Finance

Smart growth strategies can help any town or city improve its finances, Smart Growth America concludes in a new nationwide analysis. 

The New York Times published a fascinating piece on a billionaire's investment in a two-square-mile area of downtown Detroit. My guess is that Dan Gilbert, worth $3.5 billion, will be a lot richer in a few years as a result of his massive and growing real estate holdings in the Motor City. Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans, moved 7,600 employees downtown and has renovated buildings with 80 startup and small companies. An MIT professor, Brent Ryan, doesn't believe Detroit's downtown can revive in the face of a shrinking regional economy, but we disagree. It's true that downtowns in growing regions will be generally stronger, but the lure of downtown is so strong now that it will overcome the regional factor. Central Detroit has too many assets — great historic architecture, world-class cultural institutions, medical and academic assets, jobs — to not grow in value given today's demand for urban living. Much of the rest of Detroit, however, will likely languish for a long time.

Building infrastructure with the primary purpose of creating jobs, with little consideration to context, is setting a bad precedence and setting up communities for unexpected liabilities.

“Never before have we seen such crowds downtown,” says Jason Caudle, deputy city manager, of the 30,000 people who attended a Holloween and Harvest festival on the new downtown boulevard in Lancaster, California. The nine-block project, costing $11.5 million, has so far attracted $130 million in private investment and generated $273 million in economic output, according to an article in the January-February 2013 issue of Better! Cities & Towns. The street is designed with a Spanish "ramblas," which puts the public space at the center of the street, an unusual design that has worked well for this Southern California city.