Many towns have hidden parking areas that could be connected to their downtown with hallways like this one. Kendrick, Idaho, photo by Becky McCray.

There’s not enough parking downtown!

Doesn’t every city have that problem? You’re about to learn a new way to get more parking for your Main Street without having to pave, stripe or get a permit. It doesn’t work in every town, but it very well might work in yours.

Finding hidden parking

There is only so much parking on the main street in front of businesses. If you look behind businesses, along alleys and on the neighboring blocks, you’ll find hidden lots and spaces. Sometimes business owners and staff use them, sometimes they’re not used very much at all.

If you don’t know of any, try walking up the alleys. You might be surprised by the lots and spaces you discover.

The problem is they’re not easily accessible.

There’s no easy footpath from those hidden spaces to the main street. And some alleys and back lots (well, most) look a bit dodgy or even unsafe. Even if businesses have back doors, they may not welcome people just cutting through to get to a different business. And most people probably feel reluctant to just charge through a business’s backdoor anyway.

Cafe Alley in Ardmore, Oklahoma, can only be entered from the large parking lot in the alley. Photo by Becky McCray.

Creating hallways people will use

Here’s how to create safe and interesting ways for people to walk from the hidden parking to the front of the businesses.

1. Find a physical space where people can walk
2. Make it obvious they’re supposed to walk there
3. Make it attractive and fun to walk there

You can use plantings, grasses, gravel, stones or sidewalks to make the surface more appealing and practical. Think of how you can add some art while you’re there, whether it’s paint, chalk or maybe fabric arts.

Define a path with painted rocks

Sheila Scarborough spotted this hallway in Lockhart, Texas. The plants and painted rocks make the path of travel obvious and help move people from the alley to the front street.

Even a narrow walkway can work

This narrow space in Beaver, Oklahoma, isn’t ideal, but it is clean and easy to walk.

Photo by Becky McCray.

Wide open potential

This wide lot in Ardmore, Oklahoma, offers a direct path from a downhill parking lot up to the main shopping area. The lot is wide enough for multiple uses. The planting areas could be restored. A few chairs around the little built-in table could serve as a resting point for people with mobility challenges. This pathway is so large, it could even host vendors at tables or booths along one side. That would give people added incentive to use the lower parking.

Photo by Becky McCray.

Turn a pocket park into a hallway

Beaver, Oklahoma, also has this pocket park downtown. The brick path effectively connects the alley parking to the front of the block. The benches, plantings and sculpture make it an appealing place to linger.

Photo by Becky McCray.

New video: Empty Lot Economic Development

We’ve partnered with SaveYour.Town to bring you a video with more practical ways to use empty lots to spur economic development and support commerce in your downtown. Learn more about it at: SaveYour.Town Empty Lot Economic Development.

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Whether it’s just an empty lot or a huge tract of vacant land, experiments are the best way to fill it. Photo by Becky McCray

A small town official wrote in to ask me what business would work on empty land.

This town had acquired an old industrial site with 30 acres of empty land in the middle of town. They’d like to build a city within a city, maybe a mix of residential and commercial. To get there, they were putting together a list of businesses and other uses that might work.

Don’t make a plan!

Rather than creating a finished plan, I suggested a lot of experiments to find out what might work in their specific situation.

I don’t have any list of what business will work because of course it’s different in every location. The right answers are going to emerge from the tests, experiments, temporary projects, and tiny trials. That’s how you’ll learn what will work.

Experiment your way to prosperity

Here are the steps I’d think would make sense to fill any chunk of empty land in a small town:

1. Ask a lot of local people what they want to see in your town. Start a public discussion. Tell everyone about your goal. Ask everyone in town what they want to see. Ask school kids, ask adults, ask seniors, ask people in different ethnic or language groups. Run a contest for ideas, sketches, mockups or business plans. Start a hashtag online. Let everyone add their photos, ideas, thoughts and opinions.
   

   Your goal isn’t just to receive the ideas but also to get everyone thinking about the part they could play themselves. 

   This is essential because it’s not about just the small group of people who are officially tasked with making the decisions, it’s about gathering the whole the community to come together to create it.

2. Start with temporary events and projects right now. At every event, display drawings and sketches of what it could be like, lots of different versions, and invite people to add to it. What kind of events could you do? Hold a picnic and talk about what the area could be. Do pop-up businesses in booths, tents, or trailers. Hold a dance party. Even if the ground is rough, you can drag and smooth out a little space to use. There are tons more ideas in our roofless buildings article. Do lots of things at once, or let them overlap, or let groups be working on different ones at the same time.
   

   Your goals are to start using the space to build enthusiasm and also to get lots of people to test tons of different ideas to see what works in your town. 

3. Build incrementally. After you learn from your pop-ups and temporary fun, add in temporary structures. Think of garden sheds like Tionesta, PA. Cleveland, OH, used shipping containers. (So did Las Vegas, Tulsa, and other big cities.) Temporary structures give a little more permanence at the lowest possible cost. It’s an incremental step.
   

   You aren’t risking millions of dollars on redeveloping the whole tract at once with an untested plan. You’re using what you’ve already learned and giving people more and better places to experiment further.

   Add permanent structures like fully-built buildings only a few at a time and as you uncover proven ideas for using them. All those temporary trials give you the proof of what works here. And you can keep doing any of the temporary things that are still working, plus keep experimenting. Let things change based on what you learn. Don’t be afraid to change plans or take something out that isn’t working.

4. Include lots of tiny spaces. Right now, there are people in your town who have the seeds of a business. Maybe they just have the idea and want to try, or maybe they’ve done some sales to friends or at an event. The next thing they need is a small space to grow into. The best thing you can do for them is make one of those small spaces available. Include tiny retail space, tiny office spaces, tiny workshops.
   

   Shared spaces let a whole bunch more people try ideas and it gives you a continual pipeline of potential new entrepreneurs. 

   When you create small spaces, you enable more small entrepreneurs to grow. When you create more small entrepreneurs, you are filling the pipeline of future successful businesses. When you create more successful businesses, your whole town prospers.

With any major empty land development, officials will be under a lot of pressure to draw up one big master plan and stick to it. That’s the biggest mistake you can make. There is no way for any expert to predict what will work next year or 50 years from now. But your own people can come together, experiment, have fun, try things out, and incrementally build something that is a huge asset to your whole community for decades and centuries to come.

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