In many respects, the public/private development partnership aimed at breathing new investment life into a key stretch of downtown Niagara Falls is considered textbook urban planning.
And, while past development ventures along a four-block portion of Main Street were less than successful, this latest one - some two years in the making - has all the ingredients necessary to be an urban planning home run.
The City of Niagara Falls, working in concert with the Niagara Falls Urban Renewal Agency, the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency, and the Niagara Orleans Regional Land Improvement Corp. - a bi-county land bank, is in the process of acquiring 39 vacant Main Street properties ranging from the Rapids Theater to the former Jenss Department Store headquarters and offering them to private developers.
The project is the vision of Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino, who has spent the past two years championing the plan and shepherding it to its current pre-development stage. Restaino says this is an urban planning effort rooted in reality and not some pie-in-the-sky dream…
“We know that it is going to be of some duration, that we’re going to have to be consistent, and that we going to have to make sure that we stay with this project,” Restaino said.
To sweeten the development pot, Niagara University has pledged to bring as many as 175 students - initially - to some of the Main Street buildings as anchor tenants. This will give Niagara Falls a jump start on bringing some critical mass to that portion of Main Street and with it an influx of private sector-backed development dollars. Also planned are restaurants, microbreweries, and other retail outlets.
Taken together, it could help solve a development and urban planning dilemma that has haunted Niagara Falls for the past few decades, a lot is riding on its success.
“It starts with the University students, bringing that different vitality, right?” Restaino said. “We’ve actually had one of the construction companies actually brought some Buffalo businesspeople here from one of the entertainment districts and talked to them about 175 different students being here, what would that mean in terms of storefronts, and they were literally looking at the storefronts and sort of picking off what might make sense in any one of these locations. So again, we're trying to be very organic, let them come in here and think about what they think will work, and then have at it.”
The mayor, along with development leaders like Andrea Klyczek from the NCIDA and NORLIC executive director, said that the Main Street plan is designed to be a long-term effort, taking perhaps five years to complete.
“It is going to be a long-term development effort for sure, and it’s going to take several years before you see the investment on Main Street sprawl out into the neighboring communities,” Klyczek said. “but I do believe the investment in Main Street is going to be in the very near term”.
Niagara Falls expects to close on the short sale deal for the land by early January and then put some of the properties on the market, with the first buildings expected to be tenant move-in ready by September 2026.
