Connecticut In the Region Stores Unmoored in a Sea of Banks

RIDGEFIELD

WITH its blend of boutiques, conventional chain stores, and the occasional mom-and-pop holdout, the prominent Main Street here looks fairly healthy to the casual shopper. Foot traffic is heavy enough on weekdays to sustain a hot dog vendor at Main and Prospect around lunchtime.

Ask the local merchants, however, and you’re likely to hear complaints about a creeping menace. It’s not suburban shopping malls, big-box stores or online discount outlets that have them so vexed. The threat they see is right next door — as well as across the street and up and down the block.

It is a Main Street plague of first-floor offices, primarily real estate agencies and banks, that to merchants’ minds is deadening the shopping climate and driving up rents. “We’ve got to give people reasons to come downtown, and we’ve got to have more reasons than real estate,” said Suzanne Brennan, a co-owner of the Shoe La La shop on Bailey Avenue, off Main Street.

More than 1,200 Ridgefield residents and area shoppers have signed a petition, circulated by Ms. Brennan and other merchants, calling on the Planning and Zoning Commission to ban any additional nonretail uses in first-floor storefronts within the central business district.

A similar prohibition is under discussion in Darien, where a nonprofit group formed to revitalize the downtown wants to bar banks from taking up any more street-level storefront space.

The proposed bans are part of a backlash against the regionwide proliferation of banks (and, to a lesser degree, real estate offices) in affluent shopping districts. The ample supply of banks is raising concerns among downtown organizations nationwide, said David M. Feehan, president of the International Downtown Association.

“We are hearing from a number of places, particularly in areas where there is a resurgent entertainment district or restaurant district, where the opportunities are there and the spaces are limited,” Mr. Feehan said.

In Ridgefield, nearly half of all Main Street storefronts within a three-block area house nonretail businesses, including 10 real estate offices and another 10 service businesses — like banks, salons and insurance companies, according to Ms. Brennan.

Demand for retail space in town is such that she and her partners had to “go through quite secretive measures” to secure the shoe store space, Ms. Brennan said, though she added that landlords can typically command higher rents from office tenants.

“I think it is kind of a greed thing,” she said. “It’s easier to get or a square foot from someone selling million houses than from a business owner selling 0 dresses.”

Town officials tried to defuse the tensions last year with a regulation prohibiting any new business, professional or medical offices at street level in the central business district without a special permit. They exempted real estate offices, however, leaving the door open for Keller Williams Realty to move from a second-floor space into another Main Street storefront.

“Everybody in the town got all up in arms,” said Willing L. Biddle, the president of Urstadt Biddle Properties Inc., the Greenwich-based company that owns the space that Keller Williams leases. What people overlooked, he added, is that since his company bought that 35,000-square-foot property along Main and Bailey 10 years ago, it has gone from one-third vacant to renovated and fully leased. Almost all of its 15 or so tenants — among them Shoe La La — are retailers.

The Planning and Zoning Commission recently to end discussion about tighter regulation of first-floor offices in the shopping area but will review a narrower proposal, drafted by the town planner, to limit the prohibition to storefronts facing Main Street.

Mr. Biddle opposes more regulation. It would unfairly limit the tenancy pool for landlords like him, while doing little to improve the retail climate, he contended.

“Everybody wants the town to look like a cute little Norman Rockwell town,” Mr. Biddle said. “But then you’ve got a guy like me who has to pay his mortgage and his property taxes.”