But that’s a national picture. The Savannah economy — at least in downtown and surrounding neighborhoods — continues to attract a surge of investment.

Back in June, I wrote a column about the many major projects announced in 2012: Series of big investments bode well for Savannah.

Today’s City Talk column builds on that one: New downtown Savannah plans include new hotel, townhouses, beer garden

Aerial view of dining and beer garden at Moon River that will go before the Historic Review Board this week.

We’re seeing some really impressive momentum building in these developments.

If you want even more background on these trends, check out my post with various links about a recent AJC article: Savannah has something Atlanta wants: a real city center

Savannahâ€s surging downtown defies downturn

The article opens:

SAVANNAH — A city center that Atlanta and plenty of other cities dream about is the reality here.

Downtown Savannah teems with tourists and college students stroll past coffeehouses and restaurants in an eminently walkable urban environment. Chocolate shops sit side-by-side with art galleries, bawdy bars and boutique stores, creating the type of seamless mixed-use environment that developers dream of manufacturing.

Though long been known for walkability, downtown Savannah wasnâ€t always this way. Sections were plagued with empty storefronts and lagging foot traffic just a decade ago. A fresh influx of tourists, a renewed focus on the “creative class” and Savannah College of Art & Designâ€s unorthodox growth strategy have led to a downtown renassaince.

Atlanta certainly doesnâ€t have the waterfront lure or historic charm of its older cousin. But the importance of a pedestrian-friendly downtown and Savannahâ€s careful cultivation of a vibe that appeals to a wide swath of residents and tourists may hold lessons.

Residents turned out in droves for Fashion’s Night Out on Broughton Street

“The economy has changed, but the plan doesnâ€t need to,” said Sottile, referencing the city squares that Gen. James Oglethorpe laid out almost 300 years ago. “It survived the American Revolution, the Civil War and the 20th Century. And now itâ€s defining sustainability in the 21st Century.”

For an upbeat insider’s view of how Savannah has weathered the downturn, take a look at Tommy Linstroth’s recent post on The Creative Coast blog: Here for the Long Haul.

In a recent column, I noted that by year’s end we could be close to full occupancy on Broughton Street again, despite the long hangover from the recession.

Sure, Savannah has lots of problems, but those who don’t dwell on the problems and who forge ahead trying to get stuff done are making dramatic positive changes to the city.

From Bloomberg’s Delhaize to Cut 5,000 Jobs as Food Lion Owner Shuts Stores in U.S., Europe:

Delhaize Group SA (DELB), the owner of Food Lion supermarkets, plans to cut about 5,000 positions and expects a 2.4 percent drop in revenue as it closes stores in the U.S. and Europe.[. . .]

The food retailer will close 113 Food Lion, seven Bloom and six Bottom Dollar Food locations in the U.S., it said. The remaining 42 Bloom shops as well as 22 Bottom Dollar Food stores will be turned into Food Lion outlets.

Twenty stores in southeastern Europe will also be closed. Delhaize gets most of its revenue in the U.S., where it got 68 percent of its total 2010 sales of 20.9 billion euros, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

And there’s also a big local story for Savannah — and obviously similar local stories throughout the southeast U.S. From the Savannah Morning News’ Food Lion to close four local stores:

Among the stores affected are two of the company’s newest and most bally-hooed local stores: The market at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Gwinnett Street that opened last March and the Southbridge location that opened in 2009.

The Food Lion in the Eisenhower Square shopping center and another store in Rincon were also on the closure list, which included 113 stores in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and West Virginia.

[UPDATE: You can see the full list of Delhaize’s American closings here.]

When I wrote about the new downtown Food Lion last April, I called it a “welcome addition” but noted:

I live more or less equidistant from Kroger and the new Food Lion. Will the new store change my shopping habits or those of others who have shopped at Kroger for years?

Food Lion closes at 10 p.m. each night, while Kroger is open until midnight and frequently has a steady stream of late shoppers buying small numbers of items. Since the recent revamping of the interior, Iâ€d even say the 16-year-old Kroger offers better aesthetics than the new Food Lion.

I literally haven’t been back to Food Lion since then. I know there were some in the downtown community who hoped that a better overall grocery than Food Lion would be attracted to MLK and Gwinnett — so maybe now we’ll see if that can happen now.

Savannah faces a big handicap in any such recruitment efforts, however.

Since the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority has been dramatically defunded, there will be less energy and possibly fewer incentives put into recruitment.

And the city’s decision not to put the new SPLOST-funded cultural arts center at MLK and Hall Street raises serious questions about the city’s commitment to that portion of the corridor.

