File this one under the category of Hard-to-Believe. Only a year ago, Atlantic City’s immediate future included five new mega-casinos or casino expansions, and jobs for up to 40,000. Casino workers anticipated an influx of new opportunity. Developers and the city looked forward to an infusion of new residents.

Then the hammer fell. Recession and competition brought progress to a standstill. But as history attests, recession is always followed by recovery. Though the pace and scale of development has been drastically scaled back, the long-term vision for the city remains the same: a place to live, work and play, with a thriving residential base, a bustling downtown, a sizzling waterfront, and a dynamic, reinvigorated casino industry.

South Beach, Florida

More than 30 years after its first casino opened, Atlantic City remains a city half-fledged, with a billion-dollar industry cheek by jowl with pockets of desolation. Yet much of the groundwork for future prosperity—new homes, new retail and dining, a reconstituted Gardner’s Basin—has already been laid. The following “urban miracles” may hold clues about how to complete the process.
South Beach, Florida. During the 1970s, South Beach was little more than a retirement village for the poor and a gold mine for drug dealers known as “cocaine cowboys.” Salvation came from an unlikely source: Miami Vice.

South Beach’s splendid waterfront and beautiful-if-dilapidated Art Deco look provided the perfect backdrop for the hit TV cop drama. The city was regularly showcased before millions of TV viewers, and activists, artists and historians rallied to save the fabulous buildings. The renaissance was on.

Architecture Week called the South Beach story “one of the most successful urban restoration projects in the history of American architecture.” Today, the community is home to the rich and famous (Gloria Estefan, Jennifer Lopez, Sylvester Stallone), but also enjoys a thriving young multi-ethic community who come for the city’s nightlife, art galleries and matchless waterfront.

Louisville, Kentucky

In 2004, this once-sleepy Southern town became a stellar example of downtown revitalization. Eager to improve the central city and kick-start a flat housing market, Louisville officials pursued several redevelopment strategies that emphasized dining, recreation and entertainment along with residential.

The linchpin of downtown development was Fourth Street Live, an entertainment complex built by the Cordish Company of Baltimore (also developer of Atlantic City Outlets, the Walk).

The neighborhood around Fourth Street, once described as “dark and dangerous,” became a destination. As former Mayor David Armstrong said, it attracted “not just tourists, but local people who wanted to come back downtown.”

Manayunk, Pennsylvania

For much of the 20th century, Manayunk in Northwest Philadelphia was an industrial landscape in steep decline. Its hilly streets (including the famous “Manayunk Wall” of bike race fame) were lined with bleak row homes; crumbling 19th century factories overlooked the community’s Schuylkill River waterfront.

Then a few smart restaurateurs brought fine dining to town, and suburbanites who didn’t want to travel to Center City descended on Main Street.

Within a decade, the so-called “land of bars and churches” had been transformed into one of Philadelphia’s trendiest neighborhoods. Though some locals decried the change as gentrification, there was no arguing with some of the improvements: vacant factories and mills became apartments, and Main Street, once described as a “shooting gallery,” became a hub of parks, boutiques, fine restaurants and quirky clubs.

Baltimore, Maryland

While Baltimore still has areas of high crime (East Baltimore, in particular) the transformation of the city’s harbor area makes it a good example of successful urban renewal.

The “waterfront festival marketplace” known as Harborplace first opened in 1980. In the years since, the Inner Harbor has been reincarnated as a cultural center with tourist attractions like the National Aquarium, the Maryland Science Center, Baltimore’s World Trade Center and Power Plant Live (another Cordish development). Beautiful Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles, is nearby, and the harbor shows off its seaport history with a maritime museum and water taxi rides to Fort McHenry.

Slowly but surely, those enhancements had a positive effect on surrounding neighborhoods. Once-shabby districts east of the Inner Harbor, like historic Fell’s Point, have come back to life with condominiums, retail space, restaurants and hotels.

Hoboken, New Jersey

In the late 19th century, this “Mile Square City” on a major East Coast shipping route was thriving. Post-war Hoboken was something else entirely. The industrial city fell on hard times when its factories left town. Residents soon followed suit.

People started returning in the 1970s and ’80s, but Hoboken came back with a roar in the late 1990s, when Wall Street professionals priced out of Manhattan recognized the city’s unique charms, its industrial chic architecture, and its sheer walkability. Today, when Governor Jon Corzine is not in residence at Drumthwacket, you may see him strolling near his apartment in Hoboken.

