For years we’ve all know that vacant buildings negatively affect downtown. When the BID was formed, the consultant recommended our next major step was to do a community assessment to gather public input on what new businesses should be recruited downtown. Over the past 2 months, we’ve done just that! 606 community members responded to our community needs assessment survey.
They gave valuable feedback on what business types they’d like to see, what beautification they would value, and what reasons they travel to and spend money in neighboring towns. We all want people to have a date night, back-to-school shopping, and other shopping for fun in OUR downtown.
We have analyzed and compared the information gathered from the survey to other cities and industry research findings and have some tangible recommendations for our downtown. We will use this information to guide Downtown Oroville in priority projects and aid in business recruitment. Of course, much of what we are finding in the research so far confirms what we already suspected because the business owners know our town best! ]
Having the data and hard facts will help build our story and future in a way that others can easily support and envision. We’re excited to see how this project has already been used to support downtown and to see the impact it has in the coming months and years.
You can read the results here:
