What's the Deal with Development? And Other Questions for Economic Development Coordinator Chris Warren

Why couldn't Berwyn Cafe make it?  Why are there so many empty storefronts not just downtown, but along Route 1? These were the questions we had in mind when sitting down with Chris Warren, the city's economic development coordinator, and his intern, Robert Riker.

Patch: There are a noticeable number of empty storefronts in College Park. Why is it such a difficult place for businesses to make it?

Chris Warren:  Really when you’re saying that, it’s like, Terrapin Station. I think Terrapin Station just freaks everybody out because they think that represents all of College Park. And you go there, and it’s like 50 percent turnover which is ridiculous. And really, the landlord just has some issues there. I don’t know why they don’t choose people to be in their space if you knew that they couldn’t make it.

College Park is just a real challenging place because there are a lot of businesses here already for take-out and that sort of thing, so there’s a lot of competition. And then we have these landlords just charging an arm and a leg. Look at the areas that have had vacancies for awhile. Those are the ones that charge too much rent, those are the ones that do not provide the best services to their people.

Patch: Is there something that the city can do to prevent these landlords from charging outrageous prices? I don’t know why it would be in the best interest of landlords to make their rent prohibitively high, but is there anything anyone can do to stop it?

CW: It’s just not in their own best interest. I think Terrapin Station is just a real difficult place. Sometimes people wait a year or two to find somebody to go in there. They waited awhile to get the video game store, they waited awhile to get Jason’s Deli. But I think with Terrapin Station you’re just going to see it over and over again. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe their business model is that way.

Patch: But what about the places further down Route 1? There’s the old , the by Taco Bell?

CW:  They’re always part of some redevelopment  site. They hold onto these properties for so long they just deteriorate. You look at Mandalay, it’s been five or six years that it’s been part of the redevelopment project that never resulted in a project. That white building has been empty for 20 years.  You’re not going to find anybody who is going to make it work financially to just renovate that building. The best you’re probably going to do is just tear it down and build something new. But then it just becomes another redevelopment project.

Patch: You’re the economic development coordinator. What exactly does that job entail?

CW: A lot of things. Typically I’m talking to different real estate developers, marketing the city toward them, providing all sorts of real estate information. I’m also involved in business attraction, business retention. I also work with existing businesses, like the downtown merchants, downtown College Park Management Authority. Just trying to get some revitalization done in different commercial districts, whether it’s Hollywood, by the metro, Route 1.

Patch: So you are probably the principle person who has a hand in seeing these properties developed?

CW: Moreso on the front end. In terms of getting them aware of these properties, but sort of once they start a project, it typically becomes a planning project. I think a big challenge in general is just over the last 10 years, there’s just so much competition. If people can develop in Fairfax, Loudon County, Arlingon, they’re going to develop there, and they’re not going to develop so much in Prince George’s County because the money’s not there. 

Patch: I know this is a county-wide problem, but College Park is a more unique situation than a lot of other cities in Prince George's county, because we do have the benefit of the university here. So what are you guys doing to try to bring businesses in, and convince them that College Park is the place to do business rather than Fairfax or Montgomery County?

CW: I think if we’re talking retail and restaurants, we don’t have to. They come here, and I kinda want to sit them down and talk to them and say "OK, this is what the market is like, and this is how you can become successful. This is the type of rent you need to look at because there’s a couple of these places where the landlords aren’t really going to make it that easy for you to be successful with your business."

Patch: So we’re stuck in a stalemate?

CW: No, not at all. The economy for the whole country has just kind of sucked for the last couple years. The market had this sort of mini-boom with the student housing. We have projects that, if they could get financed, they’d be done tomorrow, like the College Park Motel. It’s been approved, it’s ready to go. I’ve worked with the guy to try to get a guarantee from a bank. And he can’t get it, and it’s only like a $5 million project, so that’s a challenge. The biggest thing on Route 1, the challenge is that we have these redevelopement projects, that if they don’t go through, they just kind of tie up the property.

Patch: So there’s no way you can just impose sort of a limit? You can’t say "OK, you’ve had 5 years. We’re done. We’re moving on."

CW: I can’t just say that there’s one thing wrong, or two things wrong, or one story or a couple stories. Ultimately there’s five reasons as why that building on Route 1 is vacant. But at the same time, there’s still people coming in. Best Buy came in this year, which was awesome because that was like a 30,000 sq. ft. vacancy, but then Jordan Kitts is leaving. Overall the rate is something like 95 or 96 percent occupancy, which is huge. Maybe that’s not that impressive for the D.C. area, but I bet if you went to Frederick or some other places that would be quite impressive.

Patch: The other sort of newsworthy reason for my visit is that obviously, the Berwyn Café closed, which is sort of an example of a restaurant that seemed very popular, and was certainly a valuable asset to the community, and one that I think people had an interest in keeping. Is there any incentive that the city can offer to make the area more hospitable to a small business?

CW: One of the issues with the Berwyn Cafe was the location. We even spent a couple hundred thousand dollars just to redo the streetscape there, and get some of the people who owned property to fix up their property. And they did, but then there were some issues with zoning, and the last couple of years with the landlord, it’s been really difficult to get people in there. I think the rent there wasn’t too bad for them, but we’ve been trying to focus in on the Berwyn area for a good 5 or 6 years. We put several hundred thousand dollars into the streetscape, put the Trolley Trail there, improved the infrastructure, but if the landlord isn’t out marketing the property...

