“It's great to see the streets full”
Don Harrold, Executive Editor
editor@enterprisepub.com
Seven or eight years ago, the most noticeable thing about Logan's business corridor was what wasn't there. "You would drive down our main street, Highway 30 area," said Mathew Gross, a Logan business owner and president of the Logan Chamber of Commerce. "Of course, there were several businesses in town, but one of the things that was very noticeable was the vacant buildings."
In a joint interview Aug. 28, Gross and Brianne and Bruce Niedermyer described a downtown that has filled in over the past several years. "I'm not saying that we're perfect and there's not any empty buildings in town," Gross said. "But I would say that we went from 10, 12 empty spaces to two or three empty spaces."
Gross owns a car wash, commercial building with three storefronts and five residential rental units, and substitutes at the school. He is a founding member and board member of the Logan, Iowa Community Foundation.
Brianne Niedermyer is a co-founding member and president of the community foundation, recently served on the Logan-Magnolia school board and holds a full-time job based out of Des Moines. Her husband, Bruce, is secretary of the foundation and a member of the city planning commission. A landscape architect who leads an urban design practice, he served as co-chair of a community visioning process the city ran a few years ago through Iowa State University and the Iowa Department of Transportation to develop a master plan.
Gross traced part of the turnaround to the building he inherited. "My father, my dad had owned those properties for 30 years, and throughout the 30 years, he had one tenant in all three locations," he said. When that tenant moved out, the options were to sell the building or find another single occupant. "It was too big and didn't quite work for one organization."
The space was divided into three addresses. The first tenant came from an unsolicited pitch. "I had a lady who approached me just with what she would call a wild idea for a brick-and-mortar, permanent farmers market," Gross said. "And we decided to move forward with it on a short-term basis. And that business is One Farm Market."
"I would say that that business was kind of the cornerstone that proved to everybody else that these small specialty shops or stores or whatever they were could work in a small town," he said.
A custom leather company followed and did not last. A women's clothing boutique and Long Lines Communication now occupy the other two spaces. Gross said new arrivals include a coffee shop, an organic food market and a tattoo parlor.
"There's been just all sorts of different organizations or businesses that have come in that maybe 10 years ago you would say, 'Nothing like that would ever work in town,'" he said.
"Most of those are five, six years in and doing very well."
Gross said the businesses coordinate with one another, including on hours. "Instead of just having a single stop in Logan, somebody can come in and spend some time and make a morning or an afternoon or a day of doing things around town," he said.
Brianne Niedermyer, who occasionally works at the boutique, said customers arrive from Atlantic, Omaha, Blair and Fort Calhoun, Nebraska. "They'll just drive through and see that places are open, and they end up spending more time than they had anticipated in Logan, which is really great," she said.
Asked what residents want, Niedermyer pointed to requests the foundation collects on its Facebook page. "A lot of times things that come up are, like, a youth rec center, a splash pad, things like that," she said, adding that Little League programs, a gymnastics gym on Highway 127 and a downtown dance studio already give children options "all right here in Logan without having to drive to Omaha or Blair."
One resident wanted to open an arcade and hangout for children, she said. "But then it's just staffing and the financial side of that is the hard part to figure out how it works."
"We also need child care," she said, adding that the gap extends well past Logan. "I could give you tons of information around Harrison, Shelby and Monona County numbers of the child care deficiency that we have in rural Iowa."
On the relationship between business and city government, Bruce Niedermyer said tax increment financing is used in the city's urban renewal areas and the city is managing the trail project now under construction.
"There's always deep conversations about the realities, what is possible, what is within their bandwidth, because it is a small group of people," he said. "I would say there's not complacency within our government. We are moving things forward."
"We could always be more progressive in figuring out how to better those processes, but it's not like there's a huge divide, I would say, in my opinion," he said. "We are maybe taking baby steps in those directions."
Gross said the community foundation was created to link groups that had long operated separately. "A lot of them just worked independently of each other," he said. "It's not that nobody got along with each other. Everybody's always pretty well got along, but there just wasn't the central organization or the connecting organization that brought everybody together."
Asked to sum up Logan's business climate for someone unfamiliar with the town, Bruce Niedermyer stopped short of calling it a boom. "I think the word thriving is a little extreme," he said. "But when you can come for, like, a Saturday morning and just spend a couple hours literally busy because you're going store to store, getting coffee or lunch or breakfast or whatever, that's pretty exciting for me."
"It's great to see the streets full on a Saturday morning and other days of the week too," he said.
Brianne Niedermyer said the crowds build around events including the Fourth of July, Sugar Fest and the Christmas season. "We get a lot of comments from people outside of town and even in our county that we very much look like a Hallmark Christmas story type of thing, because all of our streets are lined with lights, or our businesses are lined with lights and stuff," she said, and added, "It's really cool to be able to go downtown and see that there's very few parking spots, that there are people walking with coffee, with pastries, with whatever, almost year round, if we're being honest."
Gross said the constraint now is inventory. "I think the biggest attribute is the problem that we have not being able to bring more in, just because we don't have the space, or there's not any readily available vacant buildings that somebody can rent or buy," he said.
"We still have the people that want to come and take the risk to start something up here in town. People want to be here."
"Our downtown is pretty full," he said, "and space is a very limited resource."
