Ebony Walton and Mark Simpson Transcript — Sept. 17, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00):
For this next session of the NPF Local Business Journalism Fellowship, we’re going to be hearing from two speakers who have some important context and insight to share with us about the complex local business business scene in the nation’s capital. First, we’re joined by Ebony Walton. She is the director of marketing and communication for the downtown DC Business Improvement District, or commonly known as DC bid. Ebony provides creative oversight to ensure that the bids, branding, marketing, and communication strategies are impactful and consistent. Her work involves planning events, managing a multimillion dollar budget, and developing strategic marketing strategies for the bid. And Ebony is joined by Mark Simpson. Mark is the director of planning and Economic development for the DC bid. He oversees research policy and project initiatives focusing on revitalizing the downtown core, specifically in the post COVID era. His extensive private sector experience and academic training is in urban land and real estate development, multifamily construction and urban design and planning.
(01:29):
That’s just a taste of their extensive professional background. So you can read their full bios on our website@nationalpress.org. Mark and Ebony, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. The timing for this conversation is great because so many of these journalists are covering their towns in their regions, dealing with some of the same things that are going on in dc, the impact of federal policies on local business tourism, whether or not their tourism numbers have dropped, just so many things. So I thought we would start by having both of you share a little bit with us about your path to DC bid, what brought you there and what you found when you first got to DC.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (02:17):
Sure. So I am a proud graduate of Howard University and interestingly enough, my major with broadcast journalism. And you know how it goes, you have to pay your dues, and I didn’t want to go to Milwaukee report on cats and dogs. And then I had a family and I’m like, I need to get a job that pays a little bit more money. So I sought to work in my field but had never heard of what a bid is and did not know what that meant. Does anyone know? Does anyone know what a bid is? Have you heard of that term? One? Two, don’t be afraid a few. Okay. So it was very new and really what we’ve come to understand is why we are a nonprofit. Nonprofit isn’t an industry, it’s a tax designation. Our industry is place management. And so it took a while to really understand what a bid is and what it does.
(03:09):
And I think the light bulb sort of went on when I saw how this really is a part of planning. There are stakeholders who agree to pay an additional tax, at least in DC and bids take on many names. So I do want to do a little bit of level setting. You may hear bid business improvement district, sid, community Improvement District Alliance partnership, all the same thing. Our goal is to make the area clean, safe and friendly. That’s the baseline. Because you all know when you visit and you spend your money, you don’t want to go anywhere. That’s not clean, it’s not safe and it’s not friendly. So that’s the basis of what we do. And in DC we are one of 12 bids. So it’s important that whenever you’re talking about a bid, so especially here, we’re the downtown DC bid because we’re one of two bids that share the downtown area.
(04:00):
And so that really in a nutshell was my path to getting here. And then really learning and understanding all the nuances of what a business improvement district does. In DC we are not allowed to lobby, so we cannot lobby council and all of the bids in DC have to be enacted by DC Council. So we have to go before DC Council. When you first come into being to say that we have enough property owners who agree to pay this additional tax in DC property owners are already paying a tax per commercial square foot. And the way that our bid is run is it’s by square foot, not by value. Thank god for that. Right? Oh my goodness. And we I think have only three times raise the commercial, raise that bid tax rate. And so essentially what happened is 25 years ago when downtown was dull, dirty and dangerous, it was the property owners who got together and said, look, what can we do?
(05:00):
How do we bring some investment into this area to get it to where literally it is now? And so you all know it’s cyclical. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Is it the restaurants and the retail and then the workers or the visitors? I don’t think anyone’s figured it out, but you need all of it because in order for a business to want to locate somewhere, they want to know that there is a vibrant, there’s vibrancy, there’s culture, and of course it is affordable. So that really was my pathway. And 19 years later, I’m still here. So that’s an anomaly too. People like, oh my gosh, been in 19 years, God is good. So I’ll let Mark
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (05:39):
Talk. I just love you always get me going in the morning EI love that. So yeah, my name’s Mark Simpson. I oversee planning and economic development for the downtown bid. I’ve been working downtown in this work for about two years now. I’ve been at the DC bid for one year, and then I was at the Golden Triangle bid, which is our sister bid in downtown west for a year prior. And then prior to that I was working as a real estate developer on the redevelopment of the Walter Reed, the historic Walter Reed campus in Upper Ward four. But I got the opportunity to come downtown and I was really excited to work on downtown revitalization efforts writ large and tackle the challenge of what comes next for downtown in the post pandemic era. My background in training is in architecture and urban planning, and so I was excited to come help contribute to the new iteration of what downtown’s going to become with the presence of remote work, changes in shopping and visitation habits, rise of internet shopping and its impact on retail. And so in the urban planning field, there’s sort of a joke that downtown is in crisis about every 20 years or so. So this is my generation’s time. And so I was excited to come down and help work on finding creative solutions to make our city better.
Rachel Jones/NPF (07:10):
I’ve had two stints of living in dc. I first came in 94, was here till 2007, and then came back in 2019. And I’ve been here since the first time around. I was struck by, it was just a steakhouse here, and it was very kind of dull so that by the time COVID hit, I was so blown away and impressed by how the business scene, the dining scene had changed. So I want you to take us to that moment when news of COVID hit and businesses started shuttering. What was that like for a group of people whose sole focus is amplifying business?
