Tag Archives: downtowns

NYT on wealthy suburbanites moving back to the city

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Who is buying those expensive downtown condos in places like New York or Chicago? One article suggests it is wealthy suburbanites:

Like Dr. Fader, who lives in Bryn Mawr, west of Philadelphia, most of these new high-end buyers are coming from the suburbs, developers say. This is a group that loves its mansions and large homes but is finally, not so reluctantly, trading them in for high-end city adventure.

“Things just lined up in the last few years,” said Patrick L. Phillips, the global chief executive of the Urban Land Institute, a research organization in Washington. “The peak of the baby boom is right around 60 and these wealthy folks have a lot of embedded equity in their homes. They have the wherewithal to move into something with space in the city.”

And cities have prepared for people with money, at least in their downtowns, Mr. Phillips said. They have concentrated theaters, arenas, upscale shopping and refurbished or new parks and museums there.

Two questions come to mind:

  1. Just how many people are doing this? How many people could afford such a move? The key here is that these people are already living in expensive suburbs and have all sorts of housing options.
  2. What happens to other parts of the city where there is less money to be made for developers and builders? Cities like to trumpet new buildings in their downtowns and the growth of cultural and entertainment options. But, these are not necessarily available to everyone.

The revival of big city downtowns not about recreating economic hubs?

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Joel Kotkin suggests revived downtowns of big American cities aren’t exactly bringing back the old days where they served as economic hubs:

Instead what’s emerging is a very different conceptualization of downtown, as a residential alternative that appeals to the young and childless couples, and that is not so much a dominant economic hub, but one of numerous poles in the metropolitan archipelago, usually with an outsized presence of financial institutions, government offices and business service firms…

The better numbers reflect then not a mass “back to the city” movement but an uptick in the market appeal of city centers. And it’s unlikely that the old urban cores will ever come close to recovering the economic preeminence they once enjoyed. In American Community Survey data from 2006-08, the central business district of the New York metro area was the only one across the country that accounted for over 20% of regional employment; downtown’s share topped 10% in just six other metro areas: Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., Richmond, Chicago and Hartford. This contrasts with the kind of employment dominance seen in the 1950s when Manhattan’s commercial core accounted for more than 35% of employment in the New York area. Of course, the decline is a natural outgrowth of the massive physical expansion of the New York area during the past half century, a pattern seen in other major regions.

From 2000 to 2010, the share of jobs dropped somewhat in the nation’s biggest urban cores, but employment declined far more in the inner ring suburbs, according to an analysis by demographer Wendell Cox. In contrast the fastest job growth was in suburban and exurban areas, paralleling their gains in population. This has become clearer since the recession ended; the consultancy Costar notes between 2012 and 2013 office absorption grew quicker in the suburbs than the core, accounting for 87% of new office demand. Overall suburbs account for nearly 75% of all office space in our metropolitan areas…

This resurgence in L.A., and elsewhere, is no mean accomplishment, but it also does not constitute sea-change in fundamental economic geography. Downtowns are back, but more as a lifestyle option than as a dominant feature of the metropolitan landscape.

Could big city downtowns be more urban lifestyle centers? Compared to suburbs, these downtowns offer more cultural options: museums, large urban parks, restaurants, theaters, non big box shopping. Suburbs have more cultural options than they did in the past – and the stereotypes that all suburbs were bedroom suburbs with no other activities was never true – but cities offer a higher concentration. And could city condos be a clear status symbol of today’s upper-middle or upper class?

Another piece of data that might help here are reverse commuting patterns. Looking at these downtown census tracts and blocks, how many residents work nearby or in the city compared to past decades?

Suburbs looking for ways to lure young adults back from cities

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If young adults are going to the big city and staying in increasing numbers, how can suburbs get them back?

Demographers and politicians are scratching their heads over the change and have come up with conflicting theories. And some suburban towns are trying to make themselves more alluring to young residents, building apartment complexes, concert venues, bicycle lanes and more exotic restaurants…

Some suburbs are working diligently to find ways to hold onto their young. In the past decade, Westbury, N.Y., has built a total of 850 apartments — condos, co-ops and rentals — near the train station, a hefty amount for a village of 15,000 people. Late last year it unveiled a new concert venue, the Space at Westbury, that books performers like Steve Earle, Tracy Morgan and Patti Smith.

