By Oona Mackesey-Green
Northside News
As businesses seek affordable space to open or expand, they are looking beyond Madison’s fast-growing and expensive downtown real estate. Many find appeal on the Northside. Whether businesses are drawn by the swaths of residential areas that surround the Northside’s commercial districts and are home to potential customers, or by the price tags on the properties available in the area, Northside development is growing.
“Development begets development,” said City of Madison Business Development Specialist Ruth Rohlich. “The city as a whole has been hitting records of development in the last few years. While that increase feels focused on downtown, it is definitely spread throughout the city. What we’re seeing is higher than normal levels of development across the city, and that is true for the Northside as well.”
The trend is easy to spot with big-name business openings over the last several years: Willy Street Co-op North, Tennyson Senior Living Community, McKenzie Place, Bear & Bottle and Goodwill are just a handful of the companies making investments on the Northside. But it’s also true for some smaller businesses looking to scale up.
John Pickle and Jennifer St. Cyr, owners of the food cart Pickle Jar based out of FEED Kitchens from 2014-2017, began the process to open a dog daycare last fall. They recently received city approval to operate in the NorthGate Shopping Center. When selecting potential locations for the new business, Pickle said, “we wanted to be both North and Eastside. We looked at a few places before this, but they were too expensive or not prepared to work with our type of business.”
Pickle was originally seeking space in the Madison area to open a restaurant but was discouraged by what he described as “tremendous competition for space.” Many of the properties available required expensive overhead costs to get the space ready for a food business. “Restaurants seem to be a very big financial risk right now,” said Pickle.
Northside residents and entrepreneurs Amanda and Brian Carriveau overcame that risk thanks to the “perfect storm” of circumstances. They hope to open their restaurant, Bierock, in the Northside TownCenter this spring. As during their search for a business venue, prices made the Northside the right place for them to purchase a home here three years ago.
“We liked the area and the houses were in our price range. It was an area with a lot of change happening, and a cool part of the city that we weren’t familiar with,” said Amanda Carriveau. As residents, the recent development on the Northside was noticeable but they only followed business news casually. That shifted when they began to consider pursuing their interest in entrepreneurship.
“We were definitely following what was going on. That pushed us to say, other people are doing it. We really could make this work.”
During their search for a restaurant space, “we were open to pretty much any part of the city,” said Carriveau. Some of the same factors that influenced their decision to purchase a home here also affected the decision for their business. With the increasing development and affordability of residential and commercial space, Carriveau said it “sounds like you’re going to get more people on this side of town who are going to be living here and going out to dinner where they live, not having to drive across town. There’s a lot of excitement about this part of the city. That boosts customers for us.” And it wasn’t until they saw their current space that they knew they had found “something that works for us and that we’ll be able to afford.” And, said Carriveau, “we thought wouldn’t it be great if we could live and work in the same place?”
Sue Hessel lives across the Northside from the Carriveaus. Although recent business openings have shifted the way that Hessel spends time and money on the Northside, the increased development doesn’t feel close to home yet.
“I don’t know if there is a sense of place yet,” said Hessel, “but it feels like it could be going in that direction. It feels like it still needs to be supported. The development down at Sherman and Fordem feels a little far away from where I live. Down there, that feels more like revitalization and that brings a little fear of gentrification.”
As development continues, Northside Planning Council executive director Abha Thakkar is prepared for conversations about the potential for increasing costs of living.
“With a community like ours, gentrification is something we really have to try to mitigate. It is complicated. We want businesses that serve a variety of income levels, but at the same time, you don’t want to shift the overall balance of the community to the point where it prices everyone else out.”
Thanks to increased development in the Madison area, and the work of residents and local organizations to draw entrepreneurs to the Northside, business is booming. What does that mean for residents? Part two of this article will be published in the June/July issue to answer just that.