The Vacant Windows Theory

From Ladders to Foot Traffic, How Cities Really Grow

The scent of eucalyptus and lavender drifted through Fire Doll Studio as guests leaned over pitchers of molten soy wax. Laughter and small talk filled the room, punctuated by the occasional question for owner Kayla Brown: “Does this color set darker?” “How long before it’s ready to light?” Sunlight poured through the front windows, where Main Street traffic hummed in the warm air.

It felt like a creative workshop among friends, until you noticed the name tags. The candle-makers were mayors from across Illinois, in town for the Illinois Municipal League summer board meeting, led by Champaign’s own mayor, Deb Feinen.

The questions may have been small, but the agenda wasn’t. Over two days in July, the group ate at Neil St. Blues, dined on Prairie Fruits Farm fare at The Venue CU, and toured the Champaign County African American Heritage Trail. It looked like a civic field trip. In reality, it was a case study: What happens when a city bets on many small places that amplify one another, instead of one big project that promises everything at once? 

That choice shows up most clearly at the street level. A block stitched together by glowing storefronts builds its own momentum. A block dotted with dark glass drags everything down. This is the Vacant Windows Theory: empty windows signal decline and accelerate it; lit windows flip the cycle, sparking safety, foot traffic, and opportunity.

Champaign’s most reliable path to prosperity isn’t at the edge of town. It’s in walkable, mixed-use districts where policy clears the way, small bets can take root, and the glow from one window makes the next more likely to shine. The city we want is built candle by candle, transaction by transaction. Policy either makes that easier, or it doesn’t. Policy can seem abstract until you watch it shape a business. Few stories show that better than the rise of Fire Doll Studio.

The Ladder

Kayla Brown didn’t set out to be a civic ambassador. More than a decade ago, while juggling nursing school and music, she began making candles at home because store-bought ones triggered her asthma. Farmers’ markets led to holiday fairs; a website to curbside pickup; a tiny studio to her first downtown storefront. 

In time, she moved into a larger Main Street space, the former Skins ’n Tins drum shop, a fixture from 1989 to 2020. For three decades it sold the tools of performance. Now it hosts the performance itself: candle-making workshops, live concerts, even yoga by candlelight. The store is part retail, part gathering place, always stitched together by scent and sound.

Fire Doll’s progression is a ladder. Each step was inexpensive enough to try and reversible enough to survive a bad month. A ladder like that depends on affordable space, flexible rules, and neighbors close enough to walk. Remove a rung and the climb becomes a jump. Add rungs and more neighbors can grab hold. The return is both revenue and locally rooted wealth: owners who live upstairs or around the corner, profits that recirculate, a main street that feels like a conversation rather than a catalog.

“To get good foot traffic, people need to feel safe and welcome,” Brown says. “If they don’t, they just stay away.”

Fire Doll grew step by step because nothing stood in the way of the next move. Policy can close off progress or open new paths forward. Champaign’s shift on parking did the latter.

The change sounded technical, but proved transformative. In 2015, Champaign eliminated minimum parking requirements downtown, in midtown, and in campustown.

In the seven years that followed, 43 major developments took advantage of the change. Collectively, they built less than half the parking the old rules demanded—avoiding 2,250 empty stalls. Eight projects built none at all. Instead, developers shared supply. Customers parked once and made a night of it.

The savings were enormous: roughly $45 million that could flow into housing, retail, and design instead of asphalt. The ripple effects were visible. Residential density surged nearly 80% in affected areas, even as occupancy rates stayed high citywide. Local shops and restaurants gained a steady base of customers. And compact, mixed-use blocks delivered more tax revenue per acre while costing less to maintain than sprawling single-use developments.

This isn’t anti-car. It’s pro-efficiency. Every dollar not buried in a parking lot can go into a door that opens, an apartment upstairs, or an adaptable kitchen that meets code. And nothing stops a developer from adding more parking if they choose.

Parking reform freed up space and resources. But the next question is what fills that space, and how does it feel to walk through it.

The Walkable Life

Walkability isn’t a vibe; it’s how places are assembled. The distance between doors, the mix of what’s inside them, and the way streets invite people to linger all add up to either friction or flow. This doesn’t have to be guesswork. It’s a pattern you can build.

Start with active storefronts. A street with lights in the windows and reasons to linger is safer, richer, and more interesting than one with papered glass. When ground floors are full, the sidewalk becomes marketing. People pass, look in, and say, We should try that. When they’re empty, the chain breaks.

Mix uses. Apartments over shops are at once charming, a built-in customer base, a 24-hour neighborhood watch, and a fiscal strategy. Without enough residents within a ten-minute walk, retail is roulette. With enough of these residents, places become habits: coffee on Tuesdays, a show on Thursdays, dinner on the way home. And why stop at just downtown? Imagine walking a block to a Hopscotch in your own neighborhood. Right now, that would be illegal in most of Champaign.

Shrink your craters. Surface parking lots dissolve street life and stretch the distance between destinations. You don’t have to erase them, only stop digging new ones.

Program the public realm. A downtown plaza with swings, vendor stalls, and a small stage isn’t Disneyland, but it can stitch together daily life. During events like Friday Night Live and Toast to Taylor Street, bands on the corner and pop-ups under string lights bring first-timers downtown. First-timers can become regulars.

