Why Should Delaware Care?
Despite the presence of the state legislature, Delaware State University, and the nearby Air Force base, the city of Dover struggles to bring foot traffic and economic activity downtown. The Downtown Dover Partnership is hoping to change that with a full-scale revitalization project to be completed by 2030. Leaders say the redevelopment will have an effect in Dover like the Riverfront project had in Wilmington.
A multi-million dollar, multi-year downtown Dover revitalization project is now underway, anchored by the construction of a four-story parking garage. But some residents and experts are skeptical of the efforts to breathe new life into Delaware’s capital city.
The Downtown Dover Partnership, a nonprofit focused on redevelopment and business growth in the city, broke ground last month on the first part of its plan. Beginning with the construction of a combined parking garage and office space, the project will also include apartments, a grocery store, a riverwalk path and a community amphitheater by 2030.
Project leaders say the effort, which they have named Capital City 2030, will bring working professionals, economic activity and foot traffic back downtown. But residents and urban planning experts are less sure the plan will succeed, citing the city’s long struggle with homelessness and drug use in the area.
“This is a complete sea change,” said Ken Anderson, property development director for the Downtown Development Partnership. “There isn’t a downtown entity in the state of Delaware that is building infrastructure and overseeing development [like us].”
A project anchored by parking
The redevelopment plan will eventually bring apartments, food and retail options and more walkability to the city core. But a parking and transportation hub is the first step to bring that plan to fruition, said Diane Laird, executive director of the Downtown Dover Partnership.
The so-called “mobility center” will feature a first-floor office space, 325 parking spaces across four garage floors and a connection hub to other modes of transportation, like DART bus lines and bike pathways.
For Laird, getting the parking garage up and running was the launching point in the revitalization effort because it will prepare the city for the 1,000 new residents she hopes to bring downtown when the entire project is completed.
“You can’t have a lot of redevelopment around you and then you haven’t figured the parking out,” she said.
Wilmington-based EDiS Construction began work on the mobility center, located on Bradford Street, on Oct. 14. Anderson said the Partnership hopes to be parking cars by the end of 2026.
People will have to pay for parking in the garage, and the city will be adding parking meters to street parking that used to be free in order to make options more fair across the board, said Todd Stonesifer, the Partnership’s board president.
As the garage construction continues, the organization will turn its attention to a mixed-use apartment and grocery store building across the street, at 120 S. Governors Ave.
Building plans currently include 120 units – a mix of studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments – along with a first-floor grocery store, Stonesifer said. The development, which will be called “The Governor,” will be a mix of market rate and subsidized affordable housing.
Stonesifer said the Partnership has not determined how many units will be market rate and how many will be affordable. The grocery store chain also has yet to be decided.
Stonesifer said the Partnership wants to attract people working at Bayhealth Hospital, the Dover Air Force Base, Legislative Hall and graduate students at Delaware State University to live in the building.
The organization has secured more $30 million for the project from a mix of state bond money and federal COVID relief funding, Laird said.
That money – along with some smaller grants – will cover the entire cost of the mobility center and a portion of the apartment building. The Partnership will need to seek out additional funding to complete the later phases of the project, including wastewater improvements and the proposed riverwalk, Stonesifer said.
“When we prove that the money they’ve already given to us is put to good use, they’ll continue to support us,” Stonesifer said about getting more money from the state. “But we have to prove that what they’ve given us so far is going to work.”
He added that the well-known Wilmington Riverfront revitalization project received hundreds of millions in funding from the state, so the Dover project will ultimately require a similar investment to be successful.
An urban planning perspective
While project leaders hope the parking garage and mixed-use building will be the first steps in increasing activity downtown, an urban planning expert said the ultimate outcome of the project is difficult to predict.
Nina David, an urban planning professor at the University of Delaware, said Capital City 2030 has the ingredients for a successful revitalization effort – a long-term scope and a coordinated approach across different parts of the city.
“In the planning world, having a cluster of strategies that targets different areas of the city tends to be the best,” she said.
