Smart Growth
The Responsible Hospitality Institute Aims to Keep Urban Hospitality Centers from Failing

Re-directing entertainment development to urban centers from suburban areas is a trend many markets are seeing. And it’s a trend in which the Responsible Hospitality Institute is elbow-deep, helping parties with vested interests in such development approach it wisely and effectively.

Where Hospitality is Going
    “In 2001, we held a networking forum on managing the growth of dining and entertainment districts,” says Jim Peters, RHI president. “We had various national associations come together, and there was no organized information about how cities managed this trend. So, we got a grant from Diageo to go into four cities — Philadelphia, Seattle, San Diego and Tallahassee — and study what was happening in those cites. We realized that there were three primary stakeholder groups: the hospitality industry, the safety community and the development community.
    “Cities were realizing suburbia was inefficient, so there was a lot more attention to rebuilding cities — the smart growth concept of making it so people can live, work and play without having to get into their cars and drive from place to place.”
Since then, RHI has organized focus groups in about 20 more cities.
    “There were six common trends that most cities reported and six core issues of a hospitality zone,” Peters says. “So now we’re going to cities and helping them assess where they are in the evolution of their downtown.”
    An active nightlife environment is a big part of the appeal of living in a downtown hospitality district. Even Baby Boomers, Peters says, in increasing numbers get rid of their large houses and relocate to a smaller home downtown, where everything they need is at arm’s length.
    “We go into a city and organize four specific roundtable groups: hospitality, safety, development and community. We get them to not necessarily look at the problems of nightlife economies but look at the opportunities.”
    Peters says the demand for more nightlife places in these urban areas will grow, but these four groups have to plan and manage that growth.
    “The problems can’t just be solved by police, and the clubs can’t be blamed for everything that’s going wrong,” Peters says. “If you have large crowds at closing time, and you have people not getting out of downtown because there’s not transportation, that’s not the club’s problem. That’s the city’s problem … that’s a planning issue.
    “We’ve evolved from saying we can solve alcohol-relating problems by training servers to check ID and recognize intoxication, to saying cities have to institutionalize systems that support a safe nighttime economy and recognize that that is trend of the future. If they don’t have those places, people aren’t going to want to buy the condos and pay the taxes to live downtown.”

Opportunities to Learn
    Two upcoming RHI conferences in Boulder, Colo.,  (October 4-6) in New Orleans (October 25-27) will provide an opportunity for hospitality operators to learn about ways to improve two very different types of hospitality districts. The Boulder conference is for operators in military- or college-oriented towns or towns that are regional tourism destinations — towns that have increasing residential housing near a downtown hospitality zone. The New Orleans conference is for operators whose cities are music-oriented and have a dense hospitality zone or heritage entertainment district, with large crowds at closing.
    Also, RHI offers the industry other valuable resources, such as online seminars. Most recently, RHI conducted a session for discussion of recent developments in the United Kingdom — which now allows bars to stay open 24/7.
For more information, visit www.rhiweb.org.          NCB