12 minute read
Transforming Downtown Waco: A Vision for a Thriving Urban Center
by Tom Balk, PLA Director of Strategic Initiatives City of Waco
The City of Waco’s visionary Downtown Development Project is poised to revitalize a prime area of the city center, delivering on a billion-dollar vision that commits itself to authentically celebrating the art, culture, and history of Waco through public and commercial development that work together to activate the urban core and Waco’s Front Lawn. The 20-year development vision encompasses residential, commercial, retail, office, entertainment, hospitality, and public spaces – it builds upon land and ingredients that have been carefully assembled by Waco’s leaders over many years. The project aims to create a dynamic, fully functioning urban center that serves to support Waco’s continued growth. Development will reflect the unique character of Waco, while also incorporating sustainable design principles, promoting walkability, and fostering connectivity with existing amenities and infrastructure. This article provides a window into this transformative process, exploring its comprehensive phases, focus, and the vital role it plays in the city’s future.
Current State of Downtown Waco: A Hub of Growth
Over the past six years, the city has made economic growth in Downtown a key priority, resulting in more than 57 transformative projects and a staggering $462,000,000 in capital investment. These projects have become key contributors to Waco’s broader economic growth and job creation. One of the standout projects underway is the Riverfront development, centered on the Foster Pavilion, Riverwalk, and Brazos Commons Park. This transformative development, strategically located at the intersection of I-35 and the Brazos River, promises to fuel continued growth adding residential, dining, shopping and entertainment.
Downtown Waco has continued to benefit greatly from a steady wave of tourism with more than 2.2 million visitors over the past 12 months. This steady influx of visitors has prompted significant growth in the local hotel industry, with eight new hotels underway downtown, including the AC Marriott, the Hyatt, Hotel Herringbone, and 1928 Hotel by Magnolia, set to add 710 rooms—a remarkable 76% increase. Notably, the Waco Convention Center has also served as a steady driver of the economic success of Downtown Waco, with an economic impact of nearly $10M, contributing significantly to the city’s prosperity and visitation.
But Downtown Waco isn’t just a place to visit; it’s a place to work and thrive. Nearly 12,000 people are employed in Downtown, and both employment and population have surged by more than 10% in the past five years. With an eclectic range of over 530 downtown businesses generating more than $2 million in sales tax, this growth is indicative of Downtown’s expanding role as a vibrant urban center.
This context of steady local and regional economic growth makes now a great time for Waco to amplify the development of Downtown Waco in a big way. This is a generational opportunity to develop a multiphase project between two of the fastest growing regions in America in Austin and Dallas/Fort Worth.
Strategic Planning Process: A Roadmap to Success
As a key initiative leading up to the transformative Downtown Development Project effort, city leaders engaged planning consultant TIP Strategies in early 2022 to prepare an economic development strategic plan. This comprehensive plan emerged from robust stakeholder conversations and established priorities like business development, small business support, downtown development, placemaking strategies, and resource alignment. Finalized and presented to Waco City Council in May 2023, it outlines three goals: creating a shared vision for business growth, aligning workforce development with employer needs, and supporting investments in place-making and real estate. While these goals provide an essential 10-year framework for city-wide economic development efforts, they also helpfully set the stage for guiding a signature reinvestment effort in Downtown Waco.
Downtown Visioning and Key Components
In April 2022, global architecture firm Gensler was engaged by the City of Waco to study the project potential and initiate the necessary visioning process for a new municipal campus in the vicinity of the current City Hall. The project scope was expanded in October 2022 to include more than 50 additional acres surrounding the City Hall area to capture their potential for a wider range of coordinated public and private developments. Gensler’s services focused on working with City leaders and stakeholders to distill Waco’s vision and needs, to generate explanatory visual tools that better convey the shape and scale of the project opportunity.
The resulting vision was presented to Waco City Council in April 2023. The assembled elements aim to activate Downtown Waco both day and night, making it a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly destination for people of all ages. This involves embracing Waco’s unique character and its connection to the Brazos River. Vibrant street life and year-round entertainment are essential elements, ensuring that Downtown is equally inviting to residents and visitors alike.