I think another challenge is when you come to College  Park you can’t just focus in on walk-by traffic. People come here and they think that everyone is just going to show up at their doorstep and maybe that’s what they’re being sold. But if you’re going to be successful, the walk-by traffic is really just the tip of the iceberg. Where you’re going to make your money is either catering or delivery. Unfortunately, Berwyn Café didn’t do either. But that’s easier said than done. I’m not a business person, but I think in general it’s hard to run a restaurant, period. Even franchises have a difficult time here. Look at Quizno’s – they left. Look at Wawa – they left. These huge businesses that typically can function anywhere, but if you don’t have the right landlord…then again, people don’t realize how competitive it is. But everybody’s doing the same thing. If everyone is targeting students, and there are some landlords where the rent is too high.

Patch: I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but there’s no way of just selecting better landlords, and getting rid of the dysfunctional ones?

CW: Unfortunately it’s just going to be at their own peril. Some new space is going to open up, and people are going to leave. Ultimately, we’re just trying to work with the local residents just to make College Park more of an area that’s attractive to not just college students, but residents. I think there’s a lot people who just don’t acknowledge what’s here. You’ve got so many places. But I don’t know of any college town that competes with the people that we compete for the dollar. Chapel Hill is out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they compete with Raleigh. But they’re a bedroom community; the college students aren’t really pulled anywhere, whereas here, there’s so many different places. You can just get on the metro and go to D.C., or get in your car and go to Bethesda. We’re not pulling people necessarily from Arlington. They’ve got stuff going on there. It really is a huge challenge. Ann Arbor is its own city. Madison is its own city. I think it’s just a mindset, really. When you start comparing yourself to D.C., maybe it’s just hard for people to see what’s already here, like Clarice Smith. But we’re also just small, too.

Robert Riker: College Park is not a conventional college town, and that creates a lot of difficulties for the business community. We don’t have a conventional downtown area in the sense of like, a main street, or like three city blocks where everything is. We have to deal with the fact that we’re on a state highway, so instead of having one consolidated business district, we’re lined up all down the street. And then we have these different districts, like Hollywood and Berywn and things like that, and there isn’t much connection between them except that they’re all in College Park. So those are big problems particularly for College Park businesses.

CW: That said, we’ve got so much potential here, and I think that’s what really kind of irks people is like, why aren’t things happening? And it’s like, redevelopment is like a 30 year process. If you go to Bethesda, I remember when it was just like, holes in the ground. We’re in the process of sort of rebuilding, and slowly but surely I think things are happening. We’ve got, a $450,000 grant to include the streetscape in downtown. We’ve got a new county executive who seems like he could make things happen, and then we’ve got a new president at the university whose got a different philosophy. And we’ve got the student housing, and if we can fill in the holes along Route 1 and get more entertainment venues here, I think we would really be creating a “there” there. I think it’s just a mindset. You compare it to so many things and it’s not like what you want. It’s not your traditional college town, it’s not your traditional nice suburb like Montgomery County. It’s just a work in progress.

Patch: That seems like a good segue to talking about Shop College Park. Tell me about it.

RR: Basically a few years ago, the city council decided to put money toward Shop College Park as a program, which consisted of initially making a destination website that lists all of the businesses, services, events, accommodations, things like that in the city. And then a series of meetings were taking place with business people to see if there was interest in trying to move forward in a more organized "buy local" campaign. There was some interest, so we took the money that we had from the city and brought in the co-founder of the American Independent Business Alliance, which is one of the two national organizations that creates local independent business organizations that develop buy local campaigns. He came in and gave a presentation on some of the merits of having a buy local campaign, and some examples of cities where they’ve done it and it’s worked really well ... because local business invest much more than chains. He also talked about it in the context of College Park. How can we address some of the difficulties like the ones we’ve been talking about, like being a college town, being on a highway, because a lot of the "buy local" communities are traditional main street communities that have little mom and pop shops, and we’re not that type of community, so how can we tailor this to us?  We’re tying to continue moving forward with it, we had another meeting this week. They basically decided that they want to create a business alliance, not necessarily a formal one. 

Patch: Where do you see it going in the next year?

RR: That’s really the question because at some point, the city can’t continue to push it forward, it really has to be embraced by the business community and they really have to spearhead it. We can’t lead their business organization. They have to do that themselves. So it’s really a question of whether or not the leadership steps up to continue moving forward for the future.

Patch: Based on where they are now, does it look like that’s going to happen?

CW: We’ll just have to see. We left the last meeting where we talked a lot about the mission statement, what the city could do and what they can do in the future. It’s just a lot of things that we can do on our end, and we’re just kind of waiting for them to sort of step up. Regardless of whether the organization becomes an official alliance, we’ll still be promoting local business, because we have 40 or 50 percent of the storefronts around here are local business. The non-local, non-indepenedent business --- they’re here, but they’re not the reason people come to College Park. People don’t come to College Park for Chipotle. Everybody likes Chipotle, but they’re not going to come to College Park from somewhere else, because they can get that somewhere else. You have small populations that are obsessed with College Park Bicycles or Big Planet Comic Books, that are pretty passionate about what they have here. So we’ll continue to work with them regardless of what happens.