This is certainly a topic to discuss and I thought you presented the issue well. I am not a business owner but I do believe people respond to incentives. Therefore, as a business owner, why wouldn’t you pay attention to the indicators coming from your customer base?
If they are saying they want easy parking, you fight for that, and not a bike lane out front. If your customers are telling you they want bike lanes and bike parking out front, you’re more likely to advocate for it.
Safety may be trickier cause it means different things to different people. Real safety is also different than perceived safety. Let’s say crime doesn’t happen downtown but there are still poorly-lit corners and foreboding parking decks that people feel wary walking by. These are subtle queues to us humans that may budge people to another area versus downtown, even with a clean track record. The RPD may be doing their job but who is looking at the public realm?
I’ve talked to a few business recruiters over the past years, just casually while attending networking events. The general thinking is that businesses and companies tend to already know where they want to go when looking for space. You have the “companies want the suburbs” crowd (ex: a Cary office park or RTP) and the “companies who want the urban style” crowd (Downtown, North Hills) and it’s hard to convince them otherwise.
From a city POV, it’s good that we have all these options so that no matter what, we can land these companies, whether it’s outside Brier Creek or in the downtown core. For downtown’s sake, I’m hoping we can distinguish ourselves a little more to make recruiting more appealing. I’m assuming recruiting is a little tougher these days, I certainly could be wrong.
It feels like North Hills has “caught up” to downtown over the last 10-15 years. Downtown needs another boom time to distinguish itself from the pack and then I think we could see office leases filling up again. I HOPE that the catalyst that was the 2000s Fayetteville Street/City Plaza/Convention Center can be pulled off again here in the second half of the 2020s with the new Red Hat/Convention Center Expansion/Omni Hotel projects. I hope too that they don’t phone it in with the Fayetteville Street makeover and especially this “magical connection” to Dix.
I wonder if the Fayetteville Street makeover can be more of a district-wide thing and include some love to Wilmington Street and GoRaleigh Station.