At its core, the vision revolves around creating a diverse and inclusive mixed-use environment. This environment is designed to foster economic growth, enhance community livability, and promote cultural enrichment. It encompasses a wide range of uses, including residential, commercial, retail, office, entertainment, hospitality, and public spaces. Sustainability, walkability, and connectivity with existing amenities and infrastructure are integral to this concept.
Gensler’s concept approach involves organizing Downtown Waco into five distinct districts, each designed with a “Live-Work-Play” ethos: a Residential District, an Entertainment District, the City Hall District, the Historic District, and a Performing Arts District. These districts strategically engage surrounding public spaces and walkable streets, with an emphasis on connectivity and the utilization of the riverfront as Downtown Waco’s front lawn. This approach amplifies a sense of community and offers a wide range of activities and people-watching opportunities, from public concerts, festivals, and community celebrations to rowing and paddling on the river.
Public space activation is a central theme, and it’s achieved through the coordinated development of key public and public-private partnership facilities, including:
A new Convention Center and HQ Hotel
An activated, central Great Lawn for festivals and events
A versatile Baseball Stadium wrapped in mixed-use
A landmark Performing Arts Center with maximum versatility
A new City Hall and Public Services Campus
These exciting facilities ensure that Downtown Waco becomes a hub of activity, offering space for sports events, cultural performances, festivals, and community gatherings.
To make this vision uniquely Waco, it draws cues from remnant historic structures and districts, local cultural influences, as well as the city’s geography and geology. It thoughtfully uncovers and establishes a sophisticated vernacular that reflects Waco’s identity.
Key to implementing this 20-year vision is the leveraging of public-private partnerships. A Master Developer will be engaged to orchestrate the cohesive and unified comprehensive planning and multi-phase development. This collaborative effort will ensure that the Downtown Development Project is carefully master planned and strategically sequenced through its many phases to assure steady progress to successful project delivery, shaping the city’s future for generations to come.
New City Hall within the Downtown Vision
Among the key components of this vision is the integration of a new City Hall and Public Services Campus—a civic heart at the core of Downtown. The inclusion of a New City Hall and Public Services Campus within Downtown Waco is not just a strategic opportunity—it serves a dual purpose: to resolve the office space limitations of the existing Waco City Hall and to consolidate a sizable municipal workforce, maximizing the benefits for the community.
Waco’s current City Hall was constructed in 1930 and stands as a testament to a bygone era. Its art deco stylings and limited space across four floors, totaling nearly 39,000 square feet, no longer meet the needs of the modern municipal workforce. Over the past century, the city’s administrative workforce and public-facing services have significantly grown and dispersed, leading to challenges in customer service and management. The new City Hall and Public Services Campus represent an opportunity to bring together more than 22 departments under one roof, streamlining public access to essential services.
This consolidation of services will offer the public streamlined access to a wide range of services, including permitting, planning, economic development, housing, water utilities, public works, purchasing, parks and recreation, the public health district, municipal court, as well as the official venue for City Council Meetings. This consolidation represents a workforce of more than 500 staff, all working to enhance the efficiency and accessibility of municipal services.
In addition to municipal services, the vision includes the possibility of collaboration with Waco Independent School District. Strategies for shared facilities and office spaces provide opportunity for improved administrative operations for the district through improved training accommodations and enhanced public access. This collaboration is rooted in the pursuit of efficiency and improved services for the community.
Planning not only for present workforce needs but for the future is also a crucial consideration. Additional floors in each office building will create capacity beyond current municipal and district needs, ensuring that space is available for future growth. Until then, these spaces can be leveraged as quality lease spaces, contributing to the vibrancy of Downtown Waco.
Beyond its functional role, this concentration of staffing and public services stands to generate substantial visitation and foot traffic. This influx of people can catalyze the growth of Downtown dining, shopping, recreation, and lodging/ residential offerings. It’s part of a broader development recipe that will incrementally propel the success of the overall vision forward.
