Is Development Broken in Old Hattiesburg?
I have a City Council meeting coming up in a few days to approve a sign for our commercial building on Main Street and the Longleaf Trace. Even if it means my sign isn’t approved, it is too perfect of an example as to how hard it is improve the older sections of our city to not vent.
First - The Sign
Our 170+ page development code allows my project to have either a wall sign or a projecting sign. Neither really work due to the orientation of the building and the beautiful mural painted on its side. Working with the City, we went with a monument sign that you can see versions of throughout West Pine, Hardy, and Main Street itself. Basically, a frame constructed of two 6” by 6'“ posts and a connecting 2” by 8” to hang placards from. That sign needs a variance as my project only has 79’ on Main Street versus the 150’ of frontage required for a monument sign. Guess who also doesn’t have 150’ of frontage? Many of the commercial properties all throughout West Pine, Hardy, and Main Street who have a sign like this.
Getting a sign approved anywhere in Hattiesburg, even if you don’t need a variance, isn’t easy. It takes about a month and requires submitting multiple pages of calculations and renderings by a licensed sign contractor showing the exact location and dimensions of the sign. For example, I cannot have the bottom of this sign less than 18” or more than 36” from the ground. What if the ground isn’t even? Where do you measure from? Need to change one little thing after approval based upon an inconvenient location of a water line? Better hope nobody notices.
Here, I need historical approval AND the variance, so I expect this particular sign to take me over two months. A $750 sign will require the equivalent of $1000s of dollars, namely the time of the City Council itself, at least 5 awesome professionals with the City, more than a dozen incredible volunteers on the Board of Adjustments and the Historic Conservation Commission, and my immensely patient sign contractor who does this for a living. Oh ya - and my time for multiple public meetings and the general mental bandwidth disaster that is thinking through all these issues for what I consider a community service project. Now you may be thinking, “Chad, what’s the big deal? Sure it sounds a little tedious, but just go through the process.” And that might be fair if this was one of the only rules I needed to follow. There are another 169+ pages of that land development code we still have to deal with.
Here is a really inconvenient truth about the development rules we have to follow in Hattiesburg. It’s virtually impossible unless you are building a cookie cutter Olive Garden on raw land out west. Cause that is how we designed our development code - to meet the standardized rules of national chains pumping out urban sprawl in new sections of town rather than to reflect the 100+ years of history imbedded in the built environment in the older sections of town. I would wager that every single one of the restaurants key to our city’s identity east of HWY 49 would not be legal to build today. Now I love those little cheddar biscuits too, but who wants more Olive Gardens and fewer Keg & Barrels?
So what happens? People focusing on small projects like me frequently give up, cheat, or go build stuff outside the City limits and hope they don’t get annexed. Large developers spend tens of $1000s to hire civil engineers, architects, and lawyers, and every once in a while aggregate enough land to build a cool project (with lots of a variances - I think Midtown had 31). And empty and dilapidated buildings on Hardy Street sit.
Truth be told though, all of the above isn’t what actually makes me mad. Lots of good people came together and tried to compile a land development code to prevent anything bad from being built. All those little, well intentioned rules did add up to what I would argue is an albatross holding back investment in the older sections of town. I don’t like it, I think we should hack off about half these rules and let the free market decide if a sign should be 37” from the ground, but it is possible that is just my personal politics shining through.
What makes me so frustrated is that I am going through this process and the building next door is falling down. Literally. And I shouldn’t pick on the church - they are far from the only one. Go a few doors down from me, and you have a cute brick house boarded up with visible roof issues owned by a former city councilman. Keep going and you get a historic grand dame falling apart before our eyes owned by the daughter of a former city attorney. It isn’t just Main Street - downtown, Hardy, West Pine they all struggle with this issue. I am not talking about slum lords or some investor out of Texas. These are prominent, stalwart anchors of our City who have done more for Hattiesburg than I will ever come close to doing. Yet we have decided, as a City, that it is culturally acceptable to own buildings that do not reflect how we want others to see our community. Nobody is perfect in this world, me especially. Construction is hard, expensive, and time consuming, and many of my projects are not as far along as I wish. Sometimes life just gets in the way - be it a vicious tornado ten years ago, a sick relative, or our finances. But why is it easier on Main Street, Hattiesburg, MS to let your roof collapse than it is to put up a $750 sign?
