Photo courtesy of Connecticut Main Street Center
The Connecticut Main Street Center has been awarded $150,000 for its new Diversity on Main Collaborative in partnership with the Black Business Alliance.
On a recent weekday at La Stella Pizzeria, tucked into a flatiron building at Main Street and Market Street in Norwich, Conn., lunch hour was buzzing. Many of the city's other historical storefronts along its downtown thoroughfares were empty and quiet — in some cases for over two decades — but nearly all hinted that some kind of transformation was under way.
But adjacent to La Stella, Water Street Lofts, a residential conversion of a 19th-century building, is nearly complete, and interior construction is visible through several storefront windows along Main Street and Franklin Street. People stop to lounge in pocket parks, and brightly painted murals call out from all corners of the city's commercial district.
"It's coming alive again," said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Norwich Community Development Corp., as he stood at the Marina at American Wharf, where three rivers — the Yantic, Shetucket and Thames — converge.
Like many Connecticut cities and towns, Norwich has directed a small portion of federal COVID-19 relief funds, via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), to breathe new life into its hobbled Main Street businesses, CT Mirror, a nonprofit online news service, reported April 24.
The pandemic accelerated a shift to remote work, dealing a blow to downtowns across the state that were already struggling to manage earlier losses of commerce to big-box stores and online retailers.
"We're in some ways living with a legacy of neglect," said Michelle McCabe, executive director of the Connecticut Main Street Center, adding that now, "with workplace habits changing, we need to adjust. Businesses need help."
She noted, though, that two pandemic-era trends, the rise in entrepreneurship, and new public and private housing investments in downtown districts, are beginning to drive change on Main Streets. Putting a small amount of ARPA funding toward things like helping commercial landlords bring their street-level properties up to code, so as to be ready for new storefront tenants, can be transformational.
With just over $4 million in ARPA funds, the Norwich Revitalization Program is working to aid 17 small businesses and contributing to four larger special projects in its downtown. Those efforts have attracted over $25 million in private investment and will result in nearly 200,000 sq. ft. of refreshed space.
"We're turning the lights back on," Brown told CT Mirror.
Of the more than $615 million in ARPA funds spent so far on addressing the pandemic's "Negative Economic Impacts" in Connecticut, roughly $45 million was distributed directly to businesses and nonprofits, including rehabilitating commercial properties.
The $1.9 trillion ARPA funding included $350 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) which must be obligated by the end of this year and spent by the end of 2026.
Connecticut state and municipal officials have budgeted over $3 billion in SLFRF projects, obligated $2.3 billion, and spent nearly $1.8 billion, according to the U.S. Treasury. Within the "Negative Economic Impacts" category, the state's project budget is nearly $1 billion with $850 million obligated as of the beginning of 2024, CT Mirror noted.
"All these Main Streets are coming back to life with the funds to do wish-list items that aren't just idealistic, but have a huge impact," McCabe told the online news source.
Places like Norwich already have the "incredibly gorgeous bone structure" of historical buildings, she said, with "the bandwidth and resources to pull in entrepreneurs — that's where you start seeing that new vibe going on."
Establishing the ‘Ecosystem'
Elsewhere in the state, the town of Windsor used $100,000 in ARPA funds to help launch two new co-working spaces: one in a retrofitted industrial building near the train station downtown and another in a former bank in Windsor's commercial district.
"By establishing these facilities in the community, we're hoping that folks with the entrepreneurial spirit will get some technical assistance and bump into other like-minded people who are entrepreneurs, want to get businesses launched that will someday move from their space to spaces in our downtown brick-and-mortar locations," said Patrick McMahon, Windsor's economic development director.
"Anything that we can do to build that sort of entrepreneurial ecosystem in the town is beneficial, helps create jobs, and creates vibrant neighborhoods," he added. "We thought that was a really good use of ARPA funding."
Several other towns and cities in Connecticut used ARPA funding to modernize aging infrastructure in their downtowns and commercial business districts to improve safety and usability for visitors and businesses.
For example, the town of Fairfield is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to mitigate flooding around its central business district, while Bristol is slated to spend up to $1 million to install a retaining wall and refurbish a railroad overpass to accommodate more pedestrian activity in its Centre Square district. And Norwalk has put nearly $200,000 it received from ARPA funding toward a program called "Complete Streets," aimed at improving pedestrian safety and accessibility.
Additionally, city leaders in Waterbury identified a pressing need to update the century-old sewer and water infrastructure below Main Street and Bank Street downtown in preparation for a streetscape improvement project. Over $10 million in ARPA was budgeted for those upgrades.
Given that the city's historical downtown structures already require a heavier lift, along with more money, to outfit for modern tenants, that kind of below-the-surface improvement is key to attracting businesses, Dan Pesce, the director of Main Street Waterbury, said in speaking with CT Mirror.
"It's a real benefit to us because we don't have to worry about any infrastructure under the ground that's aging," he explained. "We won't need to address the underground infrastructure in downtown Waterbury for a very long time. That's going to be huge for us moving forward."
Promoting ‘Strolling in Downtown' Connecticut Cities
Since indoor spaces presented risks for many residents and visitors in Connecticut during the pandemic, development went outside toward recreation spaces, small urban parks, al fresco dining and a statewide expansion of public art installations.
In New London, for instance, city leaders are leaning into an aspect of the city's identity that has the potential to draw a crowd with the construction of a new, $150 million National Coast Guard Museum, slated to open on the waterfront late this year or early in 2025. The museum is expected to attract 300,000 visitors a year to the area.
ARPA funds also have gone toward improving infrastructure to enable the city to accommodate more people, such as street lighting and wayfinding signage.
"We're looking for foot traffic, that walkability, that sense of a place to be talked about," said Elizabeth Nocera, economic development coordinator for New London.
The city also assisted in repairing the roofs and facades of downtown buildings as well as helped with code correction. The goal is to get historic storefronts to a state known as "vanilla box," where a new tenant can come in and establish a personal footprint without having to worry about mechanical or structural issues.
Officials in both New London and Norwich have sought to multiply the impacts of ARPA funding by seeking out collaborators and additional sources of investment, both public and private, thus increasing the scale of the projects and their reach.
Rise of Mixed-Use Community
The recent wave of thousands of new hires each year at submarine manufacturer General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton means nearby cities like Norwich and New London are managing an influx of not just tourists but hundreds more permanent residents in its downtown districts.
"That's where the downtown and the Main Streets start taking advantage," said Felix Reyes, director of New London's Office of Development and Planning. "Once people live by where they work, then you get all that indirect and induced [economic activity]. You get small businesses, and you start getting markets [because] you need eggs and milk and gas and entertainment and restaurants for those people."
Bridgeport was already seeing that transition before the pandemic, and it has only accelerated in the last four years, Lauren Coakley Vincent, president of the city's Downtown Special Services District, told CT Mirror.
She added that, in the downtown neighborhood, several former commercial buildings have been converted for residential use.
"There's a big shift toward what would be called a mixed-use community," she said. "That does influence the type of uses you see at the ground floor level."
At the same time, Bridgeport was making ARPA-funded grants available to hundreds of small businesses throughout the city for storefront improvements or expansion.
Roughly 30 downtown Bridgeport businesses received grants, resulting in the district successfully retaining so many of its ground floor storefront businesses that the city's turnover rate actually declined, Coakley Vincent noted.
Now, she added, the downtown "is much more geared toward sort of a 24-hour use than it had been previously."
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