That’s according to a 2007 Johnson Gardner study, based on 2006 numbers in Portland, Oregon, commissioned by Oregon Metro, as only recently reported on in this recent article, Trendy shops put a shine on home values.

Their study concludes that property values within a block and a half would be affected accordingly by the following businesses:

- Neighborhood theater - 14-30% higher property values. Some positives cited by the study include an increase in pedestrian traffic (safety) at more hours of the day, and the fact that such theaters have no parking which encourages a more local crowd. Neighborhood theaters also tend to play avant-garde, foreign and indie films, which attract more creatives, which then attract higher home values.
- Specialty grocery store - 20% higher property values. One explanation could be that because people will pay a bit of a premium for healthier groceries, they also have the income to pay a premium to live nearby. Then again, who doesn’t want to live within walking distance of their favorite grocery.
- Wine bars - 11-21% higher property values. A quiet third place, something many people wouldn’t mind living near.

Some venues that didn’t help raise property values, and possible reasons:
- Day spas. Such regional destinations often require surface parking.
- Brewpubs. This is probably more attributable to being only a block and a half away, especially if live music is involved. There’s nothing to say they lower property values if not within hearing bands late at night.
- Gourmet bakeries. Early-morning truck traffic.
- CD/record stores. I would suspect home owners and teenagers will never be on the same page

Which venues did you find the most surprising as far as the study results go?

Perhaps too many people buying homes they couldn’t afford wasn’t the problem behind the Wall Street collapse, but a symptom. The real problem may be that there are too many homes out on the market that people could never afford in the first place. In other words, the average U.S. American can’t afford $300,000 for a home, as is the going rate in many cities. So rather than lend out more money to buy homes people can’t afford, that banks can’t back, perhaps the real solution is addressing the lack of supply of homes that the average U.S. citizen can actually buy.

The creatives, aka the renaissance generation are already on it. They’re into ‘not so big’ homes, quality over quantity - the average space/occupant was 290 s.f. in the pre-auto era, 939 s.f. today. They’re into urban and walkable, not suburban/exurban and drive-thrus, and they have a much more international, cosmopolitan viewpoint of housing size - bigger is not better. They know ‘bigger’ requires more maintenance, is more costly to air condition, has a larger carbon footprint and most of all, is much more difficult to keep making payments on simply because bigger costs more.

So, the next time you hear the blame being passed around on who got us into this mess, maybe it’ll be more productive and inspiring to focus on those who are already investing in what may get us out of this mess, like truly attainably-priced green condos in the heart of the city. In fact, we’ve got a number of them being crowdsourced as we speak in Washington DC - the Bearden Arts Building, priced a third less than the lowest price one can buy a new home for in DC.
Image: The 380 s.f. one-bedroom ipad in the UK.

While this site provides you 1400 vignettes on what crowdsource placemaking can create, it doesn’t provide you with the direct means to actually crowdsource these places. That’s no longer the case.

Join the CoolTown Network (see new green button in the right column) and create a new Group to start crowdsourcing the kind of place you’d like to see in your city or neighborhood. Is it a coffeehouse? A coworking site? Attainably-priced lofts? You define the vision, then start attracting people to build up a crowd.

What’s next? Once you build up a following of at least a hundred people also committed to implementing that shared vision; a beta community, we’ll help you find a ‘Sponsor‘, that is, an entrepreneur willing to invest in your group to implement your collective vision. We’ll call it the CoolTown Crowdsourced Placemaking Challenge.

If you need technical support in helping you grow your beta community, you can subscribe to such a service - go to the CoolTown Beta Communities home page and scroll down.

Image: Street in Prague, Czech Republic by ZeHawk.

The online world centers around conversation, via discussion forums, chat rooms, comment threads, Facebook’s ‘Walls’... many of these mediums didn’t exist ten years ago, even five years ago. That’s not difficult to fathom, given that today it doesn’t take more than five minutes to set up an online community with all these things. However, an internet minute is equivalent to a real estate year, so if you’ve subconsciously wondered why walking through your built environment lacks the spontaneity and enthusiasm of surfing the net, that’s because it hasn’t been manifested in the real world… yet.