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (07:52):
Well, I think us like the rest of the world, it was surreal. I mean, we thought it was going to be a week, two weeks. We was like, okay, a month. Okay, six months later, we’re still here. So then it began to, our efforts began to shift to how do we help businesses stay open? And as I think many of, at least what we have seen, the downtowns that fared well are those that had a more vibrant mix of uses. And so our downtown has somewhat of an imbalance of mix. We’re 70% commercial real estate. And so when we were living our best life, everybody was coming to work, all was good. We had people down here working, people who are working have money to go shop, have money to go eat. And so that’s when we began to see, and I would have to say that prior to COVID, we had already started talking about diversifying the mix of uses, talking about residential conversion.
(08:46):
But you know how people don’t believe like, oh, what is that? We don’t need to talk about that. So of course now people think that we’re all talking about residential conversion, but those conversations started happening long ago in the height of COVID, our focus became how do we help businesses survive? What does that look like? And then beginning to reimagine what life would be like post COVID because it changed the world. And so while there are people who I will stop short of calling them delusional of trying to go back to, I mean it, we’re not going back to pre COVID, not, I think there are so many good things that came out of it. And so now how do we shift? I think the challenge is when you talk about diversifying a mix of uses as a bid, we have to understand every audience.
(09:36):
So not just the property owner, the worker, the property manager, the retailer. So if I own a building and my building is retrofitted to be a commercial building, now what does that mean if I really want to convert to residential? And then how do city policies help that? Am I going to make less money? So all of those things, essentially I’m saying we do not have the answer is what I’m saying. There’s no answer. There’s no magic bullet at least that we have found. But in terms of going forward, talking about what can we do to continue the pedestrian activity? And Mark, this is probably more in your wheelhouse. So go ahead.
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (10:16):
I was about to say I left my magic bullet in the office. No, so Ebony laid out the landscape really well and just the kind of radical shift that happened with behavior patterns during the pandemic and after the pandemic, I would say we were over-indexed for office, just a lot of office buildings. And there’s various reasons for that, primarily that it was just the highest and best use in most cases. Most of the time for any real estate developer looking at a piece of land, you could just make the most money by building an office building. And so developers just built office buildings for years and years and years and years. And the shift that happened with COVID and the rise of remote work is that the office attendance, which is one of the metrics we use to track activity downtown, it was in the kind of number of fobs in pockets.
(11:10):
An average day would be 97, 8, 97, 90 8% activated. Some people are on vacation, some people have a doctor’s appointment, but most people are in the office five days a week. Fast forward to where we are today, that rate is about like 50%, right? So we have a huge drop off in office workers, Ebony and I, and when I first got introduced to the downtown bid, we worked closely on this planning document in partnership with the Golden Triangle where I previously was, and our friends at the district government called the Downtown Action Plan, which outlined it was a roadmap for policies and programs that could revitalize downtown and bring back that economic activity. And what we learned in that was that all of the surveys that our team had done, both on the worker side and then on the employer side, showed that some version of hybrid work was here to stay.
(12:05):
And even in a kind of best case scenario, we weren’t assuming that we would get more than 60% office utilization, which translates roughly to be like three days a week. So if that’s your baseline for the entire ecosystem of businesses that had operated for years and years, losing 40% of your business, I mean if we cut 40% of your paycheck, you would feel it, right? I mean, it’s a tremendous amount. And so what we’ve seen then is just rises in retail vacancy. Our retail vacancy rate is more than double what it had been historically. It’s office vacancy rate has also been increasing because firms have realized that they can shrink their footprint. People are coming in less. So you’re seeing more hot desking and flexible work arrangements. And many of the challenges that we see are all downstream of that. It’s like a lack of foot traffic, a lack of demand. And so the work that the bid does in addition to the clean and safe, which is if you know Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that’s the base of the pyramid. But now we need to welcome more people back and find the policies, programs, changes and uses to replace that source of demand from the daytime worker
(13:26):
Who is not coming back to your point to where they were pre pandemic.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (13:32):
And Rachel, I just want to say one other thing. When Mark talked about behavior patterns, that’s somewhat of where we come in. Most of us, where we live is where we do a lot of, where we do a lot of business. And so if we have workers, we don’t have the same amount of workers, how do we draw people and get that same activity? Because our goal is we don’t want to make people be downtown, we want you to want to come downtown. So it’s about what other reasons can we give people to come downtown? Events are a great way that we help to spur that economic activity and that pedestrian activity. So this summer we came off a whirlwind of doing, I don’t know, 10 events, trying to figure out how there are still a lot of assets downtown. Rachel talked about the great dining scene, but what it takes to actually get someone out of their house to come out maybe with their husband or with their kids and spend money, it’s a lot. How many times do you have to hear a commercial or does someone gives you a recommendation to say, Hey, come try this great new place. And so events are one of the ways that we help the economy downtown and we help those businesses because someone may come for an event. So we had a lot of events in an area called Anthem Row, which is downtown. And so we did a ring sided anthem row. So there was like, what is it, Mexican lucha Libre
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (14:53):
Libre with the masks stuff. I’m clearly out of the loop. It was super cool.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (14:56):
Yeah, people come, they say they eat, they may get on the metro, and that’s one of the ways that we help to stimulate the economy.
