Green Bay Press Gazette, October 11, 2004
Urban dwellers key to vital downtown
By Karen Rauen
krauen@greenbaypressgazette.com
Getting here and there
Using MapQuest, the Press-Gazette measured the distance from roughly North Jefferson and East Walnut streets, the virtual center of downtown’s east side, to nearby convenience businesses.
Grocery
• Save-A-Lot, 505 Dousman St. — 0.76 miles
• Nemecek’s SuperValu Foods, 1220 S. Webster Ave. — 1.73
miles
• Copps Food Center, 1819 Main St. — 2.72 miles
Pharmacy
• Streu’s Pharmacy, 934 Main St. — 0.73 miles
• Krider’s Pharmacy & Gift, 1119 W. Mason St. — 1.95
miles
• Walgreens Drug Store, 1401 E. Mason St. — 1.47 miles
• Walgreens Drug Store, 1165 W. Mason St. — 2.06 miles
Dry cleaners
• Tidy Laundry Cleaner, 818 S. Broadway — 1.03 miles
• Executive Dry Cleaners, 933 W. Mason St. — 1.52 miles
Laundry
• Walnut Street Laundry, 513 W. Walnut St. — 0.5 miles
• Corner Coin, 313 Mather St. — 1.12 miles
• Norge Village East, Corner of South Webster Avenue and Stuart Street — 0.6
miles
There are doubters — those who say downtown housing will never
sell. “There is not enough down there to invite people to live
there,” said Pat Richardson of Green Bay. “We don’t
need more living space downtown. I think the men who are doing the planning
are wishful thinkers.
“They need more than eating places and a couple of entertainment places to get people to move downtown.”
That sort of thinking doesn’t deter John Vetter, one of the “men who are doing the planning” for a more than $60 million riverfront revitalization that includes condominiums, mixed-use office buildings and public access to the river.
Vetter Denk Architects of Milwaukee hopes to build a 26-unit condominium complex behind the 200 block of North Washington Street, where the Fox River Parking Ramp once stood.
Vetter believes that once people live downtown, more businesses will follow.
“The problem with Green Bay is it never understood you need the people for the viability,” he said. Although city officials have long talked about identity and vitality, the focus has been on bringing in retail. “You need to bring in people first.”
He’s seen it happen.
Vetter Denk’s Beerline developments have raised the bar for condominium development in Milwaukee, he said.
“This was our starting point and stepping stone,” Vetter said, standing at the firm’s downtown Milwaukee studio and looking over models of the first Beerline project.
John Vetter and Kelly Denk founded their firm in 1985. Their Broadway studio occupies the third and fourth floors of a 150-year-old building.
Hardwood floors stretch virtually uninterrupted the length of the building — an open, loft-style concept. Models and hanging displays create a three-dimensional résumé of the firm’s award-winning work.
“The market was just crying out,” he said.
The Beerline projects — which began with housing, then included a more community-minded development for the Milwaukee Rowing Club — have won recognition from the American Institute of Architects Wisconsin Chapter.
As the housing developed, retail followed.
“It informed the other developers’ thinking dramatically. The lifestyle image we created five years ago is the status quo now. We want to raise the quality of life.”
Green Bay officials also are striving to raise the bar for downtown housing. Planners know downtown needs more people making it their home.
A simple Internet search with the phrase “downtown living” finds cities nationwide trying to draw residents to the city center. Downtown living has tended to start small in cities, but catches on, said Dave Feehan, president of the International Downtown Association.
“All Green Bay has to do is enjoy an urban housing boom, and you will have an activated downtown like you wouldn’t believe,” Vetter said.
In 2000, 540 people called downtown home, according to the U.S. Census. Of those, only a handful owned their homes.
Tim and Sandy Glynn added to the number of urban dwellers last year when the couple moved to Green Bay’s Washington Square Apartments.
“We wanted to get downtown,” Tim Glynn said. “We wanted to be close to things.”
They managed that.
Glynn walks to his job at the Regency Suites hotel, the bank, dentist and library. He and his wife walk to restaurants and occasionally local bars.
The couple lives easily with one car, which Sandy Glynn uses to get to her job in Bellevue.
Having lived in a handful of other urban areas, Glynn said he can see that Green Bay’s downtown has a “ways to go.”
“The city planning years ago just didn’t seem like they had a lot of foresight,” Glynn said. “If they just would have investigated other cities … I know other cities made the same mistakes that they did.”
He, like many, hopes to see the riverfront enhanced.
“If you look at other cities that had a river running through it, that’s what really helped them,” he said.
Green Bay is aiming more for an urban feel than a magic number of residents.
“You’re going to sense it. You’re going to feel it when you’re on the street and there are people there,” said Rob Strong, Green Bay’s planning director. “There are things going on in the evening where people are walking to them; they’re not all driving downtown. There’s just an urban lifestyle that’s now alive.
“I do want to start to see the street life, people who live and work here and walk on the sidewalks.”
Strong and Green Bay Mayor Jim Schmitt talk about attracting a “creative class” of people to the city core.
“Downtowns are a perfect environment for those types of people if you provide the settings that they like, places where they can meet and spend time with other creative people,” Strong said.
But for more people to live downtown, city planners recognize it needs to offer a grocery store, a pharmacy, a dry cleaner.
The city’s Downtown Design Plan pegs the southeast corner of Monroe Avenue and Main Street, where the Body Shop now stands, as a “neighborhood commercial node,” where a small grocery store or pharmacy might locate.
“We’ve known all along that you need to have that element if you’re going to support the residential,” Strong said. “The businesses aren’t going to come here until they’ve got ‘the rooftops,’ as we say, or in this case, the unit counts. And it’s tough to get the people down here, knowing that the services are so far away. It’s going to have to go somewhat hand in hand.”
The city has tried to bring drug and grocery stores downtown, but the retailers haven’t bitten, Strong said.
“You’ve got to find the businesses that understand the urban environment and start to realize that there is value in these walk-in customers,” he said.
The city faces inherent challenges in attracting people to live downtown, said Ray Hutchison, head of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Urban and Regional Studies department.
Some people perceive downtown as unsafe. “While those are not accurate perceptions, it’s a reality that some people view downtown as that,” he said.
And people have to want the lifestyle.
“Are people in Green Bay going to buy this idea of living downtown?” Hutchison said.
Vetter Denk’s work in Green Bay is in part educational, Vetter said. The condominium project will be the city’s first truly urban housing option, he said.
It’s difficult for Green Bay residents to judge whether the condominiums will succeed.
“How would you know if it doesn’t exist?” Vetter said. “Go to Denver, Milwaukee, Minneapolis — this is how it’s all happening. Literally, this will set the tone. The buying public can only react to what’s available.” tion, the two properties will be valued at $5.07 million and $1.28 million respectively.
More is in the works. If Milwaukee-based Vetter Denk Architects’ plan
for the riverfront gets off the ground, it could add $60 million to $95
million of value to a three-block area between the Walnut Street and
Ray Nitschke Memorial bridges. 
