Urban office markets are looking up

More companies have been making a major move this year from suburbs to central business districts than from downtowns to the outskirts, Urban Land magazine reports. Among the cities benefiting from this trend are Chicago, Detroit, and Las Vegas. 

The magazine primarily attributes the change to these financial and social trends:

Corporations are consolidating offices and shedding surplus space to achieve cost savings. New or renovated downtown Class A buildings tend to offer larger footprints and better interior designs, such as more open layouts, than suburban campuses. Perhaps most important, companies, especially in tech-related industries, are recruiting and targeting the next generation of talented workers, the generation Y/millennials 17 to 34 years old who increasingly prefer urban lifestyles with mass transit.

Dense, walkable communities that are just outside the central city are also benefiting, Urban Land says. The article cites the example of Biogen Inc., a biotech company that has decided to leave the research campus it opened in an outer suburb of Boston a year ago; the company will move back to tightly built Cambridge.