NORTHAMPTON — During the COVID-19 pandemic, daily car traffic in downtown Northampton declined 15% and daily foot traffic decreased by 41%. There were 20 business closures, resulting in a net loss of five businesses.
Those were some of the results of a survey of downtown businesses presented Tuesday at a forum held by the planning and design firm Civic Space Collaborative. The firm undertook the survey as part of the state’s Rapid Recovery Plan Program — an initiative created to develop project-based recovery plans for downtowns and other commercial areas impacted by the economic fallout from the pandemic.
“We all want to have a healthy, vibrant downtown,” City Planner Wayne Feiden said, introducing the event. What’s needed is to figure out which projects can support that vision, he added.
Civic Space Collaborative, the state-hired firm working with Northampton, began its efforts by collecting baseline data on the current state of downtown through the eyes of the businesses there. The firm will be holding stakeholder meetings with a variety of other groups, from social service providers to cultural institutions, as it moves through the process.
The survey featured 82 respondents in total, 96% of whom said they were directly impacted by COVID-19. Of those, 82% generated less revenue in 2020, despite 63% having experienced increasing revenue in the three years prior. A total of 78% had fewer on-site customers and reported operating with reduced hours or capacity currently.
“These losses are really heartfelt,” Civic Space Collaborative project planner Karl Alexander said.
Civic Space Collaborative also assessed the physical environment downtown, suggesting some of the area’s highlights — quality of lighting, street trees, storefronts and benches, for example — as well as some areas that could be improved. One of the improvements to be made was bettering the quality of pedestrian facilities, such as sidewalks and crosswalks, along Main Street.
The firm is also looking at what kind of city actions could be taken to make it easier for businesses to open and operate successfully.
The forum featured a chance for people to speak about the challenges and opportunities to come out of the pandemic, and several local business owners spoke to their own experiences. Jesse Hassinger, a co-owner of the restaurant Belly of the Beast, said that there are silver linings to come out of the past year, particularly in highlighting different options available for businesses and the community.
“I think there’s a great opportunity right now to engage in some fairly radical changes, both to the way businesses are run and the way the city looks at businesses and looks at the interaction between the public and the private sectors,” Hassinger said. “We need to look outside the box and push beyond the normative aspects of trying to get back to what it was. I think we can go farther ahead than where we had been previous to this.”
Others highlighted the difficulties that they faced. The owner of a downtown salon, for example, said that their business only survived because of reasonable rent — something unusual for downtown.
Jena Sujat, the owner of the downtown store Pinch, said it was scary “to not be able to open and to see lots of people buying online instead, people switching to Amazon instead and the huge corporations.”
At the end of this summer, Civic Space Collaborative will provide the city with 12 project recommendations for ways to facilitate the economic recovery downtown.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.