For more than a decade, Tigard has been working on revitalizing its downtown. City leaders, small business owners and the nonprofit Tigard Downtown Alliance have worked together to bring more foot traffic to main street. We hear more about the effort and the work that’s still to come from Kevin Bates, an owner of Symposium Coffee and the president of the alliance.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We’ve had a few conversations in recent weeks about revitalizing downtowns. We turn now to what many local people see as a success story in progress in Tigard. For more than a decade now, city leaders, local business owners and the nonprofit, Tigard Downtown Alliance, have worked together to bring more foot traffic to the city’s main street. Kevin Bates is one of the members of this partnership. He is the owner of Symposium Coffee and the president of that Alliance. He joins us now. It’s great to have you in the studio.
Kevin Bates: Thanks for having me on, Dave.
Miller: What was downtown Tigard like when you first opened your coffee shop there 11 or 12 years ago.
Bates: Yeah, Tigard was old. It was kind of run down. I would say there were some businesses that were thriving, there were some businesses, but it was quite old. And the Main Street Green Street project when you see it now, that had not occurred yet. So when we first moved in several months later, construction started on that. When we moved in, the entire downtown went under construction. So what did it look like? It looked like piles of dirt and big machinery.
Miller: And that went on for a long time? I talked to some Tigard residents about construction downtown in recent years, and the words that stood out were “chaos” and “delays.” What was it like, as that was going on, to try to run a business?
Bates: Well, we took it as an opportunity. So we did construction specials. And people want living room type coffee shops in their downtown districts. So people will climb over piles of dirt and construction, flags and such, to get to their favorite place.
Miller: So are you saying that figuratively? Or literally, you’re saying people will climb over piles of dirt to buy coffee?
[Laughter]
Bates: I’ll say both. Maybe a little bit figuratively, climbing over piles of dirt. But they did move around construction cones and signs just to get their parking far away to take the trek.
Miller: Did you think twice about opening up there? My understanding is that folks from Tigard had seen your existing location and invited you, said “please come.” Did you think “do I want to do this?”
Bates: We, 14 years ago, started Sherwood’s location. And that was a cute bungalow house, it still is. We own the whole corner of the property, so it’s very accessible and very popular. There were organizations in Tigard, like the Tigard Chamber of Commerce, [that] came to us and asked us to move there. They were doing some advocacy work to get new businesses downtown. And when we looked at it, it was a definite no. We had to process through what the construction, our own tenant improvements would be, and facade improvements. But the city came alongside of us in partnership and definitely helped us a lot. So it became a yes over time. It wasn’t just walking on property on site and saying “yes, this is the next spot.” But through partnership, and through TI grants and facade improvement grants, that was very attractive to us to start.
Miller: What has that taught you about your understanding of how a public-private partnership can work?
Bates: So of course, we’re a for profit business. The Symposium is a for profit business. It’s definitely, I think, necessary for a single entity-owned … owner-operated businesses need partnerships in order to start. So coming up with maybe some grant programs, tenant improvement grant programs, facade improvement grant, or SDC, system development charge offset grants. Cities can attract quite a number of very trendy and cool businesses into downtown districts through their grant programs. So I think that the partnership exists at that level.
But also at the level of just promotion, and opening some of our nonprofit and for profit partnerships can really create a dynamic that, without them, I don’t think would happen.
Miller: How much emphasis is there now on having businesses in the central area be locally-owned, as opposed to national chains?
Bates: Well, my preference would be locally-owned. I do know that some cities attract larger, corporate-owned businesses. Yet the Tigard Downtown Alliance definitely has a focus on a locally-owned business.
Miller: Why is that?
Bates: Well, I think through relationships, community is built. And so somebody lives, works, and exists in the town that they are building the business in, relationships could be built with the community, the community then could thrive. Honestly, it’s just a relationship building experience, which is better, I think.
Miller: It’s one thing to help out locally-owned businesses, it’s another to actively discourage national companies from setting up shop. How would you feel about that?
Bates: Well, I’m pro-business, so I can’t downplay one and up-play another. It’s just in a locally-owned situation that money stays locally. And so therefore, the money that is produced then is spent within the community. So a locally-owned business, definitely in the local economy, I would say probably is a better choice.