Long Beach, N.Y., with a year-round population of 33,000, has also been refreshing its downtown near the train station over the last couple of decades. The city has provided incentives to spruce up signage and facades, remodeled pavements and crosswalks, and provided more parking. A smorgasbord of ethnic restaurants flowered on Park Avenue, the main street…

Thomas R. Suozzi, in his unsuccessful campaign to reclaim his former position as Nassau County executive last year, held up Long Beach, Westbury and Rockville Centre as examples of municipalities that had succeeded in drawing young people with apartments, job-rich office buildings, restaurants and attractions, like Long Beach’s refurbished boardwalk. Unless downtowns become livelier, he said, the island’s “long-term sustainability” will be hurt because new businesses will not locate in places where they cannot attract young professionals.

This story should make New Urbanists happy. Because cities are attracting young adults with cultural amenities and jobs, suburbs have to respond with their own amenities. Simply existing as a bedroom community won’t cut it for attracting younger residents who want competitive housing prices as well as things to do. By appealing to these residents, suburbs can also win in two ways. First, their efforts to bring in more restaurants, stores, and cultural opportunities can help diversify their tax base. New commercial establishments and festivals help bring in visitors as well as residents who spend money. Second, these moves may also help make their downtowns and neighborhoods denser. This limits residents’ reliance on cars and makes streets more pedestrian friendly.

Of course, many of these suburbs will find it difficult to compete with (1) the big city and (2) other suburbs. Popular tactics in recent years across suburbs include transit oriented development involving condos and amenities near railroads or other mass transit and trying to build a more vibrant downtown around restaurants and small but unique shops.

The past importance of movie theaters to suburban downtowns and the difficulty of reviving them today

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The downtown movie theater was once an important part of suburbs but a number of these theaters have been difficult to revive in recent years:

Theater stories abound in the suburbs. The lavishly restored Paramount Theater in Aurora offers Broadway plays and big-name musical acts. The Arcada Theatre in St. Charles is another success story. Others — including the Wheaton Grand, Des Plaines Theater and Clearwater Theater in West Dundee — face uncertain futures after opening and closing multiple times in recent years…

Main Street theaters became popular in the late 1920s, when film was just emerging, Fosbrink said. Their construction boomed through the late 1930s and 1940s, particularly as suburbs took hold.

“Planning to have a theater in your town, or an opera house or something (for entertainment) was just as important as planning a city hall or fire station,” he said…

“People at this point in time are paying a lot more attention to how a theater can be a catalyst for economic development in a downtown business district,” Fosbrink said. “Theaters really can drive economic development, and we see a lot of that happening all over the country.”

Once a status symbol and source of local entertainment, these theaters are now possible ways to attract more people to a suburban downtown and hope they spend more money while they are there. Even though they aren’t really needed now (even the multiplexes have had a difficult time in recent years), they might anchor new entertainment districts where suburbanites don’t go to the city for culture but instead stay nearby.

It would be interesting to think about how many of these downtown theaters the Chicago suburbs could support. Particularly if they hope to all thrive, how much money is there to spread around?

Jaywalkers vs. car culture in downtown Los Angeles

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The battle for Los Angeles may not involve aliens but rather jaywalking pedestrians versus cars in downtown Los Angeles:

It is not quite “Dragnet,” but the Police Department in recent weeks has issued dozens of tickets to workers, shoppers and tourists for illegally crossing the street in downtown Los Angeles. And the crackdown is raising questions about whether the authorities are taking sides with the long-dominant automobile here at the very time when a pedestrian culture is taking off, fueled by the burst of new offices, condominiums, hotels and restaurants rising in downtown Los Angeles…

The police say they are simply trying to maintain order at a time when downtown Los Angeles, once a place of urban tumbleweeds and the homeless, is teeming with people competing for pavement with automobiles. “There’s a huge influx of folks that come into the downtown area,” said Sgt. Larry Delgado of the Central Traffic Division. “If you go out there, you are going to see enforcement.”