“When the street is full of people, everything changes,” Brown says. “It’s safer, it’s more inviting, and people wander into shops they’ve never noticed before.”

Streets full of people change everything, but only if the buildings around them can adapt. That’s why the next question isn’t just how we walk, but how we build. And here, the contrast between small bets and big projects matters.

Small Bets and Vacancies

Large developments aren’t villains, but they’re fragile. When a city bets on a single complex project, timelines stretch, incentives swell, and political oxygen disappears. If it stalls, the city carries the risk. If it succeeds, much of the upside is already spoken for.

Small bets work differently. They spread risk and invite participation. Take Plant Mode. Before it became a destination, it was a test: first plants out of an apartment, then a table at farmers’ markets, then a storefront layered with ferns and records. Its proprietor, Matthis Helmick, built loyalty step by step before committing to a permanent space. The shop feels like time travel with greenery spilling over vinyl crates, jazz on the turntable. It’s half store, half experience. A small bet that worked created the conditions for the next one.

Policy can accelerate that loop. Streamline permits for hybrid ground-floor uses. Support adaptive reuse. Encourage pop-ups that lower the cost of trying. In a city full of experiments, some will fail. But the ones that succeed carry momentum and make their neighbors more likely to succeed too.

Brown sees that multiplier effect daily. “When people come in for a workshop, they don’t just make a candle — they make a night of it,” she says. “They eat nearby, they walk around. It’s good for all of us.” 

Every additional reason to visit downtown strengthens the businesses around it.

But the same loop works in reverse. Vacant Windows Theory says a dark window does more than sit idle—it tugs on the block, thinning foot traffic, dimming safety, and lowering the odds for the next shop. Walk the blocks between Neil and Walnut and you see the pattern: some storefronts glow, others sit dark for months. Vacancy is not neutral; it’s negative feedback. The longer a window stays empty, the more it drags its neighbors down.

“Vacancies have definitely gotten worse,” Brown says. “Our building sat empty for three years. Destihl was empty for years, too. Opening a business is expensive—our buildout ended up triple the original quote. The first year is so tough.”

Some cities counter this with modest tools: low-interest buildout loans, temporary-use permits, white-box grants that get spaces into rentable condition. Vacancy fees and registries can nudge landlords to activate stubborn storefronts. Small levers like these can flip a dark window into a bright contributor to the street.

Cities can’t will a store into existence, but they can improve the odds. The goal is simple: shorten the gap between idea and open door.

Champaign offers some programs, but there is room for more creativity. The city doesn’t need to pick winners and losers. It just needs to lower barriers, keep spaces affordable, and design for foot traffic that benefits us all. Because when the lights in one window stay on, the benefits ripple outward. That’s what shared prosperity really looks like.

Shared Light, Shared Prosperity

You don’t have to love planning jargon to love this model.

If you’re fiscally conservative, look at the bottom line: stronger tax base per acre, lower long-term maintenance, money redirected from asphalt to productive square footage. A thousand independent decisions allocate capital locally better than one deal negotiated in a back room.

If you care about safety and community, the benefits are intuitive: more eyes on the street at more hours, places where teenagers can linger without being in trouble, a downtown with regulars as well as visitors.

If your priority is opportunity, ladders beat lotteries. The person with a cottage-industry side hustle becomes the person with employees. The person behind the counter becomes the person on the lease. And because the rungs are closer together, the ladder is open to more people: first-time owners, immigrant entrepreneurs, women- and minority-led businesses. Walkability and mixed use multiply the number of people who can afford to take a manageable risk.

The mayors didn’t need a slide deck to see it. They poured candles in the afternoon, and by evening some had wandered into a concert, grabbed a snack on the way, or talked policy over a beer. Crucially, they didn’t have to get back in a car between each step. That’s the flywheel: once you’re out, you stay out. One yes leads to the next.

There’s a lesson in their itinerary. Champaign already has the skeleton of something resilient: a pattern of small places in close proximity, supported by policies that understand how those places work. The task now is simple, if not easy.

Keep the rungs sturdy: flexible codes, fair fees, a permitting culture that says, let’s try it.

Keep the walk short: fill the gaps where vacancies cluster — downtown, midtown, even the long-desired revitalization of Country Fair Drive. Increase the supply of nearby housing.

Keep the savings productive: avoid unneeded parking, and spend instead on buildings that make the street better: dignified architecture, durable interiors, infrastructure that supports food service.

Keep the bets small and many: advance meaningful incremental development, ease entry for first-time tenants, and let the market discover the mixes that make people say, Only here.

Above all, aim for a network, not a trophy. A city built on small, walkable bets doesn’t make the evening news all at once. It makes a thousand evenings locally. It gives a student a reason to stay after graduation and a retiree a reason to walk after dinner. It gives a mayor from three counties over a story to take home.

Cities don’t change in a headline. They change block by block, as small bets spread. One shop sparks another until the street feels alive. The task isn’t to chase a spotlight but to multiply small lights until vacant windows are rare and the whole neighborhood glows brighter.

Jared Fritz is a Champaign resident and a lead member of CUrbanism Club. You can follow Jared on Twitter, Bluesky, Substack and LinkedIn.

He can be reached at jaredfritz1@gmail.com

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