At this point, I have no idea how easy or possible it will be to recruit new grocers or other suitable uses to the other locations being closed.

The job losses obviously hurt here. So will the lack of easy access that these stores offered to nearby residents. So will the presence of big empty buildings, which present an economic drag to nearby stores.

In my column I call the legalization a “small gift” and note the work of Peter Kageyama, author of For the Love of Cities.

Kageyama uses the term “love notes”, which I tried to incorporate into my 450 words but seemed to need a little too much explanation.

I’ve been perusing Kageyama’s book since meeting (re-meeting actually; we had chatted when Charles Landry spoke here years ago) him earlier this fall. You can find a lot more about him, his work, and For the Love of Cities on his website.

From Kageyama’s website:

A 2009 Gallup study that looked at the levels of emotional engagement people have with their communities, found that just 24% of people were “engaged” with their community. Gallup also found a significant relationship between how passionate and loyal people are to their communities and local economic growth. The most “attached” communities had the highest local GDP growth. Despite this, it feels as though our places and our leadership have forgotten how to connect with us emotionally and our cities have suffered because of it.

This mutual love affair between people and their place is one of the most powerful influences in our lives, yet we rarely think of it in terms of a relationship. If cities begin thinking of themselves as engaged in a relationship with their citizens, and if we as citizens begin to consider our emotional connections with our places, we open up new possibilities in community, social and economic development by including the most powerful of motivators—the human heart—in our toolkit of city-making.

Here’s 18 minutes of Kageyama at TEDx Iowa City. It’s well worth a watch. It’s filled with examples, narratives, and visuals about the small things — like the zombie walk in Pittsburgh that is my featured image with this post on the homepage — that increase civic engagement. The video is highly recommended:

I’m obviously very excited about the potential of that new garden, event space, and music venue — covered, open air — at the Ships of Sea. I didn’t go into it in the column, but the Ships of the Sea is in the old Scarbrough House, designed by William Jay and sneaking up on its bicentennial. It was used in part of the 20th century as a school. When the Ships of the Sea took it over, they removed the extra floor that had been added. Some will remember that there was an old commercial building once owned by SCAD on the site where the new space will be. As I recall, SCAD planned to make some major renovations and extensions, but the Ships of the Sea supporters objected because the extension would have been looming over the garden in the back of the house. I was sorry to see that building be torn down eventually, but at least we’re seeing an exciting new development (and not another parking lot).

In the second blurb in today’s column, I talk about the proposed new policy for murals. You can find all sorts of interesting reference materials here on the MPC website, including case studies from other cities and the proposed text of the new policy. After a couple of quick reads, I’m a supporter of the proposal. You can also see the proposal from See Savannah Art Walls (SeeS.A.W.) here. The artists want to rotate murals on a single story building at Habersham and 34th (not far from my house). Here’s an image from the proposal of examples of murals we might see on that building:

Finally, I also mention in my column today that Marcus Kenney was commissioned by CNN to create a piece for their 9/11 Ripple project. Once you’re on the site, click “Statements” to get to Marcus’ piece.

But those accusations show a fundamental lack of understanding about the grid system established by General Oglethorpe when he founded the colony of Georgia in 1733. The Oglethorpe Plan has proved amazingly resilient and has adapted itself stunningly well to the age of the automobile. In fact, the areas of downtown Savannah that see the worst traffic are those that have been most disrupted.

The other day, while perusing the draft of the Unified Zoning Ordinance (UZO), I ran across a couple of graphics that perfectly display the key principles of the Oglethorpe Plan. The one below shows how the streets are interconnected around each square. Historically, the squares played a variety of civic roles. The trust lots on the east and west sides of the squares were traditionally set aside for civic purposes, primarily houses of worship, but as the decades passed an increasing number of those lots were set aside for residential uses. Long before the advent of cars, the lanes provided parking and created housing for a variety of “lower income” residents, from slaves and domestic servants to laborers and today’s college age renters. The east-west connecting streets held a variety of housing types, while the north-south connecting streets developed in mixed use ways. The north-south service streets also developed a mix of uses, but those have proven least adaptable to cars: since so many of those streets were designed in the 20th century in ways to foster high auto speeds and poor conditions for pedestrians, property values have fallen and uses have dwindled.

Savannah is thought of as an incredibly green, beautiful, and pedestrian-friendly downtown, but look at how many streets there are. How can a city with such frequent streets work as well as Savannah does?

The frequent streets themselves are part of the magic. The many choices for drivers have the effect of quickly siphoning congestion away and dispersing traffic. As Jane Jacobs noted, those frequent streets are a characteristic of vibrant cities, providing both motorists and pedestrians with sometimes- exciting choices.

