New concept highlights possibilities, obstacles

Drake Patten was warned that opening an urban-farm-supply store in a vacant former gas station on Providence’s West Side would be difficult.
She was told the building owner was difficult to work with, that there could be resistance from the neighborhood and, of course, zoning and permitting nightmares.
But Patten, the former executive director of nonprofit The Steel Yard, felt the Broadway space was perfect for the store she dreamed of opening and went for it.
As it turned out, fears about the landlord proved overblown, but the zoning and neighborhood problems ended up worse than even her most pessimistic friends had imagined.
Months after Patten had planned to open the shop, called Cluck!, she was holding a rally outside the building to protest an abutter’s successful legal appeal of her business.
During what was supposed to be the business’ crucial first spring season, Cluck! was instead a cause célèbre for urbanists, food-system reformers and local leaders concerned with economic development.
It also became the latest and most visible case study of the barriers facing small-business creation in the Providence area at a time their virtues are extolled by state leaders pleading for investment.
“I didn’t think it would be that difficult,” Patten said about the legal battle around the store, which finally opened last month. “I think what the city needs is to be proactive with small businesses. We want to see places getting their doors open.”
Although on one level Patten’s struggles reflected the unusual nature of the business she was trying to create, they are also indicative of how traditional zoning can slow exactly the kind of redevelopment the city wants to encourage.
Finding a creative new use for long-vacant properties like the old gas station at 399 Broadway is often the only way to make them productive again, but changing use inevitably requires expensive zoning relief.
In the case of Cluck!, the gas station was within a residential-professional zone that fit neither its old use serving cars nor another less-intensive retail use. The owner of the gas station, Elias Ayoub, had asked for zoning variances to turn the property into a convenience store going back to the 1990s, but had been denied.
For any tenant looking to open a store at 399 Broadway, zoning relief alone would cost $1,500, not including the additional expenses of a lawyer and experts needed to put together a winning proposal for the change.
They also would have to overcome the abutter opposition that almost always meets requests for commercial zoning relief.
In this case that included the St. Vartanantz Armenian Apostolic Church, which opposed Patten’s application because it feared Cluck! would change the character of the neighborhood and take away parking spaces.
Recognizing the troubled history of the property and the fact that a gas station is inherently more attractive when converted to a retail space than a house or dentist’s office, the Providence Zoning Board of Review granted the Cluck! variance.
But the zoning code gives great deference to abutters and two who had signed a petition in opposition to Cluck! had not been notified of the zoning hearing as required, setting up grounds for an appeal.
That meant Patten had to start the process over again, this time while she had already purchased inventory, paid rent and refurbished the building in anticipation of sales coming in.
That might have been the end of Cluck!, but local supporters started an Internet fundraising campaign on the website indiegogo.com that would eventually bring in $9,380, about the amount Patten estimates the permitting cost, although lost business and diverted effort likely drives the true cost higher.
Reflecting on the experience, Patten said while the neighborhood zoning fight may have been the biggest challenge, the permitting process itself, which Providence Mayor Angel Taveras has vowed to improve, remains notoriously difficult.
While some municipal planning departments produce the abutter maps that applicants use to notify residents, Providence makes the applicant do it. In this case, one missed abutter on the list cost thousands of dollars. And then there are the forms, which could be digitized, but are instead processed only in paper form.
To fill them out, applicants must either get a typewriter or do significant scanning, modifying and printing before shuttling them between different city buildings and offices to get stamps and signatures.
“It is awkward and unnecessary,” Patten said. “Why not bring [everything] under one roof and go digital so everything can be tracked.”
Digitizing the system, which Taveras has promised to do, would not only be more efficient, but help minimize concerns about selective enforcement in controversial cases, Patten said.
At one point after the original zoning decision had been thrown out, Patten got a peddlers license and began selling items outside the store, but it was wrongly revoked on complaints from neighbors before being reinstated.
As for why Cluck! generated such intense, if relatively narrow, opposition, Patten said she still hasn’t entirely figured it out, but attributes it to a generational clash between those who see chickens, bees and farming as part of the rural past and the new local food movement pushing it as part of the future.
If Cluck! ultimately succeeds on Broadway, one of the winners will be online fundraising, which some believe could become the best antidote to tight land-use restrictions and “not-in-my-backyard” opposition to redevelopment.
Fundraising websites indiegogo.com and kickstarter.com are soliciting donations, other new online platforms, including fundrise.com, broker small-scale community investment in real estate projects.
Although many question the financial sanity of investing in a would-be bar or restaurant, dozens of neighborhood investors could counter the current power of abutters in zoning decisions.
“If you look at crowdsourced fundraising, it is taking off like crazy,” Patten said. “It’s the Obama model of many small contributions. A lot of community nonprofits are doing that and, with the lack of financing out there from banks, without that it is difficult to do anything anymore.” •

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