This past Saturday I was on the radio show, WKBK's "What's Happening with Mike Hoefer," together with fellow Keene City Councilor Mike Giacomo. We were talking about the ongoing debate surrounding Keene's downtown infrastructure project.
You can listen here.... might want to skip through the commercials.
Some people heard this and seem to think I'm against restaurants downtown. I'm not! I love restaurants. But restaurants are expensive - eating out is a luxury many can't afford - and there are only so many restaurants that a city the size of Keene can support.
Walk around and take a look at how few of our vaunted outdoor dining spaces are in use at any given time, and consider that we may have already bumped up against the limits of consumer demand.
We need more than restaurants, we need a diverse set of businesses downtown. It wasn't long ago that we had a pharmacy, a bike shop, and a store selling menswear downtown, but those places are gone.
The one way that downtown can really prosper is by having lots of people who live and work there. And we can make that happen - there is plenty of space available in the downtown area for high-density residential build-outs. But we need the transportation infrastructure to support it, infrastructure that works on a human scale. A downtown built primarily for the convenience of automobile drivers isn't going to to get us there.