Downtown New Jersey President Robert Goldsmith Esq. has sent to state Sen. Robert Gordon a letter indicating the organization’s support of Senate bill S3222, which would allow a municipality to issue one license allowing sales of alcoholic beverages in a downtown business improvement zone, pedestrian mall, or special improvement district.
June 15, 2017: Downtown Westfield continues to provide its residents, visitors, and businesses with the goods and services readily sought after in a downtown environment. But the town has not merely rested on its laurels.
April 11, 2017: At one of the breakout sessions at this year’s New Jersey Future Redevelopment Forum, Joe Getz from the downtown economic-consulting organization JGSC Group gave a clinic on the importance of using good data to make decisions on downtown redevelopment projects. The familiar developer refrain “We’ve done this many times,” he cautioned, “is not data.”
April 4, 2017: If you were planning to build a parking structure, would you invest in a 30-year bond to finance it?
That’s the question Bob Goldsmith, partner and co-chairman of redevelopment and land use for Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith & Davis LLP, posed at the beginning of the Redevelopment Forum session entitled “The Future of Parking, Today.”
Downtowns across New Jersey are facing a unique set of challenges. While many towns are seeing a rise in the number of people who want to live in a walkable, mixed-use town center, they are also facing the challenges of keeping their downtowns vibrant and full of retail tenants when New Jerseyans increasingly do most of their shopping on laptops and not in stores.
Have you noticed that just about everyone is talking about downtowns these days? They’re finally cool again! Young people want to live in downtowns; older people want to live in downtowns. Changing national demographics are fueling mixed-use and mixed-income growth.
