Growth Includes New Business: Survey Shows What People Want to Bring to the Area Heather Menzies, Bay City Tribune | 20-Sep-2009
As Matagorda County moves forward with population growth from industry expansion and development, local officials face the challenge of providing attractive amenities for future residents.
Every so often rumors float around town about this restaurant or that clothing store coming to town, so we decided to get the lowdown on the process of recruiting national retailers to Bay City from someone who fights that good fight everyday - D.C. Dunham, Bay City Community Development Corporation executive director.
The important thing to remember is that "retail follows rooftops," said Dunham.
The story that was being told about Bay City by several demographic projection firms reported a bleak picture for the future growth and development in Bay City.
The projections show a decrease in population growth and increase in vacant homes.
"So I looked at this and thought it doesn't make sense," said Dunham.
"We don't have any houses hardly at all that are vacant or for sale."
The key to the projections that cripples Bay City as a rural coastal city is that the data collection only tracks homeowners, renters and vacant houses.
By those standards, the vacancy rate was 65 percent - mainly due to the amount of second homes in Matagorda.
"It's pretty depressing when you pay big bucks for a consultant to come in and tell you that you're going to have a decrease in population and you have poor, uneducated people, said Dunham.
"And that's basically what they told us in 2005."
Because the data collection firms had no way of capturing the impact of second homes, the challenge was to find a way to tell the real story of Bay City's effective population.
"So the story we started telling was about our location," said Dunham.
"You can't be located an hour outside of Houston, 20 miles from the Gulf Coast and have a reduction in population."
The Community Development Corporation brought in Community Development Strategies, a research firm, to do the groundwork needed to tell the real story of growth projected for Bay City's target area.
The end result was a thick document, hundreds of pages long that included Bay City's development potential, economic and demographic trends and comparisons, residential, retail and hospitality market analysis, employment projections, and the results of a comprehensive employee survey outlining buying patterns, resident satisfaction and retail and restaurant preferences.
The survey respondents were employees from the local, large industries, said Dunham.
And the survey provides Dunham with direction for which retailers and restaurants are most sought-after and where the Community Development Corporation should focus its energies.
By a margin of over 100, the International House of Pancakes and Olive Garden led the pack of national restaurants that the respondents preferred to have locate in Bay City.
The top three retail winners were Target, Academy and Lowe's.
According to Dunham, learning what the target stores and restaurants are is helpful but really only provides a place to start.
"So this gives me the ammunition that I need to be able to take certain things out and say, 'This is what the people want,'" she said.
"Each type of retailer has their own criteria."
One interesting aspect that many retailers look at is the "psychographics" of the location area.
Psychographics are broken into 66 segments that define, in general terms, target lifestyles.
Bay City's leading psychographic segment is identified at "City Startups."
The City Startup segment is defined as "young, multi-ethnic singles that have settled in neighborhoods filled with cheap apartments and a commercial base of cafes, bars, laundromats and clubs that cater to twenty-somethings. One of the youngest segments in America - with ten times as many college students as the national average - these neighborhoods feature low incomes and high concentrations of Hispanics and African Americans."
According to Dunham, psychographic data is a popular tool used by retailers when deciding where to locate.
Each year she attends the International Conference of Shopping Centers in Las Vegas where she gets the opportunity to tell Bay City's story to 30,000 to 50,000 retailers that attend the event.
It is up to Dunham to prove that Bay City meets their target population, target demographic, target psychographic, target average income, and can provide the ideal piece of real estate and infrastructure.
"They see thousands of representatives at these things so you've got to find that little something that sets you apart from all the rest of those people," said Dunham.
While they continuously tell Bay City's story at the international conference and at the state conference, they realize that local entrepreneurs could also provide the means to fill some of the amenity void.
"One of the things that you'll find, like in the movie theater industry, is that we haven't been able to get the attention of the Cinemarks of the world - they're just not interested in our area," Dunham said.
"But there are some very successful and very nice movie theaters in small communities that are owned by smaller corporations."
Dunham said a developer has expressed interest in putting in a six to eight screen theater in Bay City.
"It's in the works," she said.
"They have definitely shown good faith in hiring the architect . . . they've brought in their equipment engineer to look at the facility; my hopes are by November of next year we'll have a new movie theater."
Dunham said there are several alternative routes they have considered to provide requested recreation venues like a water park, a new bowling alley, an arcade and a miniature golf business.
While residents have made it clear that there is a retail void that only national corporations can fill, Dunham said it's still important to focus on supporting a thriving downtown and the local business owner.
"Our downtown historic district makes Bay City unique," said Dunham.
"That's part of our charm that attracts outsiders to shop here and locals to keep their money here."
"That's why I put as much effort into supporting downtown merchants as I do recruiting," she said.
While the process won't turn around immediately, Dunham said we continue to tell Bay City's story to every retailer who will listen. Article from Heather Menzies with the Bay City Tribune
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