Recipe for a Downtown

Imagine a downtown. It’s walkable, with offices, cafes and apartments built around man-made canals that act both as drainage and as a waterfront setting for pedestrian pathways. The downtown is next to the interstate, close to trains, not far from the beach. It’s walkable and bikeable; if you want to live, work and play there, you can do all that without a car. Got it? Good. Now, imagine it’s Pompano.

If your response to “downtown Pompano Beach” is “What downtown Pompano Beach?,” you’re not wrong. But if the city’s ambitious plans for an area just east of I-95 come to fruition, there will come a day when “downtown Pompano Beach” means something.

Nguyen Tran, director of the Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency, knows all this sounds ambitious. But the plan, in which Martin Luther King Boulevard acts as a kind of Main Street between I-95 and Dixie Highway, has some things going for it. Not least of which is a good deal of land east of the interstate.

“Land is very scarce, and we have been assembling land for over 30 years,” he says. “It’s really our time now. We’re excited – it’s not very often a city can come together and build a downtown from scratch. This vision has been planned for many years.”

He points to redevelopment success the city is having in other areas, such as the oceanfront boom going on around the rebuilt pier or Old Town Square, the area just east of Dixie and north of Atlantic Boulevard in which historic but long-derelict or underused buildings have in recent years been reborn as a lively arts district.

Tran, who has decades of experience in community planning and redevelopment, has also seen ambitious plans come together in other places. Take a city to the north that today is a regional byword for a fun, artsy night out. Tran was with the Delray CRA in 1993.

“Delray was Dull-ray back then,” he says. “Delray today was 30 years in the making. You have to have that vision 30 years out.”

It’s important for Pompano to pull this off, Tran says, because the city badly needs a downtown.

“In economically healthy cities they have an area they can point to, here’s our downtown,” Tran says. It’s an area with higher paying jobs, parks, entertainment, culture, higher density residential – you know, a downtown.

“You want to keep it dense in a certain area,” Tran says of residential. “Downtowns help keep the city going forward.

“Pompano has been very stagnant for many years. We’ve really lost out to our adjacent cities because we didn’t have anything.”

The downtown’s proposed location is unique not just because of what they can build there, but because of who they don’t have to move to do it.

“You always try to redevelop without displacement,” he says. “That word ‘gentrification’ always comes up.”

But this is an area where there are virtually no neighborhoods to displace or change. “We own most of the property,” he says. “We own 60 percent of that land area, and it’s mostly vacant.” The core downtown area is about 120 acres.

He believes this has been helpful in getting residents to buy into the plan. Making people think about future generations – about their kids and grandkids – also helps.

“When the kids go away to college, they have nowhere to come back to in Pompano,” Tran says. “The community has really lost their roots in this area.

“From a redevelopment standpoint, we need to rebuild those community roots and establish new roots.”

Pompano has low-income housing, Tran says. But workforce housing – that category of housing that’s attainable to many but beyond the range that qualifies for low-income housing public subsidies – is rare across South Florida and practically nonexistent in Pompano.

“We have to look at housing in a comprehensive view and see: Where are we missing?” he says. “We have to focus on getting more market and more workforce housing.”

And while they’re doing that, they need to create the sort of community younger people will want to live in. One that’s walkable. One that’s not a sprawling suburb where you have to get in the car to find food or entertainment.

In the world of planning and development, people tend to be a bit obsessed with millennials and younger residents. What do they want? What sort of places do they want to live in?

“They have the lowest number of drivers licenses,” Tran says. “They rideshare, they walk, they want to buy into communities that are walkable. That generation buys into the community.” The South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, the body that runs Tri-Rail, has named the area as a location for a station on the commuter rail’s planned Coastal Link, which is to run on the Florida East Coast Railway line currently serviced by Brightline.

Small residential units will be allowed in the new downtown.

“I personally like larger units, but when you talk to them they’re like, ‘Why do we want more areas to clean?’ They want to spend time out of their apartment.”

Tran sees a new downtown as working well with something Pompano already has plenty of – industrial space.

“Our industrial market is very strong,” Tran says. “Pompano has more than one-third of the industrial zoned land in Broward County.” That land sells for $4m an acre and maintains a 98 to 99 percent occupancy, he says. “Developers are building industrial at spec.”

Tran also doesn’t see all that nearby industrial as a problem for the planned downtown because of the ways many of the businesses associated with industrial areas have transformed or are transforming with cleaner, greener technologies. “It’s no longer heavy, dirty manufacturing uses.”

If anything, he would like to see the tech of the industrial areas and the tech of a new downtown have some crossover.

“This downtown really started as that innovation district,” he says. “We need to have some synergy between the industrial space we have and some future offices we may have.”

Pompano Beach is also developing another one of its more unique locations in a way that could benefit a downtown and bring in good new jobs – its airpark. There are shortages in industries such as pilot training, Tran notes. “Those are very high paying jobs,” he says. “It could be training, aeronautics – not just hangar space for storage. Anything that creates jobs.”

Projects such as these are measured in decades, not years. The city is now in the process of finding a master developer for the overall project. But work on one big early change is slated to start soon – reducing Atlantic by one lane around Dixie and redesigning the intersection.

The changes are in keeping with Broward’s Complete Streets guidelines meant to create the kind of roads you’d drive (or walk or cycle), not an on-ramp to an interstate. That’s a big change, Tran says.

“When you look at these major traffic corridors, they’re not designed for pedestrian walkability; they’re designed for cars,” he says. “Even bike lanes aren’t safe, because they’re in with cars.”

The overall downtown plan will be generational. The road changes might not seem like much, but they announce something bigger, Tran says.

“That was a major project for us that tells us something is coming. In planning, everything starts with streetscape. Before the vertical comes streetscape. That’s always an indication that something big is coming.”