Chris Waible sees a lot of potential to spark energy in Peoria's Central Business and Warehouse districts.
“I have ambitions, and I hope that we all do in Peoria, to make downtown a great place,” said Waible. “Not just great for Peoria, but great for anywhere in the country, and making an authentic place to Peoria that's not copying necessarily somewhere else, but it's making the most of the strengths that we have downtown and turning into a really nice place.”
Waible is nearly four months into his new position as the president and CEO of the nonprofit Downtown Development Corporation. The Peoria native is back in his hometown after spending the past four years working in real estate business development in Madison, Wisconsin.
“Madison's a good comparison for a lot of cities, because it sort of compares well to even larger cities but smaller cities too, and the thing that I like about Madison versus Peoria is that there is some mixing of outdoor recreation and true urban kind of living in an environment. So, I think that’s a good match,” Waible said in an interview with WCBU.
“We have a university here, obviously, and UW [University of Wisconsin] is a big influence on Madison, which skews some of the comparison because it is so large. But I think they experience a lot of the same things that we have here, in Madison.”
Waibe takes over leadership of the DDC from Michael Freilinger, the organization's original president and CEO who retired after 11 years. He joins the effort to restore vibrancy to Peoria's downtown amid a glut of vacant office space and a need for reinvestment — an opportunity he's eager to tackle.
“This is not a challenge that's unique to Peoria; it's a challenge that all cities are facing. And there's, unfortunately, not a one-size-fits-all answer,” he said. “I get asked a lot about conversion, because there's been so much activity in the multi-family world. ‘Is it viable to convert these office spaces to multi-family residential?’ And the answer is, sometimes.”
Waible said part of that has to do with whether an office building is constructed in a way to allow conversion into residential units.
“Sometimes it's very capital intensive; they’re major projects, and not every developer is interested in that type of work. So it's finding the right partner that might be interested,” said Waible “The other piece is just, is there demand for that type of space?
“It is a unique type of housing product, and does that fit within the market demand that we have here Peoria? So, it’s kind of evaluating all those things, then also understanding that even if the building does lend itself to conversion, the improvement in occupancy rate doesn't necessarily justify the cost to convert the building.”
Waible said his first few months have been mostly an evaluation and assessment period.
“I've been working to get a handle on where we've been and where we're headed, taking inventory of different metrics — like how the apartment vacancies have looked, how these buildings are filling up, trying to understand where there are gaps in the commercial office space and what opportunities we have to influence change moving forward,” he said.
But he noted that it’s hard to get a precise figure on just how much downtown office space is currently vacant.
“That's something that we're working on to try to understand a little bit better. We don't have an exact number right now,” he said. “This is something that has been done in Madison, so it's fairly familiar to me: Understanding the number of core office buildings, those that are used specifically for office, kind of parsing those out from a number of different kind of mixed-use buildings.
“Understanding what is truly office, and then trying to understand what the inventory is. Because they're privately held buildings, that information isn't necessarily published. What's more readily available is when the space becomes available.”
One of the keys is to revitalizing downtown Peoria, he said, is creating a vibrant place where employers can tap into a strong and talented workforce.
“We’ve found that employers are interested in locating near talent, and they're interested in locating in vibrant places that people want to be,” said Waible. “So we can continue, through our work, to shape downtown into a place that more businesses want to locate or expand because it gives the right type of environment for their employees to be adjacent to.”
Waible hopes the DDC can help Peoria build on some of its successes in the Warehouse District in jump-starting activity around the downtown core.
“I think the hope is that it's all ‘downtown.’ Wherever you draw the line is sort of arbitrary, and different people have drawn the line in different places as to what's Warehouse versus Central Business District,” he said.
“But a successful downtown will breed more success. So to the extent that the Warehouse District becomes an exciting place to be, more people want to be in that general vicinity, which includes Central Business District. So we hope that the progress that is happening right now, that's been underway for quite some time now, will continue to draw more interest in downtown in general, including the Central Business District.”