Each of these cities is different, and not all the lessons of Baltimore or Louisville, Hoboken or Millville, New Jersey, can be applied to Atlantic City. But these stories illustrate that vision, plus a plan, plus investment and solid public-private partnerships—along with good timing and maybe a little luck—can work wonders in a city on the brink of renaissance.

Atlantic City is at least halfway there, and though the economy has stopped most development in its tracks, even that seemingly grim outcome may be a good thing, says James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

“The one thing Atlantic City has now, as does the rest of the state, is time,” says Hughes. “It’s not burdened by the pressures of having to approve development applications; it’s not overwhelmed with development activity. It actually has time to plan and develop long-range strategies. That’s an activity that could be very valuable.”
    
Essential to the health of any city is the vitality of its neighborhoods. In the 1980s, Procida Realty & Construction came to town with a plan to rebuild the forsaken Inlet section. The New York company packed an impressive résumé having rebuilt much of the South Bronx; company officials saw similar possibility in Atlantic City. Casinos were fairly new to town, the need for housing was plain, and the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority was willing to stake the land. But at first, the ambitious plan met with skepticism.

“When we started 15 years ago, people said, ‘Are you crazy?’” says Senior VP Christine Procida. “They were hanging up on us.”

Today, the Inlet section is about as close to Norman Rockwell as Atlantic City is likely to see, with spic-and-span homes on leafy avenues, street lamps and shrubbery, and an almost small-town charm. That same kind of transformation is at work at Procida’s EastWind development in the Northeast Inlet Corridor, now in its second phase.

Addressing the city’s longstanding paucity of home ownership—71 percent of housing in Atlantic City is renter-occupied, twice the state average of 34 percent—Procida says, “Then let’s make the housing stock better. Let’s also make the rental stock better. A city is a mix of lots of different housing—high-end waterfront, home ownership, rentals—but first, you need to fill a city up with people.”

Projects like EastWind “attract other developers and give private owners a reason to do their own improvements,” she says. “Then you’ll see the supermarket move in. Then you’ll see Atlantic Avenue change. We’re getting there, slowly.”

“I have a passion for this city I grew up in,” says Procida Sales Director Kim Donahue. “For me, this is still the home of my childhood, with sidewalks under bare feet in the summer, the ocean and Boardwalk—all of it. As a mother, Donahue is more interested in “a family feeling” than “the glitz and glamour” of the casinos, and it’s easy to find.

“I love to go with my daughters to the Walk and the Pier, Gardner’s Basin has the aquarium, there’s the Boardwalk, there’s Dante Hall—there’s so much here that gets lost behind the bright lights.”

At the same time, Donahue says she has to sidestep adult bookstores and peep shows on Atlantic Avenue when she’s with her kids. “I would shop there if I didn’t have to see signs for nude girls.”

Despite the negatives, these days many would-be homebuyers recognize the promise of Atlantic City, and are not as skeptical about moving here.

“I see this all the time—people who get it. Then there are people who want to come in after the fact,” says Procida. “If you like the Inlet, jump on the bus. That’s where we’re going.”

To get there, CRDA Executive Director Tom Carver says there must be a “magnum change” in the relationship between the city’s government and its No. 1 industry.

“The city has never come to grips with the casino industry, never come to grips with the idea that this is a single community with a single vision,” not an us-versus-them situation, says Carver. “This should be a place where people can be comfortable living and working and raising their kids, but you look around and see derelict structures that speculators own and people live in. That gives the city a black eye.”

He decries the illegal conversions of single-family spaces to multi-family properties, says regulatory standards must be better upheld, and hopes the new ability of casino workers to hold public office may increase the dialogue among stakeholders.

But, Carver adds, “The casino industry is not totally innocent either. Hey, they have to play a greater role in this town. They have the wherewithal and the intelligence, they have to sit at the table and take part in these discussions. With state government and city government sitting down with private industry, we can do remarkable things here. But we also need a change in attitude.”

While it’s impossible to regulate attitude, projects like the Walk expansion are expected to generate increasing returns in surrounding neighborhoods. Carver foresees a big change in Ducktown, Atlantic City’s onetime Little Italy, which flanks the Walk area.

As he sees it, “It will be more analogous to the transition from 14th Street to the West Village in Manhattan—a place to walk around, stop in cafes.”

Such advances, along with transportation improvements and continuing home development, should do much to persuade casino workers, young professionals, empty nesters and families that Atlantic City is more than a nice place to visit.

They might even want to live here.

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