In the industrial economy people worked in factories. In the services/information economy people worked in office parks. In the creative economy, people are working in downtowns. Rod Stevens of Spinnaker Strategies summarizes this trend quite nicely in The New Urban Workplace.

He mentions the suburbia to city downtown shift of Microsoft and Expedia in Seattle, American Eagle in Pittsburgh, AT&T in Atlanta, and Target in Minneapolis. He also highlights how these companies are recycling

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With a population over 100,000 and a greater population of half a million, Lafayette, Louisiana is a little known small town creative mecca whose residents probably want to keep it that way. What’s their secret? The city’s aptly named Independent sheds some light in their cover story, Cool town. Lafayette is becoming a magnet for the creative class. Here’s why.

Economically, they’re successfully transitioning from the industrial age (oil) to the knowledge age (health care, tourism).

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Just as our evolution to the knowledge economy is providing opportunities to recycle suburbia, as Time Magazine puts it, a less intimidating precedent would be how we’ve recycled manufacturing industrial districts to suit contemporary needs.

The Minneapolis Warehouse District is one of the best examples of recycling warehouses into an entire 50-block retail and entertainment neighborhood, with a core of about 60 historic warehouses (pictured) in a seven-block area. Known as the SoHo of the

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Regarding this cultural and economic transition of communities prioritizing a pedestrian infrastructure rather than an auto one, 15 days ago the entry ‘People over cars’ begins to hit mainstream media stated, “The next domino to fall would be Fast Company Magazine - stay tuned.“ We didn’t have to wait long, and we’re definitely hitting the tipping point when a business magazine like that has a headline like this, Suburbia R.I.P..

Now first of all, this site is not about anti-suburbia,

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It’s a familiar scene - you find housing you can afford near a mass transit line on the outskirts of a city, and the reason it’s affordable is because few people will visit you. There’s no there, there.  For decades, Collingswood, New Jersey, neighborhood of 15,000 just outside of Camden, was just that. It suffered massive downtown vacancies like most other cities, even though it was served by a major transit line to Philadelphia.  It hasn’t helped that many are still averse to living or

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It starts out as a vastly familiar story. As the industrial economy grew and manufacturing jobs moved to the outskirts, many of Wichita, Kansas’ historic downtown buildings were boarded up, with vacancy rates up to 70%. Now an evolution to a knowledge-based economy is bringing people back to the city center, and as we know, the creatives will seek out the natural cultural districts first.

The premiere natural cultural district in Wichita (which may surprise you in that it’s the 51st largest

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That’s ‘Q’ is in ‘quarter’, as in the newly renovated Gateway Quarter for Urban Living in Cincinnati’s once down-and-out Over-The-Rhine neighborhood.

The Over-The-Rhine neighborhood suffered a population loss from 40,000 to under 5000, but the 70-acre, 100-loft, indie-retail-driven Gateway Quarter looks to reverse that trend soon.

Much of the renaissance can be credited to the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC), a nonprofit developer funded by some seriously capitalized

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What do investors think of TODs? (Transit-oriented development) The Wall Street Journal is reporting that “in many cities, the hottest development is taking place along the train lines” and “mass-transit lines are the new frontier in urban development.“ You’d better check out the article, The Little Engine That Could before it gets archived.

The evidence?

- There are 100 TODs in the U.S., with 100 more in the pipeline.*
- By 2030 the number of households near transit stations will rise to 16

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What will the housing market be like 10-20 years from now?

Robert Puentes, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program provides some answers in his presentation, A Review of New Urban Demo-graphics and Impacts on Housing. It’s essentially a slide show displaying key demographics and how they will shape residential development.

As you can see in the first slide on the left, urban downtown populations have grown in the last few decades after declining prior to that. The

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You’ve just seen the study that documents the connection between rising home values and the bohemian index, so what are some examples of such neighborhoods?

BusinessWeek provides a pretty good list (with the help of Zillow) in their recently published, America’s Next Hot Neighborhoods.

Their city neighborhoods with the fastest rising home values yet still affordable are:

Boston: Dorchester, Mount Bowdoin, Grove Hall
Chicago: East Garfield Park, Cicero, Lower West Side
Denver: Civic Center,

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