Rachel Jones/NPF (15:05):
I think the best use of this time is to open it up to questions as soon as possible. But I wanted to ask one more because I think the role of tourism in Washington DC is just so integral and as much or more than many cities, many of these cities. But I wanted to ask for both of your perspectives on where we are right now with the current political climate and so many things that are going on globally or whatever. How has the bid been able to navigate the local business scene and what people want? And then to also consider tourism and what a tourist wants out of business?
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (15:49):
It’s challenging, and I will say we rely a lot on destination DC who is the marketing arm for the entire city. And also they have a lot bigger budget than we do. There’s always the hey, they do more with less. And so marketing is important, but there are so many other things that we’re tasked with doing. And so I think tourism, especially in DC, is key because it was by far the largest driver of traffic and pedestrian activity pre pandemic. And probably now you’re talking about thousands of people who come to the National Mall come to see monuments. We have a wide variety of catalog of things that are free. And so what it means for us is how do we one get people off the mall? How do we two counteract people’s perception? And that’s a battle that we’ve been fighting since the bid started in 1997 and we continue to, because one story, and you talk about Rachel was sharing a little bit with us about the program and talking about thinking deeply. One story can snowball about one aspect where now people think it’s not safe
(17:03):
And that is not always the case. And what is so key is I think for me, I’m in a very interesting sit in a very different perspective because I went to school for journalism, so I respect that, but and I understand you have to do what your editor tells you to do or whatever, all those things. But the well-balanced part of it is so key for us because we can be impacted. And I’m watching the conversations on social media, I’m seeing reports and I’m going, I come into work every single day. I take the metro. I’m not afraid to come to work. I don’t see what people are seeing. And sometimes it’s not always reporters, it’s one person’s interaction or experience that they had in that moment in time. But then no one hears about one of our ambassadors, someone dropped, this is a true story, their income tax refund checked and he returned it.
(17:57):
No one talks about I couldn’t find my car. And the ambassador walked in the rain 10 blocks to help you find your car, because I understand that’s not sexy, but it’s impactful when then people choose not to travel or they tell people, oh, well be careful when you go down there, this and this. And we’ve had people who work in our circle say, yeah, I was talking to my mom and she was like, be careful. I say, has your mom ever been to dc? Has she ever been to dc? Okay, well, please tell her it’s safe. But it’s those things that we rely on you, on your eyes, on your ears, on your writing, on your stories to help tell that story. So I think went around the mountain, don’t know if I answered your question, but tourism is huge because there’s the regional, local and national that people rely on that traffic, but there’s this mix too with the local communities also.
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (18:51):
Yeah, I mean, I was just saying hospitality was one of the bright spots in coming out of the pandemic. I’ll get my prop here, but we put out an annual data report called the State of Downtown. It’s this beautiful document that has a lot of information and charts. Ebby and I worked on this, and we put this out annually just as a barometer of where we are, where we’ve been, and then where we think we’re going. And in here year, we were touting some of the successes of the rise or the recovery of the tourist industry. So largely speaking of the major food groups in real estate, I already said retail’s down offices, down hotels were actually about to pre pandemic levels, like plus or minus. We saw average daily rates, ADRs in the realm of where they were prior to the pandemic. Occupancy rates were strong.
(19:53):
And then attendance at our museums, our theaters was just a little bit below pre pandemic levels, but within spinning distance attendance at the Cap one arena, which is really the anchor of our downtown culture and entertainment district saw attendance above pre pandemic levels. So certainly a positive. We’ve seen some hotel openings and in good investment there, there’s over 20 million people visit the mall every year. And so that is a, I mentioned demand earlier. That is just an incredible amount of demand. People coming from across the country, they want to have a good time, enjoy themselves, particularly international tourists spend rates far exceeding domestic tourists. And so we are excited to have tourists. The other thing I just wanted to touch on was what Ebony mentioned about this perception challenge. And we spent a lot of time in the action plan talking about this tremendous decline in crime rates.
(20:54):
So there was many cities rising crime here in the district, in the post pandemic era. I’m not a sociologist, but many people have written on this, but it was seen uniformly throughout cities. So we experienced what was a national trend, 2023 was our peak year. And a lot of that press, even if it doesn’t happen downtown, it could be in a neighborhood that’s a mile or two away from us, but the perception for somebody driving in from the suburbs is like, oh, it’s like this happened in downtown even if it was far away. And so we spent a lot of time in here talking about how in 2024 we saw declining crime rates to actually, our violent crime rate was then below pre pandemic levels. It was just very good news because it’s important to make people want to come here and feel safe. Exactly. It can be really hard to counter that the narrative sometimes because the charts and the graphs, they don’t get people as excited as they get me excited. Right,
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (21:57):
Right. And I’ll say one more thing, I’m sorry. It’s so important that when we recently did a rebrand, it was focused on the place downtown as the place, not the organization, and we just relaunched our website with an eye on the visitor when we started looking at the demographics of who’s coming to our website, who’s interested, it’s visitors, it’s local visitors, regional visitors, and national. So I just want to highlight that because that is important because when people are looking for information, we need to ensure that wherever they find downtown, whether it’s social media, whether it’s a website, whether it’s through a Google search, that they’re finding good information, that they’re finding the 100 plus white tablecloth, the restaurants that we have, that they’re finding all of the cultural attraction. So it is hugely important the impact of the visitor, whether that’s national, regional, or local.
