Bottom-Up Shorts: How To Build a City’s Economic Core

Amy Emery is a community leader focused on fostering sustainable growth and smart development in Warrenville, Illinois. In today’s Bottom-Up Short, she joins Norm to discuss several initiatives the city is running, including an incubator program for local businesses and a zoning overlay that allows for mixed-use development.

  • Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06

    Welcome to bottom up shorts. I'm Norm with strong towns, and after meeting 1000s of strong towns members, oftentimes, I think I've got to tell you about this person, and that's what bottom up shorts is all about. Quick introductions to regular people doing exciting things. They're not superheroes. They once felt like you might unsure if they could make a difference, but they've plunged ahead, taken action, and really had an opportunity to find a niche, a pathway, in terms of helping to improve their communities. Today, my guest is Amy Emery, who is a dedicated community leader in Warrenville, Illinois, and one of the nominators of Warrenville as one of the strongest towns in America. As you know, the strongest town contest is underway, and this is a great opportunity to be able to broadcast the types of things that communities are doing that are making their places more vibrant, more prosperous, more capable of enduring, not just the good times, but also being set up to endure through more difficult times. And so Amy is a key figure in the city's planning efforts, and she's played a vital role in initiatives like Warrenville by design, a real big focus on mixed use housing, or mixed use buildings, rather and middle housing, and working on things like strategic infrastructure, from parking reforms to business support initiatives like the Mary market, which I'm definitely going to go into with. Amy, she's helping to shape a future that strengthens the community. And so Amy, welcome to bottom up shorts. And can you describe all of the different sort of layers of activities that are underway that are making your community stronger?

    Amy Emery 1:40

    Well, thank you for having me. Very glad to be here, and that's a big question. There's so many things happening in Warrenville. We are a small city in a very populated area just outside of Chicago, and one of the most populated areas of the country, but we even though we're small, we're doing great things here, and we're being recognized for it. As people are moving to our community, we have a variety of different districts in our community that have different attention that's given to them. We've got roadway corridors that have commercial development occurring there, and we're helping those areas revitalize with reinvestment. We're looking at establishing some new programs for them to help with facade improvements and some interior renovation grants that we think will be important over the next couple of years. We're very unfortunate. We're very fortunate, rather, to have a interstate highway corridor as our southern boundary, which has a couple of interchanges in Warrenville that have supported a really significant office development core, known as Cantera, has over a million square feet of office development within it. Certainly office isn't what it used to be, but we are working on revitalizing that area and bringing new uses in. And our changes to our parking code are a big part of that, providing some new opportunities to divide some parcels and create some new spaces for new medical uses, and a new high school that's looking to establish here. And then we are also working on building a downtown, which is why we put together this overlay zoning district to help make that possible and revitalize one of the oldest areas of our community. And those are just three that pop to mind. I know there's so much happening, but happy to answer any questions you

    Norm Van Eeden Petersman 3:19

    have when you talk about Warrenville by design, and by design is, I think, a really important part of sort of mapping and shaping and describing sort of the conditions that are going to be set in place to see what happens. And can you touch on the challenge of creating a downtown, or sort of developing more of a downtown with a core and sort of a designed identity. But also, what are some of the things that you're seeing that maybe you didn't fully expect at this point, but are excited to see?

    Amy Emery 3:48

    So, yeah, it's been a very unique process for us. I think different communities will have different paths for how they try to create an area or a district. For us, this area was once the I mean, 5060, years ago, plus it was the historic hub of Warrenville, and over time, investment has moved to highway corridors and the interstate and away from that area. But it's an area that is very compact and walkable. It has a river that runs behind it. There's a reason it was the original establishment area of our community, and so putting together the overlay was a process that allowed us to bring the community together and share with them through a series of images. There were 150 in total. What do you like? What do you not like? What are you concerned about? And that visual preference survey activity was very well attended and gave us a great baseline for understanding what they want that area to look like, not just in terms of the building, but the landscaping and the pedestrian environment, and all of those things came together and developing the overlay itself, which has a strong architectural emphasis on it much different than our other zoning district. Yes. And for me, something that was surprising, very pleasantly surprised, is one of soon after we adopted the code, we had a development come in to be requested that wasn't aligned with it, and the community came out to the meetings to say, no. I mean, we just adopted this new ordinance. We want to see it roll and go forward. And it's not often that you see people standing up in meetings going, we like our zoning ordinance, and we want to see the vision that we described come to life. So that was a really pleasant surprise, and we're now working with the property owners in that area and developers to make something happen. The city actually owns a key piece of property. It had a gas station on it, as it was a Brownfield, we cleaned it up, and we're getting ready to market the site for development to really create an anchor in our new downtown space. So it's a very exciting time for us to have those regulations to guide us that we know, that people love and want to see, and then to be on the forefront ourselves the piece of property that we can help really make the transformation happen. Yeah,

    Norm Van Eeden Petersman 5:59

    and we have a non I'm fascinated by that, and we have a more non technical audience. Can you describe a visual survey? And maybe, I think there's ways in which regular groups of people can even be conducting similar sort of methodologies?

