Cars drive past the vacant National Auto building at Main and Wood Streets in Lansdale in June 2022. Photo by Dan Sokil | The Reporter.
Town touts tool during talks on empty properties
An online map could help Lansdale and its officials get a clearer picture of how to turn around downtown.
Council members saw a preview in June of an updated borough map, showing empty properties around town, and what could fit to fill them.
“They were able to populate a lot of info on here, with relation to vacant and unrented buildings,” said Director of Community Development Jason Van Dame.
Borough council and several of its committees have discussed vacancies on Main street for several years, particularly after the closures of the downtown Rite Aid and Wells Fargo branches in summer 2023, the longtime Wilson’s Hardware that closed in 2022, and the former National Auto store at Main and Wood Streets that’s been empty since 2017. In that time, the code committee has discussed a possible vacancy tax or fee meant to spur owners of vacancies to submit plans or sell, and several businesses have added new wayfinding signs on Main Street pointing possible customers their way.
On June 5 council’s code committee saw the latest tool that could help with those talks: a color-coded borough map showing where those vacancies are located around town, alongside essential info about each property. Clicking on each property shows the zoning of the site and square footage available, with current tenants listed for larger properties.
401 West Main Street in Lansdale, the long-vacant former National Auto building, is highlighted on an online map of vacant properties.“You have three different colors on here: blue, red, yellow. Red is a fully vacant building or structure. Blue is a building or structure that has space available in it, and yellow is projects that are coming soon,” Van Dame said.
“So there are permits on hand for, either a business to come in, or work to get done to get it ready for occupancy,” he said.
Lansdale residents and code enforcement committee members listen as borough Director of Community Development Jason Van Dame, right, shows an online map of vacant properties during the June 5, 2024 code committee meeting.As he spoke, Van Dame pulled up the map on a screen in the committee’s meeting room, then zoomed in on various properties around town, including a retail space on the Madison Parking Lot where one business is now operating, and Van Dame said he had “a recent conversation” about more possible soon. Publicly available on the borough’s online map page, the vacant property map can also be layered with current zoning, and overlays such as the borough’s recently expanded downtown business district, plus contact info for landlords or owners.
“You can get responsible party info, and call them up, and go get a lease out of it,” Van Dame said.
Clicking on each property on the map brought up specifics on each, such as the much-discussed former Wells Fargo bank on Main Street that shuttered last summer, which the code director said is now partially back in business.
A car passes the Wells Fargo bank building on Main Street in Lansdale in July 2023.“The bank is sold: it has one tenant in the building, a laboratory business is in the building and operating. It’s a professional medical office, so they do sampling of biological products, to look for cancer markers,” he said. “They’re looking for tenants for the lobby area, and the second floor.”
Zooming in around the town, code committee members asked for updates on various other notable vacancies: the former Wilson’s Hardware on Main Street has “intentions to redevelop it,” while the former Wister’s Barbecue at 321-323 Main may have news from the owner “when they are ready” to announce new occupants, he said. The former National Auto store at Main and Wood Streets has had “some interest, but no plans submitted,” and the much-discussed former Third and Walnut pub site at 43 W. Third Street, where a six story and roughly 200-unit apartment building was approved in 2017, “there’s actually been recent activity on the project that was approved, so we’ll see where that goes,” Van Dame said.
A sign with leasing information is seen in the window of the former National Auto building at Main and Wood streets in Lansdale in March 2022.Councilman Michael Yetter asked how often that map and the property info would be updated, and Van Dame said “the info, for the most part, is very recent,” and borough staff are updating the map as often as they can. The data in the map is manually updated by staff, and Mayor Garry Herbert said he hopes staff can find ways to automate other data inputs like use and occupancy permit approvals to go into the map as they’re granted.
Code committee chairwoman Rafia Razzak asked if the map could be updated to show how long the properties had been vacant, suggesting different shades of colors based on how long they had been empty. Van Dame said staff would work on doing so, but may not always have exact data of when a business closes.
“It may be hard to pinpoint an exact date. Businesses don’t always come to us and say ‘Hey, can we go now?'” he said.
Herbert added that having the map updated by staff, and visible to the public, would help both have a clearer picture of the vacancies around town, how long some of them have taken to fill, and could give perspective to whether talk of an abandoned Main Street is overblown.
“So that we understand what this looks like. And so that we’re not doing it from Jason’s memory, of the last time there was a business in that building,” he said.
Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on July 17 with the code committee meeting at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 7, both at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine Street; for more information visit www.Lansdale.org.
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