Fall 2020 - 1736 Magazine

– may very well be the prime reason
Augusta’s central business district is
chock full of vacant spaces.
With a handful of notable exceptions
in recent years, this pervasive halfhearted
attitude among private-sector
stakeholders has defined Augusta’s
central business district since it was
hollowed out in the 1970s by the opening
of suburban shopping malls.
The wait-and-see phenomenon
isn’t unique to downtown Augusta,
according to Ed McMahon, the Urban
Land Institute’s Charles E. Fraser
Chair on Sustainable Development and
Environmental Policy.
“I’ve heard this in countless communities
across the country,” said
McMahon, a native of Birmingham,
Ala. “Real estate investors and developers
are definitely risk-averse. They
always like to tell me the pioneer is the
person with the arrows in their back.
They’re always waiting for somebody
else to prove that investing in a
downtown building will actually make
sense.”
To illustrate his point, the
Washington, D.C.-based scholar often
recounts the story of Rick Hauser, a
young architect who wanted to set
up an office in his wife’s hometown
of Perry, N.Y., a small hamlet nestled
between Buffalo and Rochester.
In 2001, Hauser approached numerous
building owners about renting
space to house his firm, but he was
repeatedly turned down by disinterested
property owners.
“He told me he went to the owner of
the nicest building in downtown and
said, ‘I’d like to lease some space from
you,’ and the guy said to him, ‘Well,
no, I can’t lease you any space because
I’d have to fix my roof,’ ” McMahon
said, recalling a conversation he had
with Hauser while speaking at Cornell
University.
“So he went to another guy and
was told, ‘No, I’d have to rewire the
building,’ ” McMahon said. “These
were people who didn’t understand
the difference between spending and
investing.”
McMahon, who is also chairman
of the National Main Street Center
board of directors, said Hauser then
decided to buy a building and renovate
The old Perry’s salon building, left, and the former WAGT building, right, on Broad Street in
downtown Augusta are among several dilapidated structures in the central business district.
it himself. So the architect visited the
town’s bankers to get a loan.
“And then the banks told him there
was no market for downtown buildings,
which, of course, they believed because
nobody had bought a building there in
the last 20 or so years,” McMahon said.
Hauser eventually formed a corporate
entity to self-finance a purchase.
He raised money by selling shares in the
company to friends, family members
and local construction companies,
which offered in-kind plumbing and
electrical services in exchange for
a stake in his fledgling real estate
venture.
Hauser eventually got his downtown
building – a two-story storefront on
main street. He opened his office on the
ground floor and converted the second
story into two loft apartments, both of
which were leased almost immediately.
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