The Future of Downtown Helena, Arkansas

This study is different from past plans in that the priority is to improve the quality of life for residents of downtown. Past plans have tended to focus on tourism and jobs, both great things to promote, but not at the expense of the people who live here. A great place to live is also a great place to visit. I use the analogy of planning a party. Tourism is like planning a party at your house. We want our guests to have a good time so we make sure they have food, drinks, and entertainment, but we seem to skip an important first step: clean up the house. People don’t want to visit a messy house. People don’t want to move to a blight infested town and potential employers know this. We have infrastructure and assets, but if people don’t want to live here, businesses aren’t going to settle here.

The study outlines some foundational house cleaning measures that I believe are critical to making downtown a better place to live, work, play, and invest.

Laying the foundation:

Revise codes - City Code Enforcement with Center for Community Progress
Enforce codes, collect fines - City Code Enforcement, City Attorney
Fix property tax issues & implement a vacancy tax
Downtown Development Fund
Landbank & Community Land Trust (maybe)
Blight remediation

These foundational elements are necessary to change the environment downtown and make development possible. Currently, we have a major issue with vacancy and blight. We have blight and vacancy because the current system fails to provide any disincentive. There is no code enforcement and property taxes are consistently lower for vacant and blighted properties. It should be the other way around.

Finally, there is a list of recommended priority projects. This list was generated based on feedback from private interviews conducted in 2020 & 2021.