Miller: One of the changes that I’ve heard about in recent years is the addition of public art in various ways, in various places – things like sculptures and hanging glass basket art. What difference do you think those aesthetic touches make? You started by talking about system development charges and improvements to make it so tenants don’t have to pay for everything. Beautification wouldn’t necessarily be obviously high on the list. But what difference do you think it makes?
Bates: Well, I think that beautification and art installations is high on the list actually, amongst the Main Street Program, which is a national organization. One of the arms of the Main Street Program is design, which includes art installations.
Miller: So what difference does it make?
Bates: The Department of Interior just did its study several years ago about art installation and economic vitality. Art installations get people to walk you through a downtown economic district. So if you have art, then that attracts people. People then shop, or people eat in that area.
Tigard actually has Tour de Art, where it’s an entire walking map of all of the large scale art installations. So whether it be the glass baskets that hang from our poles from the lights, or Mobius outside of Symposium Coffee, there’s quite a few pieces of art through downtown Tigard. We promote that as an opportunity to walk and to view these things. And then people then take that opportunity also to shop. They might go to Curiosities Vintage Mall, or they might go to Libarius chocolate, or Little & Fiddles. They might check out the sangria bar, Harvest Moon. They might go to these different places because they were already there.
If you want to check out that art installation walking tour, you can go to our website, exploredowntowntigard.com, and find it.
Miller: Tigard’s population went up more than 80% in the last 30 years. What’s it been like to do this work in a city that’s growing a lot faster than the state as a whole?
Bates: I think that there’s a couple of factors. First, the infrastructure of downtown needed to change. When we first moved in, Main Street Green Street needed to happen in order to support not only businesses coming in, but the influx of people coming in. My friends told me that we went through a street diet, where we took the streets and we shrunk the streets. The Tigard Downtown Alliance was in partnership with the city and listening sessions and stuff of how do we create more walking traffic to get the community as a whole downtown?
Miller: Which is a little bit counterintuitive – some people may say, “you’re growing, you need bigger streets.”
Bates: I think that with a downtown, if we can create the living room effect in downtown districts, then people will come out. And people live in the downtown. People want to go downtown. They want to create or have spaces to play, or to walk, or to visit. And so as the population grows, if we can build healthier, more vibrant, thriving downtowns through infrastructure revitalization, business revitalization, recreative revitalization, if we can work on these projects, then it would just support the growing population.
Miller: What is your own metric of success? How do you decide that various efforts are working or not?
Bates: I think that my metric of success, as I look at just being the president of the organization, I think that the community building is in my heart. And that is something that I’ve had a passion for probably in my whole career. This is why I own a coffee shop. When I see social interactions with people, I know that not only will people begin to thrive, but they’re happier, their mental well being is better. When social interactions are not there, those things go down.
Miller: Meaning, people walk down the street and they acknowledge each other, say “hello.”
Bates: Relationships. You’ve been in a community where “I walked down the street and no one said hi to me.” You don’t think “oh, I want to move there.” But when you have a community that’s walking and enjoying the scenery, the art, the installations and the plazas – like Universal Plaza or the plaza down on Tigard and Main Street, right next to Symposium – when you’re able to go there, relax there, rest there and play there, people interact.
So I think that relationship building, number one, is my metric. Is that happening? Do those relationships foster listening? And organizationally, are we hearing what people actually want and need? So then we listen to what people want and need, and then we’re able to put programs, we’re able, through community development, [to] do things that people want. And so I think that when those two things marry together, when relationship building and giving people what they really desire in a community, then we thrive. And that’s the success.
Miller: What advice, if anything, do you have for leaders in downtown Portland?
Bates: I would say in downtown Portland, we need to spend a lot of time and a lot of work recreating, rebirthing, revisioning what it could be. And so to do a lot of research and pre-work, how do we revitalize? And I’m a believer in the Main Street program, so implement some Main Street programs in those areas, and help partner with strategic organizations that are helping the houseless issue or helping the empty buildings. Really reaching out to organizations to partner with as we move forward implementing a Main Street program.
Miller: Kevin Bates, thanks very much.
Bates: Thank you.
Miller: Kevin Bates is the owner of Symposium Coffee and the president of the tigard Downtown Alliance.
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