We all know the economy needs jobs. Not industrial economy jobs, which we’re transitioning away from, but knowledge economy jobs. But where did the Apples, Microsofts and HPs that fuel today’s economy come from? That’s right, startups.
Our entry Gazelles + Economic Gardening = Prosperity highlighted this very trend back in 2003. In 2007, we posted how every neighborhood needs a coworking space. Today we’re in a jobs crisis. The time is right to converge these two trends.
First, Blake
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Coworking
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Economic Gardening |
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Can you say $675 a month to rent your very own newly renovated residence in an up-and-coming neighborhood within a vibrant city? That’s affordable to someone with a $25,000/year salary.
Mini-condos on the rise in walkable urban areas, and developers in Vancouver, Canada agree, announcing thirty 270 s.f. units to be completed in March 2011.
Apparently having City support for mini-residences is a new thing, “We took a position against these kinds of units 20 years ago, but times have changed.
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Attainability
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Housing & Lofts |
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For any city taking transit seriously (or not seriously), the video above is a must-see if they care to relate to emerging generations and grow.
The auto industry spends $20 billion in advertising in California alone. The question posed in the video above is, what would happen if the same kind of money was spent on transit? Or perhaps a better question is, what if mass transit was not only presented as sexy as cars are, but as cool as the progressive, open-minded, creative people who use …
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Mobility |
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Why is it that the vast majority of new development is at an institutional scale, and we don’t see human-scaled fine-grained urban fabric, the kind that makes historic neighborhoods so desirable? Well, it’s mainly because the vast majority of real estate development investment dollars come from institutional investors, such as pension funds, insurance companies, Wall Street…
As you can see in the long tail diagram above, institutional investors aren’t interested in development projects
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Investment |
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One of those ‘I wish we had one in my neighborhood’ urban destinations of creatives is the outdoor cafe walk. The Rue des Bouchers (butcher’s street, historically) - Beenhouwersstraat in Brussels, Belgium is one of the most picturesque and popular in Europe.
For several blocks, you’ll find restaurant after restaurant featuring outdoor seating. What makes this area so inviting?
- The streets are narrow and winding, so you feel like you’re in an outdoor room rather than a long corridor.
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Outdoor Cafe Districts |
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From a creative economy point of view, are towns, cities and even regions not within a ‘mega-region’ (10 to 50 million people) not worth investing significantly in?
From the Prospect article, Ruse of the Creative Class, responding to the premise behind economist Richard Florida’s upcoming book, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity,
In a warm-up to his next book, Florida has been arguing that the recession has so decimated many cities and regions
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Economic Gardening |
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