Uptown’s Quagmire & a Way Forward?

Note: this piece has been in the works since late 2024, and the quagmire around the Uptown underpass and Trail East debacles only serves to underline our main arguments.

We are a Strong Towns Local Conversation open to everyone in the Bloomington-Normal area. What happens in Normal impacts the rest of the region. We are in favor of infill development anywhere in the twin cities, especially in the urban cores. Walkable city centers and density are imperative to a Strong Town. However, the way the Town of Normal has been pursuing these goals, top-down thinking with lumbering megaprojects, should not be the path forward.

This way of doing things is not nimble and relies too heavily on out-of-town actors to see it through. Take a look at our Finance Decoder to show how this has impacted Normal. Right now, there are underutilized spaces in Uptown Normal that can be improved upon using the Strong Towns approach to development: incrementalism. We will outline our alternative in this post.

The History of “Uptown” Normal & Its Renewal

Before there was an Uptown Normal, there was “Downtown Normal.” The quaint middle American business district akin to many others across the Midwest: mom and pop shops with offices and apartments above, relatively narrow lots, and many beautiful brick facades. The streetcar and interurban system linked Normal with Bloomington and the rest of central Illinois. There was no traffic circle in the center of the community, rather an awkward intersection of various streets and railroads pictured below.

Just like many other business districts across the country and especially the Midwest, since the 1960s Normal’s downtown has hollowed out and declined because of the explosion of suburban-style development on the urban fringe. Buildings left in disrepair led to sagging property values, and the city did not see the urgency to invest in the urban core until the 1990s.

A new movement called New Urbanism emerged as a response to the crisis of declining urban centers across America and Normal was no different. An ambitious masterplan authored by the Chicago urbanist firm Farr Associates debuted in 1999 and the Town Council spent much capital–political and monetary–enacting it. 

Over the course of more than twenty years the Town upgraded the infrastructure, rerouted streets, created the “Uptown Circle” roundabout, moved the Children’s Discovery Museum to Uptown, leveraged federal dollars to construct a multimodal Amtrak and bus station, with municipal offices and council chambers, as well a hotels and parking decks. To say Normal’s urban core was transformed is an understatement. It is a beautiful, walkable urban center. It stitches Illinois State University well to the surrounding urban fabric, and as a student I did not need a car to access many needs and wants. It is an outstanding achievement and a testament to a local government that can get massive projects across the finish line.

Past Proposals & Analysis

One of keys to future development in Uptown has been the desire to secure a developer for the Trail East and West sites along Constitution Boulevard. There have been several proposals put forward over the past decade, but for one reason or another each project failed to get off the drawing board. Instead, these lots remain a combination of surface parking, outdoor seating, and some “outdated” buildings according to the Town.

Original Trail East Proposal (2017)

Bush Construction, a Davenport, Iowa firm submitted a project proposal for a five story mixed-use building along the east side of Constitution Boulevard. However, that project has been mired with problems regarding a federal lawsuit about a mural on an extant building that would have been demolished if the proposal had gone through as originally planned. City Manager Pam Reece explained why the project collapsed in 2021: “as they continued work on their financing details, they realized it wasn’t going to come together, not only because of financing but because of construction costs increases and market changes.”¹

In 2018, Bush Construction had calculated the total project costs would be upward of $30 million dollars, with all of the TIF money generated going back to the developer as an incentive.

Trying to assemble a capital stack of cards for a project of $30 million dollars is a tall order, and pretty much anything can knock this fragile metaphor of financing down.

2022 Trail East & West Proposal

After the first project fell through, the Town worked with Eagleview Partners of Cedar Falls, Iowa to submit two buildings with a combined 198,400-square-foot footprint with an $50 million to $60 million estimated price tag. This proposal had 150 housing units, office space, and retail on the first floors. The last update on this project was in April of 2023, with no word since then. It is assumed the national market trends and interest rates certainly did not help the situation. 
Instead of pivoting, the Town continues to seek large developers for these hypothetical megalithic structures. Perhaps it is time to turn the problem on its head: return to a type of development that enhances placemaking and maintains diverse local ownership. It’s time for an Uptown Revival.² Before we discuss a Strong Towns alternative to business as usual, we need to understand the problems inherent in the current system.

