 20% of ground-floor storefronts in 1989 to 48% in 2014. But that’s just for State Street alone. According to Downtown Madison, Inc., the change in the broader downtown has been less significant. DMI’s figures show steady percentages for bars and restaurants, while retail has lost out to service businesses, like hair salons.
But no matter how you look at it, Soglin sees this as a major city problem requiring much of his time, and that means staff and council time as well. The mayor has gone so far as to propose a dramatic increase in the cost of a city license to occupy sidewalk terrace space popular for cafes and bars. His idea is to level the playing field because bars and restaurants can usually command higher rents than clothing stores and other retail. Most recently he argued against and then vetoed a liquor license for a french fry restaurant.
Most of us probably buy into a consensus of controlled capitalism. We recognize that the free market is generally a good thing, but that the market doesn’t always produce the results we want as a society. So we curb the market when necessary. For example, we impose air and water regulations on industry to protect those public goods. Or at least we did until Scott Walker became governor.
The same principle applies downtown. There are two questions to ask: Is the market producing what we want as a society? If it isn’t, is the negative result so bad that it’s worth intervening through regulations, subsidies or other public policies?
My guess is that I can speak for a narrow majority of Madisonians who agree with the mayor on the answer to the first question: It would be better if State Street had more retail. In fact, in the interest of full disclosure, when I was mayor I supported the Alcohol License Density Ordinance, which sought to limit the number of bars downtown.
The genesis for that policy came from police concern that large crowds of drunks were creating a public safety issue, especially at bar time on weekends. But I also shared what is now Soglin’s hope that such a policy might slow the trend toward conversion of retail to bars.
Urban theory going back to Jane Jacobs says that we should want diverse uses of buildings to create a city that is lively for most of the day and night. A street of nothing but bars would be pretty dead until the evening hours.
So, in the realm of high theory, I think Soglin is right even if the facts suggest that he may be exaggerating the threat for the downtown as a whole. But next comes the harder question, which is how much we should care.
And this is where I part ways with the mayor. If market forces are changing State Street to be an entertainment district, this is not the end of the world, and I don’t believe it calls for draconian measures. After all, the city has contributed to this by establishing the old Civic Center, now Overture, on the street in an earlier Soglin term.
The mayor also picked an odd place to draw a line in the sand. Madison Frites, a local, woman-owned business, was not an unsympathetic target. If he wanted to make a point, the mayor might have waited for a big chain to express interest to launch his attack. It was curious political craftsmanship for a politician who is pretty good at his craft.
But more importantly, the retail mix on State Street simply does not concern most residents. A far greater issue is what’s happening on the city’s southwest side, where a neighborhood police officer was recently surrounded by a hostile crowd as he tried to break up a street fight. That incident happened during the same week that Soglin was dominating the news with his passionate attack on Madison Frites.
It’s not worth the civic energy to try to fight powerful market trends, even if they might be creating something mildly disagreeable. The really awful things are happening elsewhere in our city, and that’s where the mayor, the council and all of us should invest our energy.