Food Trucks -- Spicing up the Suburbs

Food trucks at Fleet Peoples Park, Winter Park Florida

Food trucks provide a valuable service to many suburban communities,giving them the ability to fashion community-building events and create instant third spaces.  According to Daniel DJ Heffernan, food trucks fill a niche not being met by restaurants, adding choice and diversity to a city's food scene, which is so important for suburban locations where "place" identity is lacking.     

From the vendor perspective, food trucks offer many entrepreneurs a low-cost way to get into the restaurant business. Where the cost of start-up for a food truck ranges from $50,000 to $100,000, the costs for starting a brick-and-mortar restaurant can be upwards of $250,000.  Cathy Cheney has followed the food truck phenomenon in Portland, OR.  She has observed that food truck experience is like boot camp for restaurant entrepreneurs.  The would-be restaurant operators learn customer service and how to build a business under the trying experience of a confined kitchen with no storage space.  Most will never generate enough business to justify conversion to a permanent restaurant.   Those that do make the transition have exceptional food and a strong business plan. A sampling of these include: Beaver's Coffee & Donuts in Chicago, Calexico in NYC, District Taco in Washington DC, Taqueria Authentica in the Newark, NJ area, Pok Pok in Portland, and Clover Food Lab in Cambridge/Boston.

I recently interviewed Michael Bavaro, a local food truck vendor and owner of ubergoodfood.com in Orlando, FL.  He actually sold his restaurant at a suburban location to go into the food truck business.  For him, the change provided some cost savings-including elimination of the rent and the need to hire servers.  Rather than waiting for customers to find a fixed location, the food truck allows him to take food creations to his customers.   Bavaro's major concern was the number of new food trucks entering the market, a market where the number of events and locations are more or less fixed.  His strategy included co-marketing and event teaming with several other trucks, catering private events, and serving up high quality food creations.

Clearly, food trucks are providing suburban America with a way to begin the evolution of a community gathering place with the all-important food component.  In a future blog I will explore ideas of how suburban cities might proactively encourage the successful food truck vendors to establish fixed restaurants in their city.

Don Martin
dsmamerica.com   
 

10 Facts: Do you really know the Suburbs?

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Edinborough Park -- Activated Indoor Open Space

Adventure Peak

Edinborough Park, Edina MN

Today in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the temperature was -1 Fahrenheit.  A perfect day to take the kids to the park if you live in the City of Edina, Minnesota!  Here you will find Edinborough Park, a one-acre park with children's three-story "Adventure Peak" play structure, multipurpose courts/great hall, amphitheater, community green, swimming pool, and track -- all totally enclosed in a climate-controlled atrium.

This atrium park sits between three high-rise towers providing plenty of structural enclosure and  activated third spaces.  My family, together with my sister-in-law's family, spent the weekend at the  Residence Inn which gives the visitor a lobby view of Adventure Peak.  My two nieces had a great time here!  Also supporting the park is Edina Park Plaza, an independent and assisted living facility.  They bill this as the only place in Minnesota where you can live in 70 degree weather year around.  Rounding out the park edge is the 3300 Corporate Center, a 100,000 s.f. building housing doctors, lawyers, dentists, as well as "Especially for Children" providing care and education for young children.

Edina Park Plaza

Edinborough Park is a perfect solution for a park that is stimulating year-around community as well as economic development in a cold climate.  Congratulations Edina!  For more information visit Edinborough Park.    

The Grand Hall

Adapting to Demographic Shifts

Image courtesy of Stockimages / http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

The recent re-election of Barack Obama President reconfirms an important demographic reality.  America is becoming a more ethnically diverse nation.   Suburban demographics are following this mega trend.  According to Alan Berube, Senior Fellow & Deputy Director of the Metropolitan Policy Program, these changes can broadly be summarized as a continuing demographic convergence in our metropolitan areas.  That is to say that the suburbs and the cities are becoming demographically similar.  For suburban America, this means their populations are becoming more non-white. This convergence is the result of a combination of economic, social and physical changes.  These changes are producing a host of consequences.  On the positive side, where the suburbs were once only bedroom communities, today they now host 45 percent of all metropolitan jobs.   Increased ethic diversification can also be viewed as a positive trend.

With the growth of suburban jobs comes increased affordable housing.  As a result of the "Great Recession'" many suburban communities are facing a wave of housing foreclosures and exposure to poverty unlike ever before.   Additional burdens come from increased numbers of aging baby boomers.  While these realities put new demands on provision of services, resources are limited due to declining property values and forced reductions in local revenue streams by conservative state legislatures.
  
Clearly, adaptations are needed to accommodate new demographic realities.  As a short-term response to the Great Recession, city administrators have moved to "rightsize" their governmental work forces.  For the most part this has now been accomplished.  Positioning government structures to efficiently address demographic transformations may be more challenging.

Here's my working list of structural changes to be considered:

1.  Reposition your city's amenity package:  Most suburbs were created after World War II.  The community amenities provided to attract residents in the 1960s are not those that will attract or support the emerging generations of residents.  Perhaps the largest of these is the golf course.  Be it publicly or privately owned, in all probability it is not financially performing as it once did.  All signs point to continued decline in the golfing population.  The 100 or so acres of a 18-hole golf course offer opportunities to create new public and park amenities of connected green space that responds to the interests of the up-and-coming.


2.  Placemaking: Much has already been written and discussed on this topic. The demographic angle for placemaking in the suburbs pertains to the ability of the city to attract new generations of residents.  The millennials and generations x's desire experiential lifestyles and are looking for energized social and cultural activities.  Cities need to building public spaces which can host daily, weekly and monthly concerts, festivals and impromptu gatherings.  Properly designed, these spaces are further activated by private sector investment in adjacent restaurants functioning as third spaces.  A very successful execution of this concept can be found in Suwanee, Georgia's new town center and 10-acre park, which is financially out performing more traditional retail centers around it.  Such spaces attract the new generations with their ever expanding purchasing power, important for expanding the local economy and tax base.    

3.  Densification and Housing Diversification: Along with activated places, securing the new housing products desired by new generations is paramount to meeting the demographic challenge.  For all practical purposes we are talking about highly amenitized, new apartment projects.  Coordinated development through strategic public-private partnerships so to co-locate the housing adjacent to the new public spaces is ideal.
 
4.  Corridor Repair:  A great place to locate additional density is along the commercial corridors now consisting of vacant and low-performing strip centers.  Revising the city's code to allow residential in general commercial corridors and provide for sufficient density to energize private sector investors should be considered.

Suburban cities with proactive responses to the changing demographic shifts documented in the 2010 census will be in a much better position to capture the financial upside offered by these trends. To ignore them may well be detrimental to your city's success.  As always, feedback to these thoughts is greatly appreciated.