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Calming down Ybor

That it took a deadly fall from a balcony for Tampa to confront Ybor City's party-hearty problem shows the difficulty ahead in changing the environment of the historic Latin quarter.

Mayor Pam Iorio deserves credit: She is the first city official in a decade to seriously call for Ybor to change course. Cleaning the main strip, Seventh Avenue, more regularly and enforcing the city's noise ordinance will blunt much of the damage the bars cause to Ybor's character. But these are Band-Aids; what the city needs is to fundamentally change the Ybor experience. That will require more money, better marketing and the political patience to guide a long-term transformation.

Iorio's predecessor, Dick Greco, and the City Council share much of the blame for Ybor's problem, having encouraged the bars to multiply in a short-term strategy to bring warm bodies to Ybor. This explains Iorio's interest in attacking the bars. She wants to explore outlawing the drink specials that fuel the rowdiness, in hopes of creating a safer environment. But outlawing cheap drinks merely pushes the party elsewhere. While cracking down on bars for encouraging binge-drinking can be part of a solution, the real problem is that Ybor has too many bars. They drive up property prices, forcing bars to adopt gimmicks just to pay the rent. Rather than focusing on drinks, the city should focus on breaking a corrupting cycle.

The first step is fashioning a strategy and then sticking to it. The city needs to bring new residents into the surrounding neighborhoods and recast Ybor as a destination for unique art and shops. Visitors want to see a working, urban neighborhood - the very kind of active life that once flourished in the historic district. Artists need space and incentives to work and show their art. The areas north and south of Seventh should be put to better use to attract more retail. The city also needs to regularly sponsor more daytime events at Ybor venues, among the most beautiful and irreplaceable in the city.

There is always a place for clubs, bars and restaurants, but relying on them as destinations is lazy planning - fine, perhaps, for a cookie-cutter mall but hardly fitting a historic district abutting a booming downtown. Iorio has kicked off the debate with several good ideas. Now we need to craft a comprehensive strategy for diversifying Ybor, attracting new shops and residents and recasting the image of the historic district.

[Last modified February 28, 2005, 01:04:17]