To David, however, it’s hard to predict whether leaders will be able to attract people to live in an area of the city that many consider unsafe, like Governors Avenue.
She pointed to sociologist Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” theory that more people living in an area, or more eyes on the street, increases foot traffic and improves peoples’ perceptions of safety. A similar strategy has helped Wilmington’s Market Street revival in the last decade.
Downtown Dover Partnership leaders said they are aware of the risk of putting housing and parking in an area of the city where some residents are reluctant to go, but they believe “eyes on the street” will help the environment in Dover.
When asked about safety concerns in the city’s downtown core, Stonesifer said it is a topic he could “talk about for weeks.”
Fully addressing the homelessness and drug use challenges in the city falls on state government leaders, he said, but the Partnership believes their economic development projects will have a positive impact in the area.
“We have learned that putting more eyes on the street has an effect of deterring crime,” he said.
David agreed that the revitalization project has the potential for success in Dover, but she said it can take many years after a project is completed to see its impact on economic development, the number of people living downtown and safety.
Residents weigh in
Business owners on the west side of Dover, near the Governors Avenue apartments and parking garage, have long reported feeling ignored by city officials.
Today, business owners in the area say they struggle with safety concerns and the lack of foot traffic. They are skeptical about whether the redevelopment project will have the outcome city leaders are intending.
“I think a lot of people don’t feel entirely safe coming down here anymore with their families and if they do, it’s for a short period of time,” said Vahagn Aghekyan, who owns the clothing store Esteem Delaware on Loockerman Street. “They want to get in and get out.”
Aghekyan said he mostly relies on students from Delaware State University coming downtown to buy from his store. Foot traffic gets so slow during the summer that he must rely on online business sales to make ends meet.
Gary Knox has owned Forney’s Too, a gift shop on Loockerman Street, for 40 years.
Knox said he has witnessed a “downward slide” in the area over the years, as more and more businesses have vacated. While Knox said he is “all for” more downtown development, he hasn’t heard any of his customers say they plan to use the new parking garage once it opens.
“Just having people living downtown isn’t the answer to everything,” he said. “It needs to be a mix of businesses, offices and apartment dwellers.”
Maxine Lewis, owner of Maxine’s Fashion, said she has had the opposite experience from Aghekyan and Knox. She has seen a dramatic increase in foot traffic since moving from a location on Governors Avenue to Loockerman Street earlier this year.
In the 16 years she spent doing business on Governors Avenue, down the street from where the apartment building and parking garage are going, Lewis said she had a number of safety concerns with homeless individuals near her store.
“I had people afraid to get out of their cars,” she said.
A downtown history
Dover hasn’t had true foot traffic or economic activity downtown since the 1990s, when flashy shopping malls opened up outside the city and smaller businesses in the downtown core lost their appeal, said Mayor Robin Christiansen, who grew up in Dover.
The Downtown Dover Partnership has been working to change that since 2008, aiming to attract economic activity back to the city.
In 2014, Dover was one of the first cities in Delaware – along with Wilmington and Seaford – to receive a designated Downtown Development District through the Delaware State Housing Authority under former Gov. Jack Markell. The program targets areas of high need with tax rebates for businesses and help with funding improvements to buildings.
Despite these pre-existing efforts, Laird and Stonesifer said the previous redevelopment efforts in the city have not stuck because they were not as comprehensive in scope and did not have support at all levels of government.
Laird said she and Stonesifer came onto the Downtown Partnership around the same time in 2018 and started pushing for a more complete revitalization project.
They reviewed a number of proposals from different community members, Stonesifer said, and ended up going with a plan created by Mosaic Development Partners – a Philadelphia-based real estate development company that has worked on projects on college campuses and in smaller municipalities.
Mosaic is serving as a co-developer of the Governors Avenue mixed-use building, along with the Partnership.
Christiansen, who was elected mayor in 2014, said he has been seeking revitalization since he took office, but he has not felt true momentum until the Capital City 2030 project was underway.
“When dirt is moving in Dover, we’re making progress, we’re building our tax base, we’re bringing subscribers to our enterprise funds,” he said.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.