Katherine Lin/Mississippi (22:52):
I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of introduce yourself. Oh, I’m Katherine Lin. I’m from Mississippi today in Jackson. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of social media.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (23:01):
Oh my gosh, we don’t have enough time, Catherine. Okay, so social media is huge as we all know. And I think that what we are trying to figure out is how do we balance resources and what story are we telling while we want to stay with the trend, we have to sometimes be very strategic, whether that’s placing social ads, whether it’s joining the conversation, whether it’s not joining the conversation. So I don’t know that I have the answer to the role of social media because it’s A BMF that we can’t stop. You are giving people a platform where they can talk anonymously and say whatever they want to say. So I think the way that we approach it is how can we make our voice as loud as possible with the messages that people want to hear? So people don’t on social media, no one cares about what the bid is doing as an organization, maybe on LinkedIn, follow us on LinkedIn, but on Instagram it’s the restaurants and the why.
(24:14):
And then I have to think, oftentimes what happens is we get in positions and sit behind a desk and forget that I’m a mom, I’m a family of five. Give me a deal. I am not going to pay. Some people will who those who can do, but I can’t pay $300 for us to all go out and eat. We need a deal. So I have to begin to think about in a real way, what and what are the messages that people want to see and hear? And it may not be what I want to promote, but the end goal is to get you downtown. So what can I do on social media, whether it’s a news story or on our website to get you to come downtown. So that might not have answered your question, Catherine. I actually thought more about influencers. I actually Influencers,
Katherine Lin/Mississippi (24:57):
Okay. Thank you for being, because Jackson is not a big tourist town, but we had a canoeing company that did really well on TikTok and they drove a lot of business that
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (25:06):
Way. Yes. So I’m wondering about, we absolutely use influencers and so our strategy is to look for influencers who are covering the topics that we cover and then that’s how we do it. Influencers have a lot more impact than we do, and what we found is that when people, so you all know people go on social media to relax, to be entertained, to be inspired. Sometimes our reach is not as far sometimes as an influencer’s reach. So what’s key for us is partnering with the right influencers, whether it’s for an event or whether it’s for a campaign so they can help us tell the story. Because what we know is that the brand capital people take the brand capital of an influencer over us putting it out because they just feel like we’re trying to sell them. I mean, which we are, but we’re also trying to tell the story. So influencers are huge and it definitely has become a key in our social influencer strategy. The challenge is that every influencers is a job and they want to get paid, so we need a bigger budget.
Rowan Hetzer | Dayton Business Journal (26:07):
Hi, I’m Rowan with the Dayton Business Journal. I love what you’ve said about perception so far, and I was just wondering if you have any advice on what we can do as journalists to help improve that perception in conjunction with those destination, for example, or other marketing agencies. What can we do to improve it?
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (26:27):
I would say that there are a couple of things you can do, capitalize on what are your strongest assets? A lot of times we are trying to copy what someone else has done and it doesn’t work. Like why should they come to Dayton? Did you say Dayton? Is that what you said? Yes. Okay, great. What are the reasons, and if you can’t give the 32nd or whoever the organization is, if they can’t give the 32nd elevator speech, that’s where they have to start on. What are the compelling reasons that people should come there? When we first started all those years ago, we did a perception study and at that time we were still doing things like not virtual, but out on the street actually talking to people to see what was their perception and why do they feel that way? Because it’s necessary to know why people have a certain framework because then you can begin to combat that.
(27:16):
Is it true, is it not true? What are the things that you they’re saying of why they’re not coming so that you can combat that. I think events are also a great way to drive traffic and I would say not just the onetime event, if it’s a onetime event, it needs to be a signature or something that’s happening annually and it capitalizes on the beauty of that area. Dayton isn’t downtown and you don’t have to be, Dayton isn’t New York, you don’t have to be, but what are those unique things that would bring people to Dayton? One of my favorite commercials is Eminem. He did a commercial for Chrysler during the Super Bowl. You guys remember that commercial? And it was of the Chrysler 300, but the commercial wasn’t really about the car. The commercial was about Detroit and no one had ever used made in the USA, we all see all the time made in China. So it was a very strategic campaign, not just about the car. And one of the things he says is, we’re not Emerald City and we’re sure whatever the other city is. And the point was, Detroit doesn’t have to be all those things. This is who we are, a city of grit, a city of blah, blah, blah. What is the story of Dayton and tell that story.
