Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990                   TAG: 9003262163
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DOWNTOWNS RETAIN ECONOMIC UTILITY

Not that the tune seemed destined to become an ageless classic. But the center cities of America were believed to be on their last legs. "Urban renewal" was thought by many to be a pipe dream - or, if not a pipe dream, then a code word for razing blocks of old buildings after evicting their inhabitants. Even a rubble-strewn vacant lot, the thinking seemed to go, is better than a structure with a few years on it.

Downtowns were viewed as doomed vestiges of an earlier era, about as economically significant as the whale-oil or buggy-whip industries. As recently as 1975, Bernard J. Frieden notes in a recent Wall Street Journal article, most "experts" still were writing off America's center cities.

What the experts didn't notice, Frieden says, is that downtowns already had started to come back to life, a comeback that continued through the '70s and '80s. From 1960 through 1984, he reports, the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the nation added as much new office space as in all the years before 1960; they did it by capturing a steady 20 percent share of all new office development in the country.

Granted, downtowns aren't what they used to be. Few things are. A 20 percent share of office development means 80 percent was occurring away from downtown. Frieden, an MIT professor, concedes that downtowns have shifted to service-sector enterprises, reflecting the general shift in the U.S. economy.

But critics who contend that the reviving downtowns help only highly paid professionals and that cities should concentrate instead on getting new industry, he says, are dead wrong. For one thing, office development creates a demand for lower-skilled as well as higher-skilled workers. For another, cities that focused on industrial development rather than downtown office development have generally ended up the worse for it. Industries have gone to the suburbs or overseas anyway, while office work is one sector of the economy where center cities often have a comparative advantage.

Just as wrong, Frieden says, are critics who contend that public investment in downtown revivals have resulted in "flashy showpieces" of little real economic benefit. In addition to new hotel rooms and convention centers, cities "have helped developers build downtown shopping malls, encouraged the restoration of Victorian neighborhoods and established museums and theaters in or near downtown." Such things, he says, have been essential to downtowns' renewal as office centers, by "re-establish[ing] downtown as a place to do business."

Frieden's conclusions are based on studies of big American cities, rather than small-to-middle-sized cities such as Roanoke. But his conclusions seem applicable here, too. Downtown Roanoke's comeback as a center of business activity in the past decade or so has coincided with public investment in the area. Other public investments, including a convention center, are on the drawing board.

Can Roanoke afford to continue investing in its downtown? If Frieden is correct, the answer may well be: Roanoke can't afford not to continue investing in its downtown.