The State of Downtown: A Glimpse into HDR’s Work this Year
One of the things that I love about HDR is that, at any given moment, we are immersed in a wide variety of different initiatives and projects. We put a spotlight on our work and the state of downtown during our annual Celebration Reception event.
Upward Trajectory Time and Again
Rhythm & Vinyl business owner and shop dog
Let’s start with my favorite stat that I get to share year after year. Once again, we had a net gain of new businesses downtown. This year it was 11, and while every closure is disappointing, the good news each of the six closures we had is either already full or with a signed lease. Having over $180 million in public and private investment in our 40-block district since 2004 is also a pretty big deal. And, out of all the 36 Virginia Main Street communities that have organizations like ours, our downtown led the pack in visitorship last year with a visitor count of over 4.1 million.
If things feel like they are getting better all the time, that’s exactly what’s happening!
Connecting the Dots
Photo from Governor Youngkin’s Workforce Housing Announcement from downtown Harrisonburg
Harrisonburg enjoyed statewide attention this year, too. This spring, downtown served as the backdrop for Governor Youngkin’s announcement of a $1.2 million workforce housing grant to bring 81 affordable apartments to what many of us know as the Rosetta Stone building.
How that grant award came together is a great way to show how HDR excels at community-based economic development and the strength of our economic ecosystem.
I attended a Virginia Main Street conference in January where Chris McNamara presented about Virginia Housing’s programs. After talking about all the potential projects in downtown, Chris asked me to line up a day of meetings with the property owners.
One of those meetings was with Dave Rao, the owner of the Rosetta Stone building. I heard his building was under contract, so I shared the workforce housing grant opportunity with him to pass along to the prospective buyer. It turns out that Dave needed an incentive to make the building’s conversion to housing pencil out. He wanted to run with it.
This shovel-ready project was exactly what VA Housing was looking for. We discussed it over lunch with the city’s economic development and housing staff. They took it from there and submitted the application.
In this scenario, HDR learned about a resource, connected it with a downtown stakeholder, and connected it with city staff who got it to the finish line. That is a highly functioning economic ecosystem at work. It all comes down to connecting with people and knowing the buildings downtown as much as the people downtown.
HDR is also supported by the Va. Dept of Housing and Community Development’s Virginia Main Street program. They celebrated their 40th anniversary during that same conference where the president of Main Street America (the national organization that supports us) and Gov. Youngkin both chose to call out Harrisonburg in their remarks. They could have mentioned any downtown, y’all, but they mentioned ours!
Creative, Meaningful Partnerships
JMU Architecture Studio Class working with Harrisonburg Innovation Hub
We get to work with amazing partners on the coolest and most meaningful projects.
The year kicked off with Professor Nick Brinen’s Architecture Studio class. The students took on HDR and the Harrisonburg Innovation Hub as clients and created three design options for an outdoor space in the Hub’s parking lot.
HDR received a $75,000 VMS grant and was excited to offer the students a hands-on experience designing it. Their energy and desire to leave behind a legacy in Harrisonburg were exciting, and their talents were impressive. The Hub is ready to get construction documents drawn and will soon solicit bids to build one of their designs next year for a cool outdoor working space for their tenants and a welcoming space for all members of our community to use!
We were also part of a two-year partnership with the City, the Northeast Neighborhood Association, the Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project, and Harrisonburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority to address the harms of Urban Renewal demolition that removed the thriving African American businesses and homes on the north end of downtown.
Together, we had extensive public engagement opportunities and used community member feedback to draft a small area plan for Northeast Neighborhood improvements, temporarily reconfigured Mason Street to slow traffic, hosted a block party on Mason Street, and hired researchers to uncover the most complete history of Urban Renewal to date.
All of this hopefully will help us take down the invisible wall between the Northeast Neighborhood and downtown and make everyone feel welcome downtown. While the grant-funded portion of the program is just about complete, our work and partnership are really only just beginning. We appreciate all of the partners we have been working with, especially the two community-based organizations, for being open to working with us despite years of pain and an absence of partnership.
Getting the Word Out
Dog Mayor Candidate modelling Hburg Hounds bandana
We love producing high-quality dining and shopping guides each year and even won a state award for our internship program that helps us general incredible social media content all year. But we like to take our marketing efforts to the next level.
After we launched our Hburg Hounds campaign to position downtown as a dog-friendly destination for pups and their humans, we wanted to elevate that message. What better way to do that than with Harrisonburg’s first Dog Mayor campaign? Our interns created yard signs and campaign videos using submitted content and let the humans share their dog’s campaign pages. People could like the posts for each candidate on our social media to vote for their favorite canine, but since we aren’t above buying votes, voters could do that, too! This fun fundraising campaign kept the dog-friendly nature of downtown in people’s minds and brought a lot of joy to the ‘Burg during campaigning season!
Events and More Events
Levitt AMP Harrisonburg Music Series artist interacts with the crowd
For a team of four, producing downtown-wide festivals for 10,000 people is a heavy lift. Throwing in a summertime concert series was an even bigger lift, but events truly matter. Some of us get into a rut, or we don’t make the time to explore new things, so events get people to break their habits and see downtown sometimes for the first time, or to see everything we have to offer.
What’s even more important – when we produce an event, we bring the community together, and we bring customers to businesses. That carries an economic punch, but it also helps people create lasting memories, which goes a long way with resident retention. For all the children playing together at our Levitt AMP Harrisonburg concerts (which will continue for three more years thanks to another round of funding from the Levitt Foundation), and dancing like no one is watching, they only know that if it is humid and stormy, it must be a concert night. They are growing up trick-or-treating downtown and forming an attachment to our community that hopefully results in them sticking around or coming back here to raise their children to make similar memories.
Thanks to Sip and Stroll and planning downtown-wide events with a variety of programming for all ages, our events do double-duty and bring over 40,000 people here on event days.
And All the Other Things
There is too much to highlight here, but there is a lot going on at HDR. From trying to relocate the historic house behind the funeral home, to gearing up to bring 25 historical markers downtown with a priority on telling the African American history on the northside of downtown, to planning multimedia immersive art pop-ups with JMU’s Office for Creative Propulsion, getting ready to hang 90 banners on downtown lightpoles…we are doing a little bit of everything.
We cannot wait for next year!
When we talk about HDR’s successes and downtown’s success story, we recognize that so many people are a part of making the magic happen. This includes you! When you support a small business and when you come to their events and ours, you are making a difference. Every donation, every sponsorship dollar, every raffle ticket purchased, every volunteer hour or and every partnership – all of that is part of the story.
Thank you for being part of this amazing downtown community and for supporting HDR. We couldn’t do all of this alone, and I wouldn’t want to.
Harrisonburg, we are better together. We are stronger together. Take pride in being a part of something extremely special. Let’s continue writing downtown’s story together.
