LEWISTON — Real estate developer Bernice Radle told a familiar story to the crowd of Central Maine developers and urban planners Thursday morning in Bates Mill complex.

Radle talked about carving out an entrepreneurial niche in a failing rust-belt city that had lost half of its population to economic recession — a city with so many vacant buildings, city officials had started to demolish many of them.

But Radle was talking about Buffalo, N.Y. — not Lewiston-Auburn, or even Biddeford or Saco or any of the other Maine cities that find themselves in a similar situation.

The way to make it, especially as a 20-something developer with some social media-savvy, is to jump right in.

“My number one thing is to cannonball right in,” she said. “Don’t just dip your toe in the water. If you really want to buy a building, just buy it. All those buildings need stewards.”

Radle was the featured morning speaker at the 2016 Build Maine Conference. The conference drew 250 developers, urban planners and municipal officials from around Maine for a day devoted to modern urban planning, economic development and methods designed to revitalize downtown city life.

Radle said that has been her aim since she started at the age of 21. She’s truly in love with her home city of Buffalo and owns her own development company, Buffalove Development. She also founded Buffalo’s Young Preservationist group and was recently named tp the city’s zoning board of appeals. She was even the subject of a 2014 HGTV series, “American Rehab: Buffalo.”

“People are actually believing again that Buffalo can turn around, for the first time in 60 years,” she said. “All of our legacy cities are dealing with that: Cleveland and Detroit and Pittsburgh and all of those types of cities.”

One of the ways it turns around, she said, is through the work of small-scale developers like her. It requires her to get to know the neighborhood and the people she’ll be working with. She encouraged everyone to give it a try.

“It doesn’t matter if you are five-foot-one and a 25-year-old woman or a 75-year-old man who has a little bit of extra money — you can become a small-scale developer,” she said. “You can invest in your community. You can do art and public spaces and community gardens. You can buy, renovate and rent and invest in your community over and over again. And it will pay off.”

This is the third time the Bates Mill has hosted the conference since it started in the fall of 2014. It focuses on better ways to invest in the community.

Portland-centric developer Peter Bass, another morning speaker, said it’s up to the locals to do it, both people and officials.

“Localism is a really good thing,” said Bass, president of Random Orbit Inc., a Portland development company. “We have a real serious problem with our federal government. It’s kind of failing us and nothing is getting done. You can say the same thing about state government. Nothing is getting done and that’s true all over the country, not just here.”

He said these conditons put the onus on local municipalities.

“We don’t have anybody to pass the buck to if we don’t solve our problems,” he said. 

Maine Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner Jon Nass touted the city of Portland’s efforts to bring international trade back to Maine, especially the deal that brought Icelandic shipping company Eimskip back to Portland.

“It’s a big deal,” Nass said. “With Eimskip’s connections, we have a direct connection to Rotterdam, which gets us anywhere in the world.”

Nass said that deal happened because Portland and state developers and officials figured out what the company needed, and then set out to give it to them.

“The notion that if you build it they will come doesn’t work,” Nass said. “Occasionally, it does. Occasionally, you get lucky. But a smarter way to do it is to work with the market, discover what the needs are, discover what products are moving and then invest in ways that can impact that.”

The daylong conference included a demonstration project that converted the speedy, two-lane Canal Street into a calmer, mixed-use urban space — complete with pop-up parks, food trucks and street-side dining.

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