In 1996, the Taubman Co. — the same retail group that plans to own part of the church's new mixed-use project — was pressing for a new downtown mall in Norfolk, Va.

As public debate raged, Taubman pointed a newspaper reporter to Columbus, Ohio, where Taubman owned a fairly new downtown mall called City Centre. The impressed reporter wrote a story calling the mall "a jewel."

The article helped turn public sentiment in favor of Norfolk's downtown mall, said Alex Marshal, the former journalist who wrote the story on the Columbus mall and one of the symposium's participants.

A few years later, Taubman's jewel in Columbus headed downhill and the company sold it. By 2002, two of the mall's three anchor tenants had left, and today the mall is listed at www.deadmalls.com.

In Norfolk, where public officials approved Taubman's downtown mall in part based on the success of the Columbus mall, the MacArthur Center mall is similarly facing some struggles just six years after it opened, Marshal said.

Public settings are key to making downtowns work, Marshal added.

"A private shopping mall is not the same thing" as a public downtown setting, he said.

Creating vibrancy

Countering criticism of downtown malls, Pastore said the Columbus mall failed because city leaders worked to undermine it. While they initially supported the mall, Columbus leaders declined to introduce improvements to the neighborhoods surrounding the mall, which were blighted and crime ridden, Pastore said.

Also, local governments in Columbus gave subsidies to help build two suburban malls within 10 miles of the downtown City Centre mall.

Salt Lake City can learn from mistakes made in Columbus, Pastore said.

In Salt Lake City, he said, city leaders should be focused less on what is going to happen on the LDS Church's two blocks and more on how the city can work to spur development, enhance public safety and increase housing density in the area around those two blocks.

While much of Tuesday's symposium focused on the church's mall redevelopment plan, experts also focused on creating vibrant downtowns in general.

To a person, the experts — Pastore, Marshal, Daniel Rosenfeld of Urban Partners, LLC, and Pamela Hamilton, senior vice president of San Diego's Centre City Development Corp. — said downtown housing was the key.

People create vibrancy, they said. No matter how well designed and planned a downtown is, if there are no people it will fail. Many noted they were encouraged that the church's redevelopment plan calls for 900 housing units.

The experts, to a person, also labeled surface-level parking lots as vibrancy killers — and noted Salt Lake City seems to have an abundance of such parking lots. Hamilton said some cities have actually banned surface-level parking lots, and in San Diego the city mandated that all development in the city's core include housing — zoning rules that helped revitalize downtown San Diego.

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E-mail: bsnyder@desnews.com