Problems with “Business as Usual”

The current problems with how Normal is conducting development in Uptown is the scale the Town is pushing forward in development. Large and complicated projects often require out-of-town developers, complex incentives, and deals to get across the finish line.

The Financing Hurdle

The types of buildings the Town has pursuing are so large and expensive that these multi-million dollar deals require significant capital to move from an idea to the construction site. These lumbering deals take months (more like years) to assemble and are quite vulnerable in shifts in the markets. Even proposals come through, the developer needs Town subsidies to make the project pencil. I will not pretend to be a financial expert here, so our Urban Centers Revitalization Committee will write more about mega projects financing nightmares at a later date.

Footprints are Important

The large format buildings that the Town is pursuing will look nice and shiny for the first generation lifecycle of the structure, but as important maintenance dates arrive (roof replacement, foundation work, and HVAC), these massive edifices will require significant reinvestments for upkeep. Thinker Stewart Brand discusses this concept of “Shearing Layers of Change” from his 1990s book How Buildings Learn, various building systems will last longer than others. If structures like Trail East and West are constructed at once, they’ll arrive at major maintenance dates at the same time.

We think back to the behemoth of the old Front N Center Building in Downtown Bloomington as a cautionary tale. Too massive for most people to save, but too quirky for large companies to take on the rehab job. Now it is a hole in the ground and slated for parking. Large footprints bring up another issue, ownership.

The Ownership Issue

The large format buildings proposed by Town staff for Uptown will be another issue: unified ownership. For staff, this might be a plus in the short term. Only dealing with one owner versus ten is easier for planners. However, the sheer size of these buildings will preclude ownership of this urban core property from lay citizens: the real folks that make up the urban fabric.

Unified ownership means corporate ownership. Corporate ownership usually means out-of-town control. When a building is seen as a cell on a balance for a billion dollar investment firm, local flair and character is often lost. Industry best practices tend to lean towards leaving massive ground floor commercial units empty for years in search of a chain-style restaurant, like what is seen in other large mixed-use buildings in the University District (Buffalo Wild Wings I’m looking at you).

Lastly and most importantly in my opinion, unified ownership leads to fragility in the urban fabric. Compare the several blocks already in Uptown: the building with the Hacienda Leon and the block on Beaufort Street.

When the ground floor of a large format building, like the one in Uptown Circle, is vacant, the whole block is deadened simply because there is only one possible tenant that could go in the empty space. That block become a conduit from from place to another, not a place to be itself.

Compare that to this block on Beaufort, each building is narrow. That means that if a storefront becomes vacant, only a portion of the block will suffer. Since the shops are smaller, there is a lower barrier to entry and more local businesses can try their concepts out. A livelier street, more owners, and a more resilient ecosystem.

Uptown Revival Proposal

It is our opinion that urban revitalization happens best when done incrementally and by people who have a stake in the city that it occurs in. With that being said, these earlier proposals that have been submitted would have certainly been an improvement over the current parking lot craters that currently occupy this block. 

The first step to revitalization is the activation of the area with investments with relatively low barriers to entry. The Town of Normal government should allow the parking of food trucks in the lots to keep the space active. Currently, there is a plaza that has tables and an awning for eating outside. This can be enhanced through adding some programming.

Regarding the built environment, the town should subdivide the lots along Constitution Boulevard into parcels between 20 and 40 feet wide, just like the other successful buildings that make Uptown so beautiful and vibrant. Selling each lot with covenants detailing what the structures need to look like is a common alternative to a master-developed site.

If you’re interested in being a part of putting this alternative vision together, then join our Urban Centers Revitalization Committee! We’re planning on doing a design charrette and counterproposal for Uptown in the near future. Please get in contact with us at president@strongtownsblono.com Stay tuned for more!

1. https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2021-09-16/trail-east-developer-abandons-uptown-effort ↩︎
2. Calling back to our original name: the Bloomington Revivalists. ↩︎