If City Council approves a new strategic plan for downtown, high-traffic areas around Charleston Town Center mall and the Civic Center will be included in Charleston's urban renewal boundaries for the first time in more than three decades.
City Council's Urban Renewal Committee voted unanimously in favor of a new plan that lays out long-term recommendations to address slum and blight in downtown Charleston, the near West Side and the area around Shrewsbury and Smith streets on the East End during its meeting Tuesday night.
The downtown Charleston renewal plan, first adopted in 1985, was limited to the areas between Dickinson and Laidley Streets.
The new plan encompasses all of downtown, and many of its broader recommendations are modeled after the Imagine Charleston Comprehensive Plan, said Planning Director Dan Vriendt.
"We want to expand the area [where] CURA can use the tools they have to help development...they can do some financing that is better than what a bank can offer," Vriendt said.
"The old urban renewal plans were all about eminent domain and very specific projects. This is more about implementing best practices."
Many of those practices aren't centered on specific developments, but rather outline infrastructure and existing streetscapes that have made downtown Charleston difficult to navigate.
Among those challenges are the one-way streets that go through downtown, which limit businesses' visibility to visitors and can encourage higher speeds.
CURA's executive director Jim Edwards said the public environment created by the wide, one-way streets, is not friendly to pedestrians who are more likely to stop and spend money at downtown businesses.
"Some of these streets could function as runways, they're so wide and so oriented to the automobile," Edwards said. "And as long as that's the case, we're going to miss the economic opportunities we could have."
One option to improve the city's downtown climate is by restriping existing one-way streets with three or four lanes into two-lane streets, with parallel parking on either side.
In the long term, the plan recommends that Charleston create two-way streets on Virginia, Quarrier and Lee streets.
Edwards said it's crucial to create an environmental that's attractive to private investment - not only developers but also future residents who may want to relocate to the area.
"As long as it's a pedestrian unfriendly environment, like most of downtown is, it will not draw that kind of investment," he said.
The urban renewal plan, drafted by GAI Consultants, consolidates parts of the near West Side, bordered by Railroad Avenue to the north and the Kanawha River to the south. It also includes the Five Corners area around Delaware Avenue.
The plan also eoncompasses part of the East End, bordered by Interstate 64 to the north, the Kanawha River to the south and Morris Street to the east, with a few block of Smith Street also included.
That area has since been expanded to also include the area north of Interstate 64 that's bordered by the Elk River to the west and Slack Street to the east.
While it's too early to tell if the expanded renewal areas could create funding issues for CURA in the future, Edwards said it made the most sense to "draw the largest boundary we could."
"It really didn't make sense to try and develop islands that would be separated by unattractive, blighted areas," he said.
Generally, CURA doesn't invest funding in areas outside urban renewal areas, but it did make an exception earlier this year when it paid for the demolition of a blighted annex to a property at 1212 Quarrier St.
The plan will now go before City Council for a final vote.
Reach Elaina Sauber at elaina.sauber@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-3051 or follow @ElainaSauber on Twitter.