Miss. visitors seek downtown tips

• By CHAD CALDER
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Jul 10, 2009 - Page: 2B

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Roughly 60 officials from Jackson, Miss., are spending two days visiting downtown, hoping to head home today inspired to tackle some of the challenges Baton Rouge has grappled with for the past decade.

Ben Allen, president of the Downtown Jackson Partners, said he put together the trip after seeing The Shaw Center for the Arts on a recent visit. Jackson is planning to create its own arts complex, but officials also wanted to look at what Baton Rouge has done to attract residential development, restaurant and entertainment venues and build out public spaces.

Allen said his first trip to see the Shaw Center turned out to be a revelation.

“Baton Rouge is like the four-leaf clover we never expected or respected,” he said. “I’ve been going to LSU football games (against) Ole Miss for years but nobody ever thought about going to downtown Baton Rouge.”

The tour, which was put together by the Downtown Development District with the help of the Mayor’s Office and the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, included the Shaw Center, the work at II City Plaza and the 19th Judicial District Courthouse, the Louisiana State Museum and the welcome center, the Capitol Complex and Spanish Town and Beauregard Town.

It also included the Main Street Market and the downtown YMCA to show how parking garages could use their street-level space in ways that enhance life downtown. They also looked at residential development under way behind the Shaw Center at OnEleven and Kress at Third and Main.

Today, the group will hear presentations about public/private partnerships and creative financing mechanisms, such as diverting future tax revenue from project’s to offset development costs.

Allen said another one of downtown Jackson’s missions is to encourage residential development. He said Little Rock has increased its downtown living exponentially in the past 15 years and Memphis just opened its first downtown public school in ages.

Jackson, meanwhile, has 180 downtown residents but Allen said he wants to see that rise to 1,000 within two years.

Too many Jacksonians, he said, “are reluctant about change and the urban lifestyle, a lot of people don’t understand that young people want to live downtown.”

Allen said Jackson is going through a renaissance period, but despite being in a growing region, was in the only state in the South to lose a congressional seat due to population loss.

At the heart of that problem, he said, is a need to have a thriving urban center where people — particularly young people — can live, work and play.

Allen, who has been head of Downtown Jackson Partners for three years after a decade as a city councilman, said the main thing is that the group goes back inspired and spreads the word.