Heritage Square: A Blank Canvas for Ambitious Development
Development of Heritage Square is another notable (and longstanding) priority, perched on the doorstep of City Hall. Bounded by 3rd and 4th Streets, Washington Avenue, and Austin Avenue, this high-visibility nearly 3-acre property features a half-acre decorative plaza at the corner nearest City Hall, a small granite monument commemorating the 1953 tornado that once devastated the burgeoning Downtown Waco, and 2.3 acres of parking lot has been primarily utilized as a space for numerous public events and festivals, including the annual Waco Wonderland.
For decades, Heritage Square has essentially remained vacant, a testament to the urban renewal efforts that cleared the tornado-damaged town square 70 years ago. However, the potential of this wide-open, developable land in a strategic downtown location cannot be overstated. Heritage Square presents a unique opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the Downtown Vision’s cultural, live, work, and play ambitions. As Downtown Waco undergoes a renaissance, with infill development invigorating and revitalizing the area, Heritage Square stands as an enticing blank canvas—a canvas that holds the promise of cultural enrichment, economic growth, and community vibrancy.
New Tools on The Road to Transformation
In recognition of past challenges, the City of Waco has gone to great lengths to incorporate lessons learned from prior efforts. Notably, over the past decade, there have been smaller attempts at redevelopment within this project area that suffered from a lack of critical mass of assembled acreage and stakeholder engagement needed to offer developers the necessary tools for success. For example, in 2015 and 2017, multiple Request for Proposal (RFP) efforts were launched to seek developers for the Heritage Square site. However, since the RFP format places the visioning responsibility on developers, these efforts faced challenges in anticipating what would truly resonate with the community, and ultimately did not move forward.
This time, the approach is different. The City of Waco committed to leading the effort and responding to these needs with robust stakeholder engagement, working closely with the Gensler team to unearth the values, desires, and vision of the community, and significantly assembling a very enticing assemblage of property. This process has yielded an exceptionally valuable tool to developers, offering a clear direction and insight into what the community envisions. It also serves as an announcement of the caliber of project the City recognizes it has and the importance it places on selecting the right team.
Subsequently, a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) process was initiated October 13, 2023, to attract top-tier teams from throughout the country by putting this tool in their hands along with a dynamic interactive story map that proactively and efficiently introduces developers to the project sites, vision, context of surrounding attractions, and a wide range of relevant economic data. Overall, the RFQ process affords a more measured approach to master developer selection, based primarily on qualifications, which allows Waco to select a team that not only possesses the greatest capability but also aligns with the community’s values.
Upon selection of a master developer, anticipated in January 2024, design coordination will take shape within the framework of guiding agreements, supporting a better end result. This rigorous selection process ensures that the chosen team is dedicated to serving the project over the years, leading it to successful completion and ultimately contributing to a brighter future for Waco.
A Dynamic Urban Center for a Growing Community
As we look ahead to the exciting transformation of Downtown Waco, it becomes evident that this vision is more than just a development project; it’s a testament to the City of Waco’s commitment to its residents and its future – to serve as the heartbeat of a regional economy. That brighter, more prosperous future belongs to all Wacoans and invites them to be a part of energizing the vibrant urban core that is essential for the sustained growth and vitality of Waco. It’s about creating a place that embodies the spirit of Waco, where history meets innovation, where community transcends divides, and where economic prosperity is a reality for all. By activating the area day and night, fostering inclusivity, this vision seeks to redefine Downtown Waco as a dynamic urban center.
Waco’s thriving urban center will serve as an economic hub, fostering entrepreneurship and job creation while providing a central gathering space for residents and visitors alike. It will celebrate cultural enrichment, educational opportunities, and accessibility while also promoting civic engagement and adaptability, ensuring that Waco remains relevant and resilient in a constantly evolving world. With its eye on the future, great partners at the table, and public-private partnerships at its core, this vision is not just an aspiration—it’s a roadmap to transform Downtown Waco into a thriving, vibrant, and sustainable community where residents and visitors alike can experience the best of what the city has to offer.