The original plan permitted a mix of commercial  and residential uses as well as a diversity of housing types and styles — and the same is true today.

But over the years, some of the original plan was chipped away, as you can see in the following map pulled from the UZO draft. Most of the changes were on the west side of the grid. There were three main culprits: the I-16 overpass, the Civic Center, and the Chatham County Courthouse. Along the way, two squares pretty much disappeared: Liberty (#9 below) and Elbert (#22).

These changes have been terrible for traffic flow. Instead of the grid dispersing traffic on the west side of downtown, we see bottlenecks as drivers are denied the historical choices. In addition to the closing of some streets, we saw the unnecessary addition of one-way traffic on Montgomery from Liberty to Broughton.

Pedestrians, too, were denied choices, and the changing traffic patterns had nightmarish results for MLK, the former West Broad Street, which would have faced tough times if the only obstacle were the razing of the old Union Station.

I routinely hear Savannahians downplay the upsides of removing the I-16 flyover — some even seem disdainful of the idea. But it’s a straightforward way to move toward a variety of goals:

• allowing traffic to disperse more quickly in the southwest quadrant of the Historic District
• adding acres of valuable street-front property to the tax rolls
• permitting pedestrians and cyclists to move easily across streets that are now forbidding

All of these changes would encourage pedestrianism, give more choices to drivers and improve traffic flow, and give more inherent value to the land on neighboring blocks.

Along the way, we could restore part of Elbert and Liberty Squares in ways that effectively slow traffic and create more opportunities for the public green spaces that Savannah is so famous for.

Restoring the Oglethorpe Plan isn’t just nostalgic; it could be one key to a thriving downtown into the next century and beyond.

I say in part:

Surface parking lots are among the worst uses of urban space.

They tend to rend the residential and retail fabric. They repel pedestrians. They generally generate far less economic activity than more intense uses. They create heat islands. They contribute to problems with drainage and polluted stormwater runoff.

When theyâ€re owned by governments or nonprofit organizations, surface lots take significant chunks of land off the tax rolls.

And theyâ€re ugly.

I had hoped that surface parking lots would slowly be whittled out of the Historic District, but depressed land values have apparently raised the odds that organizations with the most cash and with no fear of property taxes — governments, churches, and other nonprofits — might degrade the urban fabric with more surface lots.

A few pics and comments:

There used to be a great old gas station at Charlton and Drayton -- a building that seemed perfect for some other use. Now, years after the demolition of that building, we're going to get a permanent parking lot to replace this temporary one. (This is the pic that accompanied my column today.)

A parking lot at Drayton and Gordon owned by Wesley Monumental. Doesn't this seem awfully ugly for a city that prides itself on its beauty?

From the same parking lot. We can do better than this.

Drayton and Taylor. More parking for Wesley Monumental. At least an attempt at landscaping, but hardly any attempt to make the lot look good.

A lot at Drayton and Jones owned by EMC Engineering Services, Inc. Not great, but better than some.

I don't mean to pick on Wesley Monumental; lots of Savannah's churches own ugly surface parking lots, like this ill kept one on Hull St. owned by First Baptist Church. In addition to the obvious ugliness, this one adds insult to injury with the front-facing entrance (there's a lane in back) that takes up two on-street parking spaces.

In my dream world, the churches and other organizations that own these lots — which are essentially blight — would step up to the plate and make them look better. And, down the road, they would recognize that these lots and all those like them are detriments to the urban fabric.

Writer G.G. Rigsby deals with any number of issues in the lengthy piece, including this wonky tidbit:

The ferries get 40 percent of the money generated by a $1-per-occupied-room fee in the convention district and $1.75 per room in the Westin. Over the years, thatâ€s brought in $2.4 million to operate the ferries.

Properties on Hutchinson also pay a 2/10 of a mill property tax that goes into the fund. That has raised about $80,000 in eight years.

Over 11 years, the authority has paid $2.5 million to subsidize the ferries. Thatâ€s out of the $20.8 million the ferries have cost to purchase and operate.

The federal operating funds are down from a peak of about $500,000 a year to $20,000 to $25,000 a year now, Coffey said.

This year, the authority is looking at a projected loss of $266,000 for the ferries.

It’s a great piece and I’m not going to summarize it anymore than that. I’ve said for years that Hutchinson’s development will be hampered forever by the lack of easy access. The ferries are fine — and expensive! — for what they do to move casual travelers, but they’re terrible for large groups and events. The vehicular path from Hutchinson to downtown — over the bridge and then across the congested intersection of Oglethorpe and MLK — is lousy too.

No one has really taken me seriously about it, but that pedestrian bridge is looking better all the time.