Quote from: Teatownclown on Today at 02:23:57 pm
Scattered development with a lot of future vacancies and banksters chasing down the guarantors of bad loans.
Let's play a forum game. Let's make a list of restaurants and retailers that have gone out of business in the 71st Street corridor in the last 10 years. Then we'll make a short list of the downtown restaurants and retailers that have gone out.
I'll get us started.
Chili's
Tony Roma's (and whatever came in after it)
Jazmo's
Grandy's (and whatever came in after it)
Lonestar Steakhouse
Elephant Bar
Ruby Tuesday
I can't even remember the names of several of them. I'll count on our well informed army to fill in the gaps.
Most of those are large national chains that didn't make it in your version of downtown....71st Street.
Meanwhile, in downtown, we've consistently turned empty buildings into revenue generating, Tulsan employing companies. My rough guess is that in the last 10 years in downtown we've added restaurants and retailers that do 30+ million dollars in sales and employ somewhere north of 1200 Tulsans. By the end of this year, Elliot and I alone will have 500 plus employees. Our companies in and around downtown will combine for nearly 20 million in sales.
Though we keep adding restaurants, sales in our current establishments continue to increase. Read that again. We're not cannibalizing ourselves. More and more people are coming downtown. Downtown's not a joke. It's not going anywhere, and the companies choosing to do business there are loving it. Downtown Tulsa is the fastest growing neighborhood in our city. We've added hundreds of new residential dwellings in the last few years alone with hundreds more planned and in development.
I can't help but wonder when these types of comments will finally wear out. How many success stories do we need to see in downtown before we believe that it's not a passing fancy?