It’s an idea we share to encourage town and city centre teams we’re working with on reducing their number of empty #highstreet units and improve the mix of uses.
To us it means there’s a stage you’ll reach with new #retail, #hospitality, services and other business or organisation types opening, that gives you a momentum which carries with it more of the empties.
It’s important because for a ‘place partnership’ set up to bring together agents, landlords, businesses, community, cultural organisations, council(s), chamber, BID if you have one and others identified locally to work on this, it means you don’t need to set as an objective tackling every one of the vacants you have at the start, even if you’ve a rate in the mid / high teens or over 20 per cent.
One thing that’s slightly tricky is that no matter how often you do this you’re never quite sure when the tipping point kicks in. It’s there tho.
Our image set, as an illustration, is of Crewe town centre which has in recent months seen:
- Several new shop and venue openings;
- A number of others with landlord and would-be occupier in negotiation;
- National brands, independents and community groups viewing units and developing proposals;
- Work underway to re-purpose un- and under-used upper floors and bring them back into play with planning in for more buildings.
Our August ‘24 ‘audit’ here showed 25 visibly vacant town centre units. That’s almost 18 per cent of the total, and it’s seen a handful added to that list since. It remains challenging. There’s still work to do. But…
It’d be interesting to know how work on tackling vacancy in your place is going…
