• Large downtown working population provides city with advantages, DCA leader says

He doesn’t yet have the complete numbers to back it up, but Glenn Lyons knows that downtown Des Moines has something going for it that a lot of other comparable-sized metro areas lack.

Lyons, president and CEO of the Downtown Community Alliance (DCA), is in the process of searching for the percentage of people who work downtown compared with the number of people who live in the area for a number of cities that are roughly the same size as Greater Des Moines.

“There’s something special happening with our downtown, and we don’t even think about it,” Lyons said.

Lyons is crafting his research based on similar research he did while working in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in the 1970s and ’80s. At the time, Calgary had numbers similar to those of Des Moines, and Lyons found that most similar-sized cities had nowhere near the number of downtown workers.

When he got to Des Moines last year, “I’m sitting there saying, ‘OK, unless cities of that size have changed, there’s no way we have anyone with a downtown office population anywhere near that,’” Lyons said.

What he has found so far, and what he suspects he will continue to find, is that a higher percentage of the population works downtown in Des Moines than any other comparable city. In a metro area with 569,663 residents, the Greater Des Moines Partnership estimates that the daytime population of downtown is 84,635, or 15 percent of the overall population.

By comparison, Stockton, Calif., Colorado Springs and Augusta, Ga., all with similar metro area population sizes, all have daytime downtown populations of 20,000 or less. Lyons said the general rule of thumb is that for every 1 million people in a metro area, the daytime downtown population is around 50,000, or 5 percent.

A large downtown population can provide a number of advantages, he said. It provides more opportunity for money to be spent, more opportunity for downtown living and a better overall image of the city.

Why?

Three factors account for downtown Des Moines’ high daytime numbers, Lyons said.

-Des Moines is the state capital, which brings government employees to the area.

-Iowa Health – Des Moines and Mercy Medical Center have large campuses downtown.

-Des Moines is one of the largest insurance centers in America.

“If you look at our peers and you look at their downtowns, a few of them are state capitals, some of them have hospitals, but none of them have the office populations that we have,” Lyons said. “Very few of them would have all three. That adds up to an awful lot of employees working downtown in a city of this size.”

Spending money

A big challenge facing the downtown district is figuring out how to get people to spend money on retail.

Lyons noted that despite downtown Des Moines’ large daytime population, relatively little retail money is being spent there.

“In terms of downtown employment, we’re hitting home runs,” he said. “In terms of retail spending downtown, at best we’re barely in the game.”

Part of the reason is a lack of options, he said. The downtown area has only about 100,000 square feet of retail space, compared with 10 million square feet of office space.

To help counterbalance that, Lyons said plans are in the works to turn Walnut Street, currently devoted to bus traffic, into “a downtown walking street where you can expect to have restaurants and some retail” after the Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority (DART) relocates to its new hub on Cherry Street.

The other reason is the culture of the downtown working environment, Lyons said. Workers with flex time tend to take shorter lunches so they can leave work earlier, taking away the option to stop by a retail store during lunch or stick around after work to get a drink, shop or eat dinner.

“Part of our job is going to be to find ways to make it easier for workers to shop downtown and spend time doing things downtown,” he said. “We’re good with arts and culture, not bad with restaurants, but retail we’re not doing good at all.”