Talk to any urban real estate developer and you’ll quickly discover their goal is to sell their units at the highest price possible for whatever property or site they’re developing, which is why you often see the adjective ‘luxury’ attached. Fortunately, the urban luxury housing market is nearing saturation at the same time a young generation of developers are emerging that empathize with their peers who can’t afford what boomers can, yet still want quality construction. I guess you can call

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This is how to do it.  Think of the micro compact home (pictured), mc-h for short, as the Smart car of homes.  For more practical living, check out the MINI Cooper of homes.

As you can see by this graphic, household size is dropping dramatically, and with that comes a migration back to city centers from suburbia where people no longer need all that space (and isolation). As the hyper-popularity of places like London, Paris and Manhattan make it near impossible to find affordable places to

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Real is in. Fake is out. We profiled the rise of authenticity over a year ago, and how it applies to towns. Now Fast Company magazine helps answer the question of what it takes to be authentic with the following four primary elements of being real:

A sense of place - You either leverage your brand through replication (ie Starbucks) or the community (local popular coffeehouse). Only the latter is considered genuine by the locals.

A strong point of view - You’d be hard pressed to find a

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People know a home with a large tree in front of it sells for more (nearly 1% more according to a 1988 study in Athens, GA), but what are the collective trees in a city worth and what’s their return on investment?

New York City knows, according to this NY Times article. Their trees provide an annual benefit of about $122 million, receiving a return on investment of $5.60 in benefits for every dollar spent on trees.

Dollar values are assigned based on:
- How much carbon the trees absorb that

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A lot of businesses like to call themselves triple bottom line (economic, environmental and social accounting), but one third place that’s 3BL without question is the White Dog Cafe in downtown Philadelphia.

The evidence starts with its extraordinary owner, Judy Wicks, who not only founded White Dog, but she is also the co-founder of the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and founder of the local Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN). You can

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How does one combine history with contemporary culture while revitalizing a financially neglected commercial district?  Check out Washington DC’s Rock & Roll Hotel in the up and coming H Street Corridor.

The live music nightclub’s website best frames its historical context: “Places like The Savoy in London and the Inter-Continental Hotel in Paris have established themselves throughout their history as bedrocks of prestige and luxury service. The Chelsea in New York City, originally built in

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We know more than enough stories of creatives being priced out of the neighborhoods they helped revitalize, but what about examples of how they’re being protected?

Bookmark this page, and I’ll keep it updated with city programs to support creatives. The list to date:

City-led programs:

-  Portland, OR amended its housing regulations to enable artists to live, work and sell under one roof.

- Toledo, OH put in place tax-abatement incentives for developers who lease space to artists and

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Car sharing has become standard equipment in many cities, but what about those of us who want something even quicker, less expensive, more convenient and healthier? Well then, there’s Cyclocity.

First of all, the caveat is that you have to live in Lyon (France’s third-largest city) or Paris (coming this summer), but this is just a sign of things to come. Perhaps it’s easiest to compare how it is, and isn’t similar to car sharing:

How it’s like car sharing:
- There are permanent parking

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Why is there such a frenzy to score a Trader Joe’s in one’s neighborhood? To sum it up with a quote sourced amid the hysteria of NYC’s first Trader Joe’s ever last year (pictured above), “It’s kind of like the Grateful Dead of supermarkets.“

Yes, it’s a chain, but for the neighborhood that isn’t able to organize its own co-op supermarket, finds Whole Foods too pricey for normal shopping, detests the suburban chains, and can’t get everything it wants from the smaller neighborhood groceries,

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Where do you put your city’s most innovative companies?

Well, in Greenville, SC, the answer is easy. They’d obviously go into the Innovate Building.

What makes it worthy of the name, and more importantly, the companies?

