The CoolTown Blog
Friday, April 11
CoolTown on the surface...
One of the country's leading institutional investment groups, Federal Realty came upon a progressive city, San Jose, resulting in the European-inspired, pedestrian-oriented Santana Row. They even made sure it had a state-of-the-art fiber optic infrastructure. However, there is little local economic development focus (fundamental to a CoolTown): no office space, no mixed-income housing, and no emphasis on entrepreneurial/local retail tenants. However, it's a great project for what it is, and one can only innovate so much.
Still, municipalities take such a long time figuring out how to approve even this level of innovation (so maybe San Jose isn't THAT progressive) that Federal Realty has since stated that they're going back to investing in easily-approved shopping centers with big-name anchors again.
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Thursday, April 10
Show me the money!
The key obstacle to building these towns is NOT financing. At least, that's what progressive institutional investors are telling me. It's finding progressive governments that allow, and better yet, encourage the development of these kinds of towns. The investors' challenge is that they will provide the financing if municipalities present such opportunities. I'm working with a collaborative of such investors that are committed to bringing the CoolTown concept to reality as vibrant urban neighborhoods in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods near universities. Email me if you know of any municipalities that are up for the challenge!
Regarding this investment collaborative, The Marquette Companies is the lead integrator, providing the land and development financing. To establish a comprehensive financing model that can be replicated in many cities, they are building lending relationships with national firms such as Muni Mae Midland, which finances all forms of multi-family residential, bonds, TIFs, and low-income tax credit housing.
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Wednesday, April 9
The New American Dream
In continuation of yesterday's blog, a few years ago I tried to get Richard Florida to name his book The New American Dream. It was actually the working title until his publishers went with the better targeted title of The Rise of the Creative Class. However, this lofty vision is fleshed out in this recent article of his that crystalizes the true American Dream of working for ourselves (or at least under our own terms), and how that requires evolving the country's mass-production-based infrastructure. In the meantime, fellow Washingtonian Dan Pink pain-stakingly researched this shift in his own terms, and one of my long-time good friends and mentors, Andres Duany meticulously articulates how better planning in our cities and towns can accommodate this in his book Suburban Nation. Finally, here's one such trendsetter who's living that new what-rush-hour? American dream.
Tomorrow I'll get to how I'm working with some of the country's largest financial institutions to possibly make this happen in your area.
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Tuesday, April 8
The Rise of the Creative Class
That's the name of Richard Florida's latest book, which formed the basis for yesterday's blog. The concept behind the telling numbers is simple: if you want to create jobs, you'll have to find creative people, and those people gravitate towards creative industries (described yesterday) and creative amenities (nightlife, restaurants, entertainment, recreation).
The book is filled not only with hard economic evidence, but delves into the workforce and cultural trends that can help revitalize our cities and small towns. What happens when you concentrate a lot of creative people and businesses into one place? See yesterday's graph, and read this brief article about a truly creative woman (the word 'create/creating' appears four times, including in the title of her own book) who is indirectly transforming her neighborhood.
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Monday, April 7
Creativity drives the economy
Prove it? Some people already have, and it's much easier to explain this visually via the graph below, where the dots represent the country's cities. On the x-axis, creativity is measured via creative class workforce (science, engineering, architecture, design, education, arts, music, entertainment), innovations (patents per capita), high-tech industry and diversity. On the y-axis, overall economic performance is measured by job and population growth, high-tech growth and changes in per capita income. In summary, the more creativity you have in your city, the more prosperous you'll be. Perhaps this applies to you personally as well, so here's something to get you started.
If you'd like to investigate the idea more professionally, see Kevin Stolarick at Catalytix, who provided the graph below. If you'd like to learn more about the person who wrote the book on this, stay tuned tomorrow. If you'd like to learn more about how to make this a reality, stay tuned this week.
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