Judy Farah | Comstock’s business magazine (28:37):
Hello? Hi, Judy Farah, editor of Comstock’s Business Magazine in Sacramento, California. Sacramento is our state capital. It’s a mini dc. We even have our capital building even looks exactly like yours. Just an anecdote, when I was dropped off by my Uber driver at midnight Sunday night for this fellowship, first thing he said was, oh, this isn’t safe here. So that’s one thing. Give
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (29:02):
Me his name. Yeah, I was about to say, what’s the company?
Judy Farah | Comstock’s business magazine (29:06):
So that’s an Uber driver telling a journalist, you’re not safe here. He said there’s a shooting down the street or whatever. On the flip side, I was at Hamilton’s last night and that place was rocking. So we are having a very hard time in Sacramento. Our downtown is barren because everything downtown was a government city. 80% of the workers were government. We have empty buildings that we don’t know what to do with. They can’t be converted into residential or anything else. They’re concrete. They were built in the fifties. So we do have some signature events. We have a downtown sports arena that helps. But I was curious to know what were some of those events that you tried? We’re not going to copy them. I just want to maybe be inspired. Give it a sacramental spin. You can The one with the mask that was
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (29:56):
The Libre. No, I mean, so we have a few signature events that the bid puts on. I would say one of our most central events is our holiday market that’s been running for 20 years now. We just had our 20th year.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (30:09):
This year will be the 21st.
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (30:10):
This will be the 21st year, tremendously successful, about a 30 day market featuring different artisans. This year we had food and drink and then performances on a stage and the event drew more than 375,000 people.
Speaker 4 (30:28):
So it’s 30 days,
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (30:29):
30 days, and it’s become an anchor of holiday DC right holiday downtown. Tremendously impactful for the area in the neighborhood. We did a spending survey of shoppers and there was about seven and a half million dollars of spending inside the market. And then for every dollar spent inside the market, there was about a dollar and 10 cents spent outside the market at local businesses. So it’s more than 8 million of economic activity happening. So I think there’s hugely impactful, sustained events are really important, but they’re very take a lot of capacity to produce. They’re expensive. It is a huge focus for us and is incredibly important. We compliment those signature anchor events. Then with lower impact, smaller scale events, a lot of music concerts and events. This a Lura Libre event was sort of a bit of a spin on that, but a single day, single afternoon, we can get a few thousand people down at not too much in terms of staff time or overall expense. And those events are incredibly impactful. The third thing I’d say is that we also, for our signature events, rather than doing a one-off like oh, it’s the Saturday, June 21st, we will do what we’re doing this month is Thursday night out, which is a restaurant, an event in partnership with the restaurants where they’re having a buy one get one
(32:10):
Incentive. We have a partnership with an app that allows for check-ins, Bando, if you check in, yeah, it’s called Wango. If you check in twice, then you can come and get a free gift card for a restaurant and then we’ll have live music and events and that’s happening every Thursday in September. So we think about that kind of branding a lot. It makes it easier to anchor in people’s minds. And then we don’t have to spend time sending, which we do spend a lot of time sending emails, but it’s helpful when it’s just baked in and easy to remember.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (32:42):
One of the other key things that bids do is, and a lot of people have never heard, what does that mean? Essentially, how do you make an area? And that area can be large, it can be small, it can be a side. How do you make it a place, a destination where people want to come? Sometimes that’s through artwork, sometimes that’s through small changes like seating. So one of our parks that recently in 2019 was renovated first time ever where there was a partnership with the National Park Service and a private organization. So in the history, I don’t know if it’s a history of America, but literally the president had to sign it into office, that NPS, the National Park Service would give management authority to the District of Columbia who would then in turn give us management authority for Franklin Park. Why? Because we have staff, we can manage it, we can activate it.
(33:33):
But I say that even because that took 10, 15 years to do. In the meantime, one of the things that we did, a very small placemaking, the park is just over five acres and there’s a huge fountain there. We just put out tables and chairs during lunchtime. It’s summertime, people want to be out, they want to eat. So you give people a place to sit. So small things like that are placemaking, things that you can do. And also art activation. One of the things that we’ve done over the past couple years is to how can we find areas, whether it’s a temporary or public installation. What Mark didn’t mention is right now in Franklin Park there is a horizon and emotion art activation. So there are these oversized seesaws and when you ride them, there’s water in the middle, it makes noise and music. And then there’s these cocoons that light up at night and illuminate and you can just sit in the cocoon and sort of be transported, maybe escape your job for 30 minutes. But these are small ways to give people respite and to add to that placemaking effect. So that’s something you can do and I’m happy to share some other things online, offline, right. You going to go back here and then
Rayonna Burton-Jernigan | Capital B News (34:39):
I’m over on this one. Hey, I’m back here. Hello. Hi, my name is Rayonna. I work with capital B News at Gary, Indiana. I have two questions actually. You guys mentioned that there are 13 different bids in the city. So if you guys work together, how do you guys work together for the prosperity of the city? And then my second question kind of goes more so to perception of the city, Gary, as soon as I mention it, people would be like, I hate to beat this way. Damn, that’s dangerous. It’s really not. Honestly, I
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (35:08):
Actually thought about the Jacksons. I was going to
Rayonna Burton-Jernigan | Capital B News (35:11):
A lot of the drama not to be this way. A lot of the drama, Gary comes from Chicago, people just coming over bringing their drama and stuff like that over there. Again, if anybody from Chicago seasons, my bad, but really, I know you guys are the business district, but even as a journalist, what advice would you guys have for trying to change that perception to kind of build a city up as a tourist city? I feel like especially in a lot of my work, when you hear about, like you said, DC is dangerous. I lived here for seven years, it’s not, but I feel like a lot of these cities that people say are dangerous are really cities that have a majority of black and or POCs in it. So how do you really, I guess, change that perception so that people will want to come? Lots
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (35:52):
Of prayer? I would say we try to keep relationships with the press warm and I think so we have to understand where you all are coming from. We have to understand that we might put a story that you can’t run, that you can’t, whatever. But I think also having a lot of tools in your arsenal so that it’s beyond for us, it’s not just restaurants. Mark can tell you about data and what does the data mean. And I think for us, what we have to do is we have to become the aficionados. So I call myself a big nerd and Mark loves numbers and we gee out about it. And then I have to say, mark, what’s the story? Because if you just tell me, I don’t know what that means. And so one of the things when it first rang true for me when I was working at the bid of what we do, we had written a series of white papers.