The loft-like building is located downtown in a former textile mill built in 1908 with hand-molded brick, exposed timbers, and stunning solid maple flooring, yet it features state-of-the-art audio and visual communications systems; open, flexible floor plans; and daylighting

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Veterans of this website know that a beta community is a group of future tenants/patrons formally co-designing a cool place with a partnered developer. However, there are many definitions of what a ‘place’ is, so here are the four types places and their associated beta communities:

1. VIBE Beta Communities - For third places, establishing a community of patrons to co-design and co-invest (via sweat equity) in those businesses. Click here for a current example in Washington DC.

2. Building

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Ever wondered what cities really were the most green

? Country Home magazine ranked 379 metropolitan areas in their Best Green Cities in America report.

Here are their top 10 green cities, based on air and watershed quality, mass transit use, power use and number of organic producers and farmers’ markets:

1. Burlington, VT (pictured) - It definitely deserves the top nod. Among it’s winning attributes:
- A program collects food scraps from restaurants, supermarkets and food manufacturers and

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There’s a lot of talk that Budapest is the ‘next Prague’, so while I have yet to frequent this up and coming Hungarian city on the Danube, I thought I’d try and identify the favorite third place for locals...

It could very well be a hang-out called Szoda (Soda).

Some of the words associated with this cafe/bar:  funky, bohemian, artsy, retro, shabby chic, young, good beer/coffee, good prices, danceable music, very friendly, down to earth, relaxed, free soda... note the Japanese Manga cartoons

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Yours would if you worked at Red Bull.

Last week, in How ‘play’ is going to shape our communities, we touched on the growing interest in using the motivational methodology behind ‘play‘ as the motivational infrastructure behind both education and work. Hey, if it works I’m all for it - anything other than sitting in a room with 100 other people being lectured to death.

I’m not sure the Red Bull headquarters is what they had in mind, but I can guarantee you this - there are a lot more people

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Once one of the largest cities in Silicon Valley between San Francisco and San Jose, most people today have never heard of Redwood City, much less visited there for any particular reason. If current plans stay on track, that’ll soon change.

Public and private leaders recognized that their city was being left in the dust as the neighboring towns of Mountain View and Palo Alto initiated dramatic investment in their downtowns. Shrewdly, they brought in the same urban design group that planned

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What are the kitchen trends of the near future? Who better to ask than Susan Serra, renowned CKD (Certified Kitchen Designer) and editor of one of the best/only kitchen design blogs around… and yes, she has a Manhattan apartment, so she knows a thing or two about creative urban.

From her blog, her answer starts out with, “It used to be that a trend would be so blindly followed, really blindly. I see the internet as being responsible for this sea change.

She sees images of people’s own

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Continuing our look at the Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes’  report, A Review of New Urban Demographics and Impacts on Housing...

So what are the key drivers leading to the downtown population surge profiled in the previous entry, which had been decreasing prior to the 1990s?

Look at the net changes in household types over the last 25 years - 11.8M singles vs 1.4M families with kids, the latter of which only represents 4.5% of all net new households in that time period.

Some other

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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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Based on this National Geographic map outlining concentrations of single women and single men, I’d venture to say yes.

It’s apparent on the map that men prefer to locate in cities built in the post-1940s auto-oriented era, while women prefer the more walkable, pre-1940s neighborhoods.  It should be no surprise, given the studies that document what women prefer in their neighborhoods and what attributes make for a safe city (see findings at links). So, while the evidence isn’t new, presenting

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“Schools aren’t preparing students for jobs of the 21st Century.“ That’s the concern of John Seely Brown, a renowned leader in organizational learning, and Doug Thomas, professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and editor of Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media.

The same could be said that our current culture and business environment isn’t preparing us for communities of the 21st Century, at least not cool towns.

Why not?  Much of our current learning - at work or at

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What to do when your city is devastated by Hurricane Katrina?  The government and city leaders of Long Beach, Mississippi, a city of 17,000 people, allowed its citizens to reshape the city’s future into a postcard portal, facilitated by an urban design firm familiar with the creative class, Ayers Saint Gross.

The result is the Long Beach Mississippi Concept Plan, a regional master plan the recently received a CNU Charter Award for New Urbanism, mentioned in the previous entry.

The public

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