16 Ideas for Downtown Gainesville

Based on extensive community engagement and research, the Downtown Gainesville Strategic Plan is an actionable, implementable blueprint to energize the city’s core.

Nestled at the seam between the University of Florida campus, historic neighborhoods, and Depot Park, Downtown Gainesville struggles to be a well-connected beating heart for the community. Gainesville neighbors described downtown as one that lacks a cohesive identity and only serves government employees by day and college students by night. While neighbors loved the walkability and small-town character of their downtown, they felt it had limited offerings and was not welcoming to everyone. Through the years, residents were engaged in a multitude of previous plans to revitalize downtown, most of which continued to be unrealized and lacked community-wide support. The MKSK team, which included market strategy firm Development Strategies and the local engineering firm EDA, approached this planning fatigue head-on when embarking on this process, meeting a directive to craft a plan that would not sit on a shelf when completed. The resulting Downtown Gainesville Strategic Plan is a testament to this mission – an action-oriented document with 16 clear and implementable ideas to improve and revitalize the core.

Hidden on the eastern edge of downtown, Sweetwater Park is an underutilized aging greenspace. Gainesville neighbors quickly rallied around the idea of transforming this park and its waterway into a vibrant downtown jewel.

The team of MKSK planners and designers focused first on building trust with the hundreds of neighbors engaged by listening to their concerns and ideas. More than 800 Gainesville voices were engaged through this process.

The process followed the City of Gainesville’s Eight Core Values for Community Engagement, which established a foundation for how to involve those impacted by the outcomes of the plan and ensured our outreach methods would reach a diverse audience. To combat planning fatigue, the city assembled a broad coalition of community leaders and neighbors in a Neighbor Advisory Group (NAG) to guide the process and involve them in decision-making. Through public meetings, an online website with activities, and paper surveys at community events, the MKSK team used this process as an opportunity to build community and harbor trust. Taken together, this community conversation resulted in hundreds of ideas that helped to shape and guide the plan, organized into six key findings. These findings were used as the organizing element in the plan’s recommendations, and the backbone of the resulting 16 ideas for downtown.

The plan explores these 16 Ideas, creating a framework of strategies and action items to enable change and transformation in Downtown Gainesville. The ideas blend aspirational visions with practical and feasible outcomes, with each idea related to one of the six key findings from the community engagement process. These range from improving connectivity through a loop trail around downtown, to supporting affordable housing in downtown, and focusing on the maintenance and beautification of downtown. Directly tying the plan recommendations to community input emphasize the community’s role in both shaping the plan and ensuring its success – the ideas and their implementation hinge on community buy-in and support.

The Downtown Gainesville Strategic Plan is organized around six key findings from community engagement that are manifested in 16 Ideas for the future of downtown.

This plan does more than merely set forth a vision for the future growth and revitalization of Downtown Gainesville. It also sets up a practical framework for implementation that will be sustainable and impactful. Following the plan’s unanimous adoption by City Commission in October of 2022, City leadership immediately focused on enabling the first steps toward implementation.

The plan’s implementation focused on the three ideas shown in the image above as a way to build momentum.

MKSK continues to partner with the City of Gainesville in this journey toward making the 16 Ideas for Downtown a reality, including facilitating a two-day Implementation Retreat in November of 2022, with a focus on three key places to start: establishing an entity that is empowered to undertake the management and beautification of downtown; revitalizing Sweetwater Park into a signature downtown greenspace; and improving the 1st Avenue corridor and the temporarily pedestrianized “Streatery” into an outdoor dining destination.