(36:42):
And what we wrote was that downtown is the goose that lays the golden egg for the city. And that the tax dollars that we bring in at that time amounted to the budget of MPD. So that rings true for people like, oh, it’s not the haves and the haves not, but this is what allows the city to do some of these other things. So I would say having different ways to report about it and to combat it. And sometimes you got to call a thing a thing. So when someone reports something that’s not true, you got to be able and not afraid to come back and say, listen, this is the A, B, C, D and E. These are the details of what happened. I think people are afraid now. Catherine was asking about social media, you really can’t be afraid. I mean obviously you have to use wisdom to your first question, the bids we do work together, but more so on a larger scale in terms of what are policies that benefit all of us.
(37:36):
So we have a DC bid council and they help advocate for work that will benefit us all. I think because our areas are so different and unique, we all have set aside boundaries. There’s less of the competition. Everybody’s got their head down trying to do work, but we may share stories, okay, what are you doing about this? What are you doing about that? How do I do this? So that’s where that comradery and partnership comes into play. And then just for something for you to know, there is an association called the International Downtown Association. So they are the parent, I guess you could say, of all the bids in the world. And so that conference is happening next week where we come together as place management, industry professionals to talk about the things that are impacting us. So we’ll have lots of off the record conversations about the federal impact.
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (38:25):
That’s
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (38:25):
All I’m going to say on that.
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (38:28):
Let’s go here. Oh, just one thing that I think is really important is we try to be very honest brokers of what’s happening. And so it’s important both with the relationships that we have with our local press, but then just anyone always that reputation really matters. And so we want to celebrate the successes when they happen. But then at the same time, if there are challenges or there are problems, we’re not going to shy away from them. I think it’s important just to have that credibility when whoever you’re speaking to,
Amelia Schafer | ICT (39:01):
For sure. Hi, I am Amelia Schafer. I’m with ICT, which is a Native American newspaper. I wanted to ask, so I live in Rapid City, South Dakota, major tourism town. That’s our number one economic factor. We’ve got the hills, we’ve got Mount Rushmore, Badlands, et cetera. But downtown, despite having a coordin Native American population, there’s just one native owned business. And I can’t think of any other minority owned businesses in our downtown. Obviously rent and things like that are a major issue. Our first ever native restaurant closed within six months downtown. And this might not be an easy, I guess answer right now because we’ve seen a lot of grants and things dialed back for minority businesses. But what advice do you have for trying to overcome these hurdles and get our community downtown start to make money downtown? This is a huge issue we have is it’s not accessible for us.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (39:56):
And so is your question more about getting people of color having businesses? Was that what the root of your question is?
Amelia Schafer | ICT (40:03):
Yeah, do you know of any grants or any opportunities or how we, I guess can we get our foot in the door and start to have our businesses downtown? So
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (40:11):
It’s a loaded question and I think I’ll just like to be frank, it’s a systemic issue. It literally is the same things that we experience on a larger scale, they trickle down. And so what happens is when you have areas even where there may be a large concentration of people of color, either the property value has gone down or people of color can’t afford to own businesses there because of all the things. You got to get a loan and then there’s roadblocks to get a loan and then there aren’t the same resources. So I think that there’s no easy answer. One is how can you get resources to people who are interested in owning businesses? I think how can you also maybe use bids and other partnerships to not only create a grant because a grant is really giving a person a fish. You got to teach them how to fish and I mean, it is what it is.
(41:06):
Do you want them to be open for a year or do you want them to be open for 5, 10, 15 years? And so the same tools that it takes people who are not people of color to thrive, they need those same tools. So whether it may be a grant, it’s got to be a grant and it’s got to be this and it’s got to be this, and it’s got to be resources, and maybe they also need a mentor. We’ve seen bids across the country do some amazing things. And so I believe it’s in Baltimore, the head of the bid there, Shalanda Stokes. There is an area where, so one, they gave grants so that people of color could open businesses. Some of them were pop-up businesses, but it was an entryway into figuring out can they be more long-term? I think those kinds of programs help.
