Quote Originally Posted by MikeOKC View Post
Hot Rod, The planning you seem to want is planning that tells new retailers to our city WHERE they should (or even should be allowed to) locate. Read your long ranting post about SC and AA again. You make it sound like the City of OKC has done something terrible by "allowing" Rawhide to put their store in AA. Planning developments is one thing - telling retailers where they can, and cannot, put stores is ridiculous. THAT'S what I mean when I write of your continuing love for Central Planning. By the way, Central Planning and a Master Plan are two very different things.

And yes, there are obvious exceptions when a city SHOULD tell a retailer it simply cannot locate in a given place (health, safety, whatever). But choosing one area of town over another is not a reason.
Exactly. The beautiful thing about city planning is that you don't really dictate where a bathroom goes in one building and what kind of business sets up in another, so long as it's not a whorehouse or a smoke shop. A-Alley represents a huge success in the making from a planning standpoint. We put the streetscape in. We marketed the district's new and improved identity, the identity caught on--now developers have bought in and are making things happen. New businesses, restaurants, lofts, and more are constantly coming to the district. The diversity of the businesses feed off of each other. On Broadway there will be Rawhide, and until they move to Classen Curve (sadly), there is the ultramodern BD Home one block over on 9th, and also on 9th is another furniture store Steve Mason has alluded to building on the Christmas tree lot.. that's critical mass, that's urban, and that's diversity.