These pedestrians are confronting not only the police, but a historically entrenched car culture that has long defined the experience of living and working in Los Angeles. With its wide streets, and aggressive motorists zipping around corners, cutting in and out of lanes and sneaking past red lights, Los Angeles is hardly built for people who prefer to walk.

Yet times may be changing. There are an increasing number of people using bicycles, taking advantage of an expanding network of bike lanes. Los Angeles is in the midst of a major expansion of its subway and bus system. Much of the urban planning in recent years, particularly downtown and in Hollywood, is intended to encourage people to give up their cars in favor of public transit, walking or biking.

It is hard to tell what exactly is going on here without some hard data about jaywalking fines in downtown LA over time. However, it does make for an interesting narrative: while many cities and places are trying to encourage more pedestrian and bike use (for its green, health, congestion, and other benefits), Los Angeles is cracking down on walkers. The issue is that LA is perhaps the prototypical car city in the entire world. The sprawling city has traditionally not had a downtown on the scale of other major cities that people would want to crowd. The metropolitan area seems to stretch on forever, crisscrossed by numerous highways. This is home to the Beach Boys singing about driving, the rise of fast food, and lots of car commercials.

Jaywalking may be an opening skirmish but this could blossom into a longer war over the heart of Los Angeles: is it really a city about cars or can it also contain dense, walkable nodes? Critics of sprawl would see a Los Angeles full of pedestrians (at least in pockets) as a tremendous success story.

Convincing suburban drivers that downtown parking is available

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The Chicago suburbs of Wheaton and Glen Ellyn are looking for ways to convince residents that there are plenty of parking spots in their downtowns:

For years, officials in Glen Ellyn have been hearing from residents about a lack of parking in the downtown, despite studies showing plenty of spaces available for customers…

“It dawned upon us that it isn’t a lack of parking, but addressing the perception of the lack of parking,” Glen Ellyn Police Chief Phil Norton said at a recent village meeting. “We’re going to shift our focus and start working on addressing the perception. You can go anywhere and be within a block or a block and a half of convenient parking.”…

The changes include creating 12 “Customer Only” parking spots where parking meters were removed in the Main Street and Pennsylvania lot. It also includes making the Union Pacific lot at Crescent and Main customer parking only, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, and making Schock Square customer parking only, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays…

In Wheaton, parking was one of the issues addressed in the final draft of a downtown strategic plan and streetscape plan recently released by the city’s consultants. A parking analysis shows there is enough parking in the city’s downtown, despite a perceived parking issue reported by residents who participated in the survey, officials said.

In the plan, consultants recommended the city consider adding differentiated time limits on certain spaces such as 15 minutes, 1 hour and two hours. That will encourage employees to park in other areas and free up spaces for customers, consultants said.

It would helpful to know why exactly residents think there isn’t much parking. Is it because the parking isn’t right in front of the store? Is it because the parking is more difficult to get into, say angled or parallel parking, than a large parking lot? Is it because the streets or narrower or they can’t perceive they can walk to multiple stores? Some of these issues might seem plausible yet people are willing to endure walks in large, crowded parking lots for big box stores or malls.

The interesting thing to me is that this is a decades-long problem for these downtowns. It dates back at least to the 1950s when downtowns had to start competing with new strip malls and shopping malls which offered multiple stores as well as free parking (as opposed to having parking meters). Even though downtowns might offer plenty of stores within a short distance, I suspect suburbanites perceive that it is more congested and more difficult to get to, even before they know whether parking is available.

Another creative solution: apps or websites that display available parking spaces downtown which gives people real-time information as well as combats percetions that parking isn’t available.

Naperville to add to public art with statue of founder Joseph Naper

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A new statue will be coming to Naperville in the near future as a cartoonist is creating a new sculpture of Naperville’s founder.

Dick Locher, a longtime Naperville resident and legendary cartoonist known for both his Dick Tracy strips and his political cartoons, is helping create the statue of Capt. Joseph Naper that will be placed on the founder’s homestead this summer.