(41:51):
I think also you got to figure out what kind of businesses do people want? Because listen, people will try to act like certain things on a reality in some areas. You’re never going to see some kind of businesses and people will move heaven and earth, so they aren’t there. And so for instance, you’re not going to see a Dollar Tree downtown. The rent’s too expensive. But then that also happens with other types of businesses. So how are those barriers removed? Is it a city thing? Do policies need to be changed? Is it an economic thing where people need resources? What are the major barriers? And who can help you overcome those? And I really should be letting you answer that
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (42:27):
Question. No, I was just going to throw a bunch of acronyms out there. So the district government has many policies and programs in place to address some of these long-term structural issues that we have with historically disenfranchised communities. We have our department of Small and local Business Development, D-S-L-B-D. They have a program called Certified Business Enterprises or CBEs, which allows for government contracting, like other resources to be available to businesses that qualify. There’s also the Department of Employment Services, DOES does they have a first source hiring program where government contracts and some other contracts, at least 51% of all new hires need to be district residents. And so there’s programs there that have varying levels of success. The other thing I would say is that we have perhaps an analogous issue here in downtown, which is our historic Chinatown, which is adjacent to the arena.
(43:34):
That is, it’s changing in its demographics as the neighborhood is evolving. And there is a lot of focus and attention from our district leaders about how we can be supporting and preserving the legacy businesses and the owners of the historic Chinatown that have just seen a major drop off in foot traffic and are really struggling. And there’s a lot of work and a lot of attention. I don’t think we have solved it. And you run into just sort of matter of fact challenges. Like sure, there’s a new program that we’ve perfectly crafted for you as a legacy business owner in Chinatown to support you with your needs. But then the owner, there could be language barrier problems. There could just be they’ve been running a family restaurant for years, and so filling out government forms is not a thing that they’re focused on. And so then it creates a new challenge for providing service and support just to access the service and support.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (44:38):
They don’t have a website. They’re not on social media.
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (44:41):
And even in some of these restaurant promotions and things that we’re doing for Thursday night out, I mentioned a gift card program. Not all the restaurants in our boundary have gift cards. So we had to be flexible with some of them to allow for paper gift certificates that they could honor, so they could still be a part of it. But it’s hard.
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (45:01):
Olivia Evans with the Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and while y’all were speaking, it was hard to not feel like I was sitting back at home in a Louisville downtown partnership press conference listening to the placemaking with the art, the rebrand of the website and the mission, and the partnering with the right influencers. It was really hard to not feel like I was back home. So if these conversations are happening with every sort of bid or downtown partnership and major metros in smaller cities across the country, is it just a matter of who can do it first and fastest? Or is it actually that everywhere needs this exact to happen and why? Well,
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (45:40):
You got no, I appreciate that. So it’s like I’m reminded of Tolstoy and the opening of Anna Corina, all unhappy family, all happy families are happy in the same way, and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. So I think all downtowns are facing a similar challenge with remote work. I mean, it’s like remote work is the thing that has changed. And many other towns or cities like DC were a bit of a monoculture for land use. And so we were all over index for office in any natural system, monocultures are inherently unstable because the minute you have a disruptive event, the system breaks. And so we’re in that moment right now, many of the strategies are the same. Ebony had mentioned the IDA conference, that’s this next week and we’re all going to be in a room together talking about all of our shared ideas.
(46:35):
So I do think there’s a bit of, there is a typical formula, people all people are very different, but we all sort of like the same things most of the time. And so I think it gets back to one of the other earlier questions is thinking about, yes, it might be art or music, right culture, but the culture of Louisville is not the culture of Washington dc. And so I’m always thinking about with our programs, how can we be celebrating not just Washington, the monuments and the government, but the District of Columbia, what’s the thing that makes DC really special about our music and our people and our food? And how do we elevate that and celebrate it? And so it might just be, yes, it’s a concert, but my concert is going to look a lot different than your concert probably. And that’s a good thing to celebrate.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (47:25):
I agree. But I would say a little differently. I don’t think there’s the same blueprint. There may be the same tools, but how do you use them and how does it work for you? You can use a hammer for all kinds of things, not just to put a nail on a wall and some things you don’t need a hammer for. But understanding, when you talk about a blueprint, a blueprint really is specific to what the request is or what the idea or the vision is. So I don’t think it’s like cookie cutter, but what is the vision? So yes, there are common things that can be used. I think what bids offer are creativity, and we can often be nimble where our government cannot, we can move a little quicker. I don’t think it’s always moving so quickly. You can move quickly and run shipwreck.