An initial question is, what would that look like? Virtual discussion forums consist of a regular community of people with like-minded interests that freely converse in a common place. A physical version of that would be presented in two ways:

1. A regular community of people within a physical community that freely converse in a physical public forum, such as a piazza, plaza, courtyard or square, at the center of where they’re most likely to cross paths, such as the center of downtown. However, they need to be provided with a myriad of dining and drinking choices via outdoor tables because food is the one thing that brings people together, and it supports the economic vitality to keep the place vibrant and fresh.

2. A regular community of people with like-minded interests that freely converse in a third place, such as a coffeehouse, cafe, pub, rooftop hangout, with both an ongoing series of events that support those interests which eventually lead to spontaneous encounters in between. It’s the latter that sparks the notion that there’s a real sense of community going on here, and an innate sense of enthusiasm that you can’t get online.

It helps to be social network bilingual in both the virtual and physical world.

How do you see the social dynamics of the virtual world transformed into your physical world?

Image: A cafe-lined square in Freiburg, Germany by Jassy-50.

For those of you who have casually wondered what an auto-oriented street would be like if it were reclaimed by people, for people, Park(ing) Day is an annual step in that direction. Participants in cities around the U.S. and the world ‘park’ themselves in a parking space for the day, paying the meter of course, and make a third place of it.

Founded in 2005 by Rebar, a collaborative group of creatives in San Francisco, it is now sponsored nationally by the Trust for Public Land (TPL). The list of participating cities now numbers over 80 in the U.S. and a few around the world. However, New York City alone had 50 park(ing) spaces throughout the city - which you can see in the video above.

What kind of spaces would you create on Park(ing) Day? What kind of spaces did you see or experience?

In another example of a picture being worth a thousand words, here are three before and after shots of pioneering New York City’s DOT (Department of Transportation) plan to transform auto-oriented corridors into pedestrian places and destinations.

Pearl Street Plaza, Brooklyn (Top) - An asphalt parking lot is now in the middle of a final transition to becoming a restored cobblestone plaza, hosting farmers markets and concerts. Read more about this street-turned-plaza, with wide-angle shot, in this NY Daily News article, Plazas are beauty of a plan. DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said at the time in August 2007, “And it’s just the beginning.“ She’s right, see the last line of this story.

Ninth Avenue at 14th Street (Middle) - See how this Meatpacking District community-lead process began in this 2006 CoolTown entry, A NYC ‘beta community’ to build a piazza.

Willoughby Street Pedestrian Plaza Brooklyn, 2006 (Bottom) - Check out a link to a video of this street’s transformation along with a larger image and description in this previous CoolTown entry, Hey, let’s try it.

This is indeed just the beginning, as the NYC DOT looks to fund at the very least eight more of these in their new NYC Plaza Program.

A year ago we profiled Patricia Martin’s Rengen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer - and What It Means to Your Business, which has helped define the term creatives as far as it’s used on this site. It’s time to check in to see how this second renaissance is coming along via this New York Times interview and a CoolTown perspective.

What is the rengen? That’s nicely defined here, a “a thirty-year swath (20-50 years old) of individuals who are living comtemporaneously”, but more of a psychographic than a demographic of people poised for fundamental change, a major shift in evolution.

What are the signs of a coming renaissance? Massive change, both destructive and monumentally creative: The fall of Wall Street, corporations, automakers, dependence on oil, big bosses… the rise of the internet, entrepreneurs, mass collaboration/you, the green movement, employee teamwork… More specific signs are the wave of ciclovia events sweeping cities around the world, and Manhattan’s program to turn car-oriented streets into pedestrian-only plazas based on community collaboration.

What are the rengen survival skills? Quoting from Patricia, the ability to collaborate, to connect and to create. “They don’t respond to directive. They respond to teaming. Employees need to grasp that during creative brainstorming sessions it’s uncool to feel threatened if someone draws on top of your drawing.“ We’ll see a shift from mentors passively advising mentees, to masters teaching apprentices everything they know. Finally, one of my favorites, is the shift to creative entrepreneurialism, “Rather than waiting 30 years to see if MOMA finds their work worthy, they will shoot a 30-second spot for DDB Needham. Unlike their parents, who would have stayed at the agency, they will use that money to fund their independent documentary.“

Image: Piazza Di Spagna, Rome, Italy by Camillo Miller

First, the definition of bilingual - communicating in two languages fluently, or to further define language, communicating in two different methods of exchanging information fluently. Second, the definition of social network - is the organic gathering of individuals into specific groups; or from wikipedia, “a social structure made of nodes (generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas…“ This can be physical, or virtual.

