So, if you’re going to try and maximize the economic value of programming for a site like that, you’ve got to figure out some complementary activities. Combining water oriented events with landside events, perhaps through festivals, and making sure that everything is visible from multiple vantage points so that the place is inviting. So that you want to come visit whether you are spying the Inner Harbor from your hotel room, whether you’re spying it from the Skyway, whether you’re spying the site from some other distant vantage point or from the water itself.

With waterfront development, there are a lot of economic advantages, but there are also obstacles and all this is going to come into play, no matter what you all decide about the best way to deal with the Commercial Slip and the Erie Canal story. Because water is an automatic amenity. Everybody wants it. It goes without saying, that’s the highest priced land. It commands premium prices and is appropriate for a huge array of uses, but it also has to support a lot higher costs.

There are environmental issues. We’ve spoken about the regulatory thicket here in Buffalo and there is a public use imperative because it’s a public resource. And what that means is that there’s an ongoing management requirement to make sure that it’s clean, to make sure that it’s safe, to make sure that it’s well maintained.

People often want to intermingle public spaces and private, commercial, uses. So what are some the issues around uses in general? Well, if you stick housing on a waterfront site you’ll get the highest premiums in the short run, but you have limited appeal and it reduces public access. The market appeal basically gets limited to people without children. Empty-nesters, young folks. Why? Because nobody wants junior to be running around, jumping into the water and drowning. It’s pretty simple. Good parenting. It’s not on the list of good things to do as a parent.

If you have office uses, you still need access, you still need transportation, you still need parking. Retail needs parking, too, and visibility. It’s been less true in recent years, but there are still a lot of folks out there who point to festival market places as the automatic solution. But that really only works if you have a large downtown population to draw on.

All of this is seeking the ever-elusive critical mass. And critical mass is a hard thing to grasp. It’s like the famous description of pornography: I don’t how to define it, but I know it when I see it. Critical mass is not just square feet. It’s a lot of things. It’s activity. It’s things to see and do. It’s choice. Do I want to participate? Do I want to be a spectator? Do I want to provide an opportunity for my kids to do something? It’s whether it provides something satisfying.

Remember when there used to be only one phone book? I’m all for competition, but it was great. You opened up the one phone book and you knew that you had complete choice. Listed there were all of the places that sold tents or parachutes or whatever you wanted instead of lugging out your five foot stack of phone books and going through every single one in order to know that you have complete choice. Critical mass satisfies the craving for having had a complete experience.

Critical mass also tends to create places that create habit. So if you program events and develop sites on your waterfront that create repeat users, things like farmers markets and festivals and so forth, you will engender the kind of behavior that you need over time with your resident audience.

There are a number of site limitations you all have to deal with. It’s not that big. There are a lot of existing stakeholders. We need to make sure that their needs are all cared for whether it’s the vessels out there, the memorials, or the existing museums. Those folks have put a lot of time and effort into their activities and their enterprises. And we need to make sure that whatever happens with the Commercial Slip and whatever happens with telling the Canal story, that those folks are honored too. They are neighbors here.

There is the Skyway. It presents noise issues. It presents shadow issues and to the extent that I wouldn’t want to be hit by a hubcap flying over the top of it, it presents some safety issues, okay? There’s other 20th century stuff on this site, too, whether it’s the grain elevators, it’s the Arena next door, it’s the old Auditorium.

Then there’s seasonality. Seasonality is not to be sneezed at because it’s not just that it presents a dilemma operationally for the businesses or the activities that are sponsored there. There are also cost premiums involved in designing spaces and structures that can accommodate the conditions and create a hospitable environment for the patrons. And there’s some programming limitations as a result and hence, constraints on revenue generation.

But there’s a lot of positive stuff too. If you were an economic development person looking at this, I think you would probably want to make sure that whatever happened, happened with the benefit of some market demand assessment and some feasibility analysis before making an investment, whether it was public sector money or private sector money.

You know, for a project of the scope of the Inner Harbor, it’s really easy to get caught up in the “theys.” Part of the reason why I became a consultant, interested in real estate development in particular, was that I was always hearing about “they.” You know like “What’s going on in that construction site down there?” “Oh, ‘they’re’ putting in a 7-Eleven.” Or, “Hey, whatever happened to that neo-Victorian house I liked so much?” Well, “‘they’ tore it down.” You wonder who is “they?” And how did “they” decide this and how are “they” paying for it? And you know what? You are “they.” And you will be “they” no matter what happens here. And that’s really great. It’s really exciting. Embrace your they-hood. Embrace your they-ness. (laughter)

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