(48:08):
But I think how can you be creative and think out of the box? So I was thinking about, as Amelia was talking about her question, a similar idea for her and Judy, when you talked about your area in Sacramento being dead and you can’t convert it. One thing that many people have done is they worked with the property owners to do popups in areas that are vacant. Because listen, at the end of the day, people want to make money. So maybe I can’t make the same amount of money because it’s vacant, but I can get some money coming in and I can get some eyes on my space. Some people maybe you can do murals. So I also brought annual reports. We did a mural project in an area where they were just cardboard and didn’t look good. I mean, a mural is simple, but it adds vibrancy, it adds life. So I think it’s being creative and what tools do I need? And then you may have to put on your startup hat, let me break this tool so I can make tool tools for this problem that I have that it looks like no one else has. So that’s my answer.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (49:11):
Ashley Murray from states newsroom. I’ll make a quick comment. I live over there on N Street. I go out all the time. Thank you. I was on News Street last night, Lincoln Theater concert. I walked home, I walk home all the time. It’s fine. We
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (49:24):
Knew we liked you.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (49:25):
I love it here. I love it here. I’m wondering about this narrative of our administration has angered allies and lots of places he think. And so there’s this narrative that international tourists are no longer coming to the US and I don’t know the facts behind that. I will say I was in Europe three weeks ago and anybody who heard that I was from Washington DC all they wanted to say was like, oh, Trump has your military there and your federal crackdown. And I’d be like, the place is safe. I love it there. And so I’m just wondering, is that real? Is there a drop in international tourism?
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (50:19):
The best place to get that answer is destination dc. So they recently had their marketing outlook and destination DC heavily markets this area internationally,
(50:29):
And they did a report. And so if you need our help, we’re happy to point you in that direction. And they do a lot of trips and I forgot what they’re called, but during the marketing outlook meeting, they had a delegation from India there to show them, this is Washington, this is what it looks like. I think they were here for a week or two and then they were going to go back and write about it. And so that’s the part that’s important. And so I think that there may be, I don’t want to say that there may be a slight decline in international tourism, but I don’t know that it is to the extent that has been reported. But destination DC can give you the numbers that you’re looking for for sure. And I think anecdotally we’ve seen a decline in certain areas, but not to the extent that people think people still want to come, but it is real that we have to combat the narrative that this area is not safe. That’s real.
Rachel Jones/NPF (51:18):
Let’s take one more from the back.
Savannah Hawley-Bates/KCUR (51:20):
Okay. Hi, Savannah. Hawley-Bates. I’m with KCUR, the public radio station in Kansas City. A lot of over. We have so many cis that they’re nearly overlapping. And I’m wondering from your guys’ perspective, as the media likely reaches out to you, how does that collaboration work? It doesn’t seem like they collaborate in Kansas City, so how can the media best reach out to each of these different neighborhood community improvement districts and kind of differentiate them because they kind of just seem all the same from our point of view.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (52:01):
So I think understanding the basic foundations of why they may be different, and I’ll give you an example. So as I mentioned earlier, our tax rate is based commercial square foot in Georgetown. It’s based on value that changes things because if the value goes down, that means their budget goes down. And so understanding what their goal and their focus is, there are some bids where it’s voluntary and the businesses voluntary pay into it, which means that their focus is going to be different. Now, if you’re a voluntary paying into it, then I’m all about small business. So I think understanding those nuances will help fill in the gaps of maybe why they’re not talking to each other. The other thing, sometimes it’s just real and it’s basic. People have small staff. So we are an anomaly. I think we have the largest budget of them all, eight 19 plus million. I should know. It’s in
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (52:52):
The annual report.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (52:53):
So you can find it in there.
Ebony Walton/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (52:55):
And we have a staff of 30 plus. We’re an anomaly. There are a lot of people, it’s like two people and they’re doing the best they can to hang on. So when you’re saying what may appear like they don’t work together, could be they’re just trying to survive and they just may not have time.
(53:12):
So I would say understand the nuances first, and then whatever information you need, figure out who can get you what you need. So Mark talked about that state of downtown report. We also have a data dashboard on our website where people can get the information, but that took us a long time to do, to actually get it to a place, and he still has to populate it. So understanding who can give you the information you want. And then I would say, how can it be a win-win? What do you need and what is it that they need to help someone maybe go that extra mile to cross those bridges and gaps for you?
Mark Simpson/DowntownDC Business Improvement District (53:48):
Yeah, I’d say just briefly that many of these smaller placemaking organizations, they’re very bootstrapped, but they are by far the best resource for connecting with owners understanding issues. Because one of the foundational roles of a place management organization is just convening people and leading discussions and just being the hub of the spoke wheel. And so even if they don’t have the data, they can connect you with a local person or just whatever exactly the story is. We are unique in that downtown, it’s in the name, so it’s like, oh, downtown DC people don’t know what my boundary is. They just hear downtown and it’s like whatever their mental map creates, that’s what our boundary is. And so we can play in that space sometimes because people, I think look to us as a resource and we are fortunately have the resources. So we can actually do the analysis and I can get into the charts and the graphs and the retail data to understand what’s happening in a way that smaller bids can be really good at what they do, but they just don’t. It’s just not a focus.
Rachel Jones/NPF (55:00):
Ebony Walton and Mark Simpson of DC bid, I’m very tempted to lock the doors and keep you in here for the rest because this has stimulates such incredible ideas for stories and inside and context. So let’s take this opportunity now to show them our appreciation for joining.
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