Not The College Park I Knew

Centh
Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:06:10 +0000

umcp11, I’m never going to change your mind on this topic, I know. But I don’t really agree with you. College Park may be a college town but it’s wedged between two huge metropolitan areas. The whole region is over-developed and College Park is just one facet of a regional over-development problem. I grew up in Ithaca and went to grad school in Austin. Ithaca is defined by the colleges and a lot of small business thrives there because it’s a) isolated and b) catering to the college crowd. Austin, as someone else pointed out, is a city affected by the college population but not defined by it. And Austin’s attractions are much broader than the university…the Capitol, a presidential library, Pecan Street, big industry, etc. This economy is tough and small businesses are extremely difficult to sustain. The kind of places you are looking for are small businesses…the big book vendors and big restaurant chains are killing them all over, not just in College Park. Would you want to run one of the small businesses you’re missing? Do you think you could attract enough of a following in this economy to make it sustainable for 10 years? What kind of incentives from the city would you like to see in place to make that possible?