Bryan Ogg, curator of research for the Heritage Society’s Naper Settlement museum, called Locher’s involvement in the project a “natural union.” Locher, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has spent four decades living in Naperville and working for the Chicago Tribune. He just recently retired from political cartooning.

But the 84-year-old’s passion for art has not waned, and he said he was happy to take on the project to commemorate Naper, who founded the city in 1831…

Locher visited Naper’s homestead site at Jefferson Avenue and Mill Street and researched the 1830s before making sketches of the statue. He had little to go on when creating Naper’s likeness, but said he was determined to make it a piece that would stand the test of time.

Whenever I visit downtown Naperville, I’m impressed with the number of statues and public art pieces. The downtown isn’t that large but the public art is prominent. Here are just two examples:

DickTracyStatueNaperville

NapervilleRiverwalkFountain

To hear Naperville tell it, the art was made possible by a concerted effort known as the Naperville Century Walk:

Genevieve looks up at us from her bench outside of Barnes and Noble on Washington Street. The Cat and the Hat practically takes our hand and strolls with us into Nichols Library. Officer Friendly, known to us today as Mayor Pradel, reminds the children of Naperville to be careful on one way streets ensuring the safety of our town’s youngest citizens. We are reminded of uncommon valor when we gaze upon five of Naperville’s most highly decorated servicemen from World War II immortalized in the bronze sculpture Veterans’ Valor in the plaza next to the YMCA.

Each of these works is just one of the 40+ pieces of public art that make up Naperville’s Century Walk.

In 1996, Century Walk began as a public art initiative featuring murals, mosaics, reliefs, mobiles, and sculptures throughout downtown Naperville. Each of the first 30 pieces in some way represents the history of Naperville during the twentieth century through people, places and events. It is a fascinating way to portray the history of Naperville through public art. Several of the last pieces were not limited to historical themes as they expand the body of artwork throughout Naperville.

See a map of the variety of art here. All of it adds a nice touch to a downtown that made quite a comeback in the 1990s when it attracted national retail stores and a number of restaurants. Many of the pieces, such as the statue of Genevieve Towsley or of Harold Moser, reference small-town Naperville which existed into the 1960s. I suspect many Naperville residents may not even know the characters referenced (for example, Genevieve Towsley wrote a newspaper column about local history for several decades) or much about Joseph Naper who came from Ohio and served for a number of years in the Illinois legislature. The art both enhances the public spaces and helps local residents and visitors, if they read the plaques, understand how much the suburban community has changed.

Former downtown Wheaton Jewel store demolished, makes way for medical building

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The closing of the Jewel in downtown Wheaton in 2008 upset a number of residents but the building is being demolished and making way for a new medical building:

Bulldozers have arrived at the former Jewel Osco site in downtown Wheaton, demolishing the building that has been vacant for several years.

It’ll make way for a new DuPage Medical Group building, which is expected to bring in new jobs and more activity into the city’s downtown…

Just south of the site, construction of a new Mariano’s grocery store is ongoing, along with an apartment complex called Wheaton 121 being built a few blocks north. Both are slated to open in the fall.

The DuPage Medical Group building, which will be three stories and span 40,035 square feet at Main Street and Willow Avenue, is expected to be done by April, said Dennis Fine, Chief Operating Officer. The project will relocate 45 employees and 12 physicians from their current location at N. Main Street and W. Cole Avenue.

Fine expects to add at least 15 jobs and three to five more physicians to accommodate the services being added at the new location.

The city has been looking for years for a way to utilize this site and help the part of downtown south of the railroad tracks. It doesn’t sound like this new building will be a huge source of jobs but it does reinforce the image that downtown Wheaton is a place to be. Medical offices fit the image downtown Wheaton is looking for: more upscale residences, offices, and business establishments. Plus, the new grocery store will provide a more upscale business so the downtown will have gained a better grocery store plus this new medical office. I would guess that a lot of downtowns in the Chicago area would be happy if a medical facility redeveloped a vacant retail site.

However, this does lead to a newly vacant building on the north side of Wheaton in a more commercialized corridor. What might go at this site at Main and Cole?

