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September 4, 2006

With hundreds of new residents, thousands of new apartment units and hundreds of thousands of square feet of new national stores headed for downtown New Rochelle, business leaders and officials have set their sights on a challenge seemingly smaller, yet crucial to the future of the city’s commercial hub.

The New Rochelle Downtown Business Improvement District (BID), a public-private group, is launching a marketing campaign intended to bringing more upscale shops and restaurants back to downtown storefronts. This fall the group will meet with property owners. “We will work with property owners who have significant vacant spaces and put together a strategic retail marketing program with informational materials they can use when they’re recruiting individual tenants,” said Ralph DiBart, the BID’s executive director. “It is what I consider the critical next juncture for the downtown revitalization campaign."

Those materials, DiBart said, would include information on the BID’s façade improvement program, plus housing density and other data expected to be of interest to retailers. The BID anticipates the campaign could last up to two years -- a time frame that dovetails with the completion of two apartment complexes and the start of construction on at least two others. more