Downtown Edmond – primed for 2019
By: Bert Belanger//Guest Columnist//December 27, 2018
Filling in for professor David Chapman again, my topic is what led me to Dr. Chapman in the first place: downtown Edmond.
In the six years since I was asked by him to teach as an adjunct at the University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond’s downtown has moved to the cusp of true urbanization, thanks in large part to its city’s visionary leaders.
Heading the city leaders in Edmond who truly “get it,” in terms of infill redevelopment, was the late Mayor Charles Lamb. His sudden passing this month was shocking and sad to me personally, but my optimism for downtown Edmond is buoyed by the “deep bench” and energetic team that Mayor Lamb has helped assemble over the last dozen years.
While teaching at UCO with Dr. Chapman, I began to understand why Chapman was so enthusiastic about the potential of Edmond’s budding Downtown District. By 2013, we were both landowners near Hurd and Broadway, and I watched with amazement as Edmond banker Jill Castilla and others organized a series of festivals known as “Heard on Hurd” that quickly rivaled, then surpassed, similar food truck festivals in Oklahoma City, drawing over 20,000 to Edmond’s quaint but otherwise sleepy stretch of Broadway.
I marveled at the fact that downtown Edmond already boasted a Sprouts grocery store and other great urban “bones,” not the least of which is a growing live-on campus population of close to 8,000 students (out of nearly 18,000!). In 2014, Freese & Nichols issued a new planning report offering city leaders a workable set of priorities and a “blueprint” that can move beyond “the shelf” and actually be implemented to create a vibrant urban “Town & Gown” village that can be the envy of every college town in the state, including the orange and crimson ones!
For me, the proof that this can happen came last fall, when Mayor Lamb and the Edmond City Council committed to funding a “quiet zone.” In OKC, it took us nearly 10 years to understand how important this step can be to vitality in the urban core. Edmond leaders have “gotten it” in less than a third of that time.
This is just one reason why I am certain that 2019 will be the beginning of an urban renaissance for downtown Edmond.
Bert Belanger is a broker with Adept Commercial Real Estate and a real estate attorney with Riggs Abney (bbelanger@riggsabney.com).