An English town that got rid of its traffic signs and lights sees improvement in street life

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This idea is not unknown but it is still highly unusual: an English town recently removed all of its traffic signs and lights.

The village of Poynton in the U.K. has undertaken one of the most ambitious experiments to date in this type of street design, whose most prominent advocate was the Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. Variations on the shared-space model have been implemented in other European cities since the early 1990s, but never before at such a busy junction. Poynton’s city leaders sought the change because the historic hub of their quaint little town had become a grim and unwelcoming place…

The project didn’t come cheap, costing about $6 million. Engineers completely reconfigured the intersection at the center of town, replacing a traffic light with two “roundels” that cars must negotiate without the guidance of traffic signs. Pavements of varying colors and textures are the only signal as to which type of road user belongs where.

It was a controversial move for the community of some 14,000 people, which lies about 11 miles from Manchester in the northwestern part of England. Now, a year after construction wrapped up, a video called “Poynton Regenerated” makes the case that the shared space scheme maintains a smooth flow of traffic while simultaneously making the village center a more attractive and safer place for pedestrians, leading to increased economic activity downtown…

In the “Regenerating Poynton” video, several people who admit to having been skeptical of the plan say that after it was put in place, they came to see it as a dramatic improvement. A local city councilor says that the main street no longer seems like a dying place, as it had for years before the change. Some 88 percent of businesses in the area are reporting an increase in foot traffic, and real estate agents say they’re seeing new interest in buying property in the area.

The social interactions that result from shared space — eye contact, waves of thanks, and the like — are one of the main selling points for advocates.

What is most interesting about this presentation is that it is less about safety, and traffic crashes do tend to go down when measures like this are taken, and more about how it can improve street life. When motorized vehicles are no longer privileged on the streets in the ways that they are in most communities, street life can be more open and lively. So, perhaps we will see more people in the coming years selling this plan more as a viable redevelopment option rather than a safety concern.

The rise of the “mega-Loop” in downtown Chicago

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Crain’s Chicago Business discusses the activity taking place in Chicago’s Loop and the surrounding area, an area it now calls the “mega-Loop”:

This is the new economic engine of the metropolitan area and, increasingly, the rest of Illinois. And it has reached a critical mass, data suggest, enabling its growth to be self-perpetuating, as more jobs downtown attract more residents to move nearby, which, in turn, becomes a magnet for more employers to join the inward migration.

The Chicago Loop long has been one of the world’s greatest job centers, of course. For much of its history, though, downtown emptied out after office hours. And as the city aged and its population declined, the suburbs rose to become the preferred home to generations of young families and the tollways became employment corridors of their own.

In recent years, those trends have reversed. After decades of watching the suburbs boom (often at the city’s expense), Chicago now is outperforming the surrounding area by almost any measure—jobs, income, retail sales and residential property values, to name a few—despite the loss of 200,000 people in the 2010 census.

The city is so hot that this expanded downtown is adding residents faster than any other urban core in America, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

“In the year 2020, no matter how many condos are built or sold, Chicago is likely to be a nest of center-city affluence unequaled in size—or even approached—by anyplace in America,” journalist Alan Ehrenhalt writes in “The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.”…

There’s no question, however, that the mega-Loop is benefiting from a back-to-the-city movement that is reviving urban centers elsewhere in the U.S. In Chicago, the trend appears to be sustainable. “This is a pattern that has developed for the last 30 years, and it has only strengthened,” says Columbia University sociologist Saskia Sassen, author of “The Global City.”

These are some big claims and it will take some years to see how the longer trend plays out. As the article notes, there are a lot of factors at work including a global economy, a variety of serious social issues in Chicago, and growth patterns in the Chicago region where the outer collar counties are gaining population.

If the glitzy downtowns continue to grow as do the more exurban areas, perhaps it is the closer suburbs that are left out. These suburbs were likely founded between the mid 1850s and 1960s and are long past the era of rapid suburban growth. While researchers have noted troubling trends among inner-ring suburbs, communities adjacent to big cities, this might extend further out as growth is centered on the downtown and at the fringes.