    Amy Emery 6:14

    Oh, absolutely. I mean, you can do this with your smartphone. Basically, what we did is we showed a series of images, a picture, one at a time, of different types of buildings, different types of development. Maybe you'd see a single story development of a fast food restaurant, or maybe you'd see a five story apartment building, and everything in between that you could imagine. And as the photos were being shown, the residents in the room had a survey instrument in front of them, and they could rank the photos from one to 10. One, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. It doesn't belong here. To 10. Can we have this here tomorrow? I love it so much. And then we took it one step further. So after they had rated everything, we had the participants in the room, and we had over 50 people attend this meeting, which is really good attendance for a meeting, and our community of our size, come together and meet in small groups and then talk through, Hey, I see that you gave this photo a 10, and somebody else may have given it a five, and and really started to drill down as to well, why did you give it a 10? It might not have been the building. It may have been I really like the landscaping in the front, or the sidewalk was wide enough, but I could get there, the storefront was really inviting to me, and all of that information helped to tell us what was important, what people were attracted to and they wanted to see in the community. And like you said, you could do this, anybody could do this. Take photos around your community, or other communities, places that you like or interested in, places maybe that you don't like. But you need to know that others are of the same mindset, and then put them in a PowerPoint slideshow and have people tell you what their preferences are, easy, simple tool and a great way to get feedback. What's, what's the saying of pictures worth 1000 words? Well, I guess if you had 150 pictures, you can only imagine how many words we

    Norm Van Eeden Petersman 7:57

    had. Yeah, and we are drawn to these nice places, and sometimes lack sort of the language to be able to say that's what I want in a technical way, but to be able to point and say that is yes, that is no, that's a maybe, or that might be somebody else's cup of tea. But like these are the types of things that feel so out of bounds. I think really is a very valuable exercise. It sounds like another key exercise that you have undertaken is the Mary market and the effort to provide a space for home based businesses, to be able to provide for their I guess, to meet customers, connect with customers. Can you share a little bit more about the merry market?

    Amy Emery 8:34

    Absolutely. So we know that we have entrepreneurs in our community. And as I'm talking to them, as the Director of Economic Development here, they tell me over and over again, what I need most is a place to interact with my customers. Yes, I can have the internet, but I want to meet them and find out what they like and what they don't like and their preferences face to face. And so we're like, Well, I think we have an opportunity here. We have in Warrenville, really great community festivals. It's part of the thing that makes our community pride and spirit so strong. Here and during the holiday season, we have an event called holidays that is probably our key one of our key events during the year, one of the big three or four that we have, brings the whole community out for the lighting of our downtown like area, the where the civic center is, is what we call it. With the City Hall and the police station. We've got a really nice park area there that's illuminated for the holidays. Santa comes in and says, Merry Christmas and all that. And there's fun little activities happening organized by our friends in the park district. But there was never a opportunity to do a little holiday shopping. And so that's where the idea was born from our entrepreneurs saying, Hey, I would love to be able to meet with customers, knowing that we have this time and place when the community comes together. And so the city stepped in and said, you know, let's give it a go. We have our city hall right in the middle of this. Is it a commercial space? No, not. Usually, there's your typical city hall with a big room with chairs and a dice but we push the chairs aside. And we put 11 tables around the dias room and a couple in the entry, and the vendors came out and just had an amazing evening of sharing their merchandise and making great sales. The community came together to check the market out to buy things. We even had a horse and trolley that is in our area, maybe it's a two block walk from where Santa is to the event, but you know, if you could arrive by horse and trolley, why not? And so it just added to the atmosphere of it, and I was so happy with the response that we had. And for our first time event, we had more than double that number of vendors that wanted to be in the space. So we know the need is there, and we're working with our park district to find an even bigger and better space to make it happen in the coming year. And we're working to try to find something more permanent so that we can accommodate these entrepreneurs, as they grow from their homes, get to interact with the customers more, and hopefully grow to a permanent storefront here in Warrenville. Well,

    Norm Van Eeden Petersman 11:00

    this is all a very compelling presentation of Warrenville as one of the contenders for the strongest town title this year. But as we close, I would love to know what is it that gives you hope in your community?

    Amy Emery 11:14

    Oh, there's so many things that give me hope in this community. I think probably by and large, it's the people that are here. I mean, they are so happy with the housing choices and the schools and the parks and the trails that are here. They treasure them so much, and they are engaged in wanting to see them continue to be successful. And so I love working here in a community where the people have such pride in the space. And they have not failed, as I said, they have stood up for the new overlay. They are attending our events and activities, and we are a growing community. As a result of that, we just did a special census in the last, actually, last summer. And as you might imagine, it's never fun to ask people to do an extra census. One census is kind of enough every 10 years, but the community came out and they responded to our request, and as we suspected, we grew quite a bit more than 2000 residents, or 1600 more residents taking us over that 15,000 mark. So we're so thankful that they're not only willing to participate and to show their pride and say they're prideful, but to even be counted so it's the people that makes this community.

    Norm Van Eeden Petersman 12:26

    Yeah, I love that, and it speaks not only to the energy, but also the possibilities of what can emerge within your community. And so folks, I hope that you've enjoyed hearing from Amy from the city of Warrenville, Illinois, one of the strongest town contest participants this year. And Amy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and to everybody that's listening. Maybe you're going to do an image survey of people in your community in order to gage that sense of, what is it that we take pride in? What are the things that give us delight, and what are the things that are going to help our places become stronger, as always? And so with that, take care and take care of your places.

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