Urban infill – transforming the Big Uglies
By: Bert Belanger//Guest Columnist//February 28, 2019
About a month left in my tenure as guest columnist, so I today address a theme common in urban infill development.
In an earlier column, I suggested that tax increment financing might be part of a funding solution for replacing the county jail. I would include this brutalist modern (architecture’s term for hideous) structure at the top of a list that I would call the Big Uglies. These are structures that, when removed from an otherwise ideal location, could pave the way for exciting urban placemaking.
By using this label, I don’t mean to offend the owners of these locations, but to encourage them to simply move elsewhere and allow the uniquely positioned dirt underneath to become something really cool. And, thus, more valuable to all of us.
Several owners of Big Uglies have already figured this out, and their contributions to my list are either gone or soon to be. The owners of the Cotton Mill, a cooperative of savvy Altus cotton farmers, have wisely cleared and put their 30 acres of land in the heart of Bricktown squarely in play. Likewise, the management of Dolese Brothers Inc. (now employee-owned, none of whom are brothers, nor named Dolese) have wisely demolished and moved two concrete batch plants in hot inner-city areas of Edmond and Oklahoma City.
The most exciting to me – but largely unnoticed – Big Ugly that is on the move is OG&E’s Tenth Street Substation. This relocation is occurring after a complicated set of land purchases and exchanges involving private owners, OG&E, the city and the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. A brand-new, higher-capacity substation will be built in the coming months just one block north, bordered by the railroad tracks, Park Place, NE 11th Street and the frontage road.
Notwithstanding the short distance of this relocation, the best news is that the 4-acre block comprising the hard corner of Oklahoma Avenue and 10th Street will be free of a Big Ugly; it will soon be much easier to envision a spectacular gateway of highly dense mixed use that can start to bridge the barrier created by Interstate 235 between Automobile Alley and Midtown to the west and the Health Center and state Capitol to the east.
Maybe the 10th Street cap being debated in the MAPS 4 chatroom, and elsewhere, isn’t so far-fetched. It sure beats a Big Ugly.
Bert Belanger is a broker with Adept Commercial Real Estate and an of counsel attorney with Riggs Abney.