In the best-selling book, Bowling Alone, author Robert Putnam laments the loss of social groups like bowling leagues and membership clubs. However, if you ask the millennials/gen yers and progressive gen xers, they feel those measures of community aren’t spontaneous and fluid enough in a world where a hundred people who never met can gather in a square at the exact same time, and have a pillow fight. Many stick around in the aftermath and make new friends, strengthen old ones. Think of it as the light-hearted opposite of a community coming together to build a dam of sandbags during a natural disaster. However, how is that these people were able to pillow bond seemingly out of the blue?

They’re bilingual in social networks. That is, they’ve formed virtual groups on platforms like Facebook, Ning or Meetup, and use those to build face-face groups with people of like-minded interests. However, here’s what makes this evolving skill for community building (and crowdsourcing) so effective…

Just like those who are bilingual with spoken languages, those who are bilingual in social networks can flow in between the virtual and physical world seamlessly, fluently, without even thinking about it.

One example of a bilingual social network is CreativesDC, a virtual social network of 300 creatives (and growing) in Washington DC that meet up face-face once a month to network, experience interactive performances, and introduced to other social networks and crowdsourcing opportunities.

Do you see the value of jumping between the two worlds with ease? Which social network platform do you use, and why? Comment/vote below…

Update: Six days later, a Facebook pillow fight.

Women make up a majority of those who start their own businesses, so it was a matter of time before that trend intersected with the coworking movement. It also helps to know that top women business builders are looking for creative and affordable environs.

Thus, we have In Good Company (IGC), an affordable/high-value coworking space in the creative capital of Manhattan (Flatiron district) - for women only. It has all the amenities you’d expect in a coworking site, like a conference room, open plan workspaces and wi-fi, priced very attainably from $300/year to $375/month for a workspace. However, meeting room and conference room access are $20/$50 hour respectively, though perhaps that would cut down on the productivity-killing habit of relying on too many meetings

Some of the features that are perhaps more oriented to women:
- IGC’s many ongoing events don’t necessarily cater to women per se (outside of the bi-monthly mom/business owner lunch), but they’re presented by successful women in business.
- Effective spaces for casual, more intimate conversation are provided, from small meeting rooms to a welcoming lounge area.
- IGC emphasizes a supportive structure for building relationships. Cocktail minglers and salon forums allow informal networking, formal bi-monthly business support groups encourage members to share their challenges and achievements, and on-site consulting provides targeted assistance.

Comment below if you’re interested in starting up a women’s coworking space in your city.

Parking for cars with every new building has been the law since the 1950s (complementing the 1956 Highway Act which legislated our interstate system), not surprisingly resulting in what are easily recognized post-1950s developments and buildings - they look like cars are the priority. The 2000s mark the era where cities have decided that the great experiment is over, and are now focusing on pedestrians and people once again. Where to start? Removing parking requirements for every new building.

Milwaukee began easing parking requirements in the 1990s while San Francisco and London changed minimum parking requirements into maximums decades ago. Washington DC is looking to eliminate parking requirements altogether, with some exceptions. This would be a significant asset to a green condo development in Washington DC’s H Street neighborhood that I’m helping to crowdsource. Why? Half the units couldn’t be built if parking were required because there simply isn’t enough room, which means the developer has to charge higher prices to make up for the loss in volume, which is unfortunate especially when you consider that many of DC’s homebuyers don’t even have cars.

Here’s a vignette of this trend in Milwaukee, quoting its former mayor in an AP article, “...a lot sat vacant for decades after a historic building burned down. The required parking made it unfeasible to build anything new there. After officials relaxed the parking requirement, a thriving restaurant sprang up.“

Image: Amsterdam by hunting ghosts.