Capitol Hill

[metro]

By request of lasomeday:


Capitol Hill neighborhood poised for revival
By Brianna Bailey
The Journal Record
Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Main Street on Capitol Hill. (Maike Sabolich)
OKLAHOMA CITY – When longtime Capitol Hill businessman Brent Fisher’s father opened Dean’s Drive-Thru Pawn Shop in 1968, the area was a vibrant business district filled with bustling department stores and restaurants.

Today, Capitol Hill is dappled with vacant buildings, used-car lots, Mexican grocery stores and thrift shops, but a few signs of urban renewal are starting to spring up.

“I’ve been here when it was the place to be, when it wasn’t the place to be and when it’s getting back to where it’s supposed to be,” said Fisher, who purchased the pawnshop from his father and took it over 15 year ago.

Revitalization efforts in the Capitol Hill district have been slower to take root than they have in other areas of the city, but business owners and community leaders say the area is poised for a renaissance after decades of decline. The area has been slower to blossom again than other older districts like Automobile Alley and Midtown because of a bad reputation that has been hard to shake.

Capitol Hill won status from the city as a business improvement district in 2009, generating new tax revenue for improvements in the district. The realignment of Interstate 40 and the city’s Core to Shore redevelopment plan will drastically change the landscape of the area just to the north of the Capitol Hill area on the other side of the Oklahoma River over the next few years. Business owners in the area hope some of the momentum to redevelop downtown Oklahoma City will eventually spill over to the south bank of the river, said Jeri Montgomery, executive director of Capitol Hill Main Street, a group that has promoted revitalization in the area since 1997.

“Things north of the river have been revitalized or are in the process of being revitalized and Capitol Hill is the next best place to downtown,” Montgomery said. “The things going on north of the river are the next best thing to be redeveloped and eventually, we hope to gain the attention of the people who actually have dollars to reinvest.”

There are still a few boarded-up, crumbling brick storefronts, but occupancy rates in Capitol Hill are on the rise, said Randy Quiroga-King, chairman of Capitol Hill Main Street and publisher of El Nacional, a Spanish-language newspaper that maintained its offices in Capitol Hill.

The area has improved little by little since El Nacional opened its office on SW 25th Street about 22 years ago, Quiroga-King said.

“There’s a lot less vacancies than there were 22 years ago,” he said. “It was really kind of a ghost town.”

High rates of absentee ownership have left abandoned buildings to fester in the area, but taxes assessed to property owners as part of the new business improvement district have created new incentives for owners to either sell their properties or fill them with tenants, Quiroga-King said.

Fisher would eventually like to see one or two high-profile restaurants or shops come into the area, giving shoppers a reason to make Capitol Hill a destination, he said.

It’s been difficult to attract many restaurants or retailers to the area, because the area is populated by lower-income and working-class people, Quiroga-King said.

“It makes it a little bit difficult to bring marquee tenants and anchors here to the district – just the cost of rehabbing buildings here is substantial,” Quiroga-King said.

Although one of the city’s older neighborhoods, the Capitol Hill area lacks designation as a historic district, so it does not offer the attractive state tax credits that have helped revitalize other older neighborhoods, Montgomery said.

Capitol Hill is working on getting a federal grant from the Department of Commerce later this year that will give property owners incentives to make energy-efficiency improvements on their buildings.

The predominantly Hispanic area has garnered a reputation for high crime that community organizers say is undeserved.

“There is a stigma that is attached to it,” Montgomery said. “The reaction I get is “Oh my God, is it safe to go down there?’ When you get people down here, they see it’s a perfectly safe place to come.”