City Center Luncheon Explores Downtown Living

Today’s City Center Luncheon at the Tacoma Club, a quarterly event developed by the Chamber of Commerce, explored the concept of downtown living.  What did we hear? 

As a reader of Exit133, a lot of the information wasn’t new to you.  Downtown Tacoma is a place with a lot of potential, some beautiful condo projects, and its future is bright.  Ryan Petty, the Director of Economic Development for the city, spoke about the current discussion to change how developers are incentived to build in order to effect things like density, affordable housing, and mixed use development.  Overall, I am hopeful that we’ll see some of these changes soon.  Some of the potential changes are significant and would require a more active hand on the part of the city.  Will incentives alone work to make Tacoma more vibrant place or do we need something with more teeth?  We’ll see. 

We also heard from a panel of ‘experts’ on downtown living including Thea’s Landing resident, Darren Brewster, City Steps realtor, Colleen Walker, and myself.  The basic message seemed to be that we’ve come a long way, but we still have further to go.  I spoke about the Vancouver dilemma and my overall optimism for the city.  It was a well run event and, having been at the front of the room, it seems difficult for me to summarize for some reason. 

To all the folks I met, it was good to meet you.

Link to the Tacoma – Pierce County Chamber