Main Street Landing in Champlain Business Journal
Main Street Landing
Redevelopment with a social conscience
Burlington waterfront project highlights environmentally responsible building practices
Published November 9, 2009
By JOY PERRINO CHOQUETTE
Main Street Landing is a focal point on the Burlington waterfront. And, Melinda Moulton is proud of the accolades it has garnered over the past several years.
A greater sense of pride, however, comes from the project’s wide community acceptance and approval, said Moulton, chief executive officer and redeveloper of the project.
“We had to work hard for the past 25 years to earn the trust and respect from the community to do what we did,” said Moulton, who referred to the numerous awards given to Main Street Landing as “the cherry on a hot fudge sundae.”
The waterfront is beautiful today, but it hasn’t always been that way. In the early 1920s, Moulton said, with the advent of the automobile, people turned their backs on the waterfront, which had previously been the main source of transportation and cargo shipment.
“It became a wasteland, really,” said Moulton. The area at that time was crisscrossed with railways and partitioned off with chain link fencing. It also was rife with rats.
That scenario is hard to imagine when looking at the beautiful location. Over the past 20 years, Main Street Landing has created approximately 250,000 square feet of built environment in a green and socially responsible way.
“We were the first people to really create something down here,” Moulton said. “We brought our vision to this landscape.”
That the space was redeveloped in a green, sustainable way is something as commonsense to Moulton as adding butter to bread. It would be hard, if not impossible, for her to imagine completing the project any other way. Lisa Steele, also a redeveloper, has been partnering with Moulton on projects since the early 1980s.
“Both Lisa and I are products of the 60’s, and the 60’s movement was a lot about social justice . . . we were peace activists, social activists,” said Moulton. “When we got into doing the work that we are doing, our values and our morals were very much predicated by social justice and environmental justice.”
Moulton said both she and Steele came to Vermont because of its beauty. Many entrepreneurs have been drawn here for that same reason, Moulton said, and many now run some of the state’s most successful companies.
“Vermont was sort of this great Petri dish of people who came up here who wanted to be in a beautiful place . . . and to take our values, our morals into the life we created here in Vermont. It’s not something that we said, ‘Oh, let’s do this because it’s a cool thing to do,’” said Moulton about her interest in running an environmentally friendly and socially responsible company.
“It was just who we are,” she said. “It makes us. It’s in our DNA.”
When she started out, sustainability wasn’t even a word in the business world. “There were very few people doing this type of work when we started,” she said.
This has changed drastically, particularly in Vermont. For instance, Moulton said, the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR) currently has 650 members and is the largest organization of its kind in the country. “I always believed that if you are doing something right, it feels good,” said Moulton. “It all comes back in a really big way.
“It comes back in a so much bigger way than just money, though it does come back in that way too,” said Moulton.
Redevelopment is typically a term used for historic areas where businesses and buildings are already present but need revamping. However, Moulton pointed out, the term can also mean leveling existing structures and starting from scratch. The North End of Burlington once contained many French and Italian homes, which were destroyed and replaced with housing complexes. This, said Moulton, is called urban renewal.
Redevelopment isn’t the destruction of pristine meadow or pastureland in order to build businesses or housing developments, she said. “I think there has been, and still is, a great threat to our pasturelands and meadowlands,” said Moulton. “Big box stores come in and build in these areas, and then the downtown ends up being unable to compete. A lot of the downtowns end up with empty store fronts.”
Such a scenario is occurring all over the country, and it’s not a trend she’s happy about.
“I believe that in the next 10 to 15 years we’ll see a real resurgence in our downtowns,” she said. Several Vermont towns have already experienced this: Vergennes, Bristol, Hardwick and Montpelier have redefined themselves and grown in the last five to seven years, said Moulton: “They’re becoming more economically successful.”
Moulton credits four agencies in the Champlain Valley in particular with helping this happen: VBSR, Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, Vermont Business Roundtable and the Burlington Business Association. These organizations, she said, help businesses to grow in a responsible, sustainable manner. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case in a lot of areas. Many local businesses fail, said Moulton, “and then we become like every other place in the U.S.A.”
Still, Moulton remains hopeful and focused. She’s certain that stimulus money from the federal government under President Obama will make its way into downtown areas. With global warming increasing, Moulton said she believes more people will want to shop and work closer to where they live.
Public transportation is something else that Moulton hopes stimulus money will assist with: “That’s something that we need to do if we’re going to strengthen our downtowns.” A transportation plan being worked on by President Obama, according to Moulton, would include a rail line along the western side of the state. This would allow people to move around the state using a more environmentally friendly method of transportation.
Moulton has been working on environmental and socially responsible business practices for the past 26 years, and said she has every intention of continuing such work.
“Vermont is full of extraordinary minds and people doing extraordinary work — to make it not just a great place to be, but to also create economic growth, and to promote, maintain and encourage social justice.”