Urban investment coming

Renaissance Downtowns says the Obama administration will be a boon to cities. Other developers at CNU agreed that plenty of urban investment is coming in the next decade. Equity will flow to urban undertakings because “people are more concerned about a sense of place,” said Chuck Perry, managing partner of Denver-based Perry Rose LLC.
The “millennial” generation — the 75 million Americans born between 1977 and 1996 — “will abandon suburbs and move into downtowns at a greater percentage than any previous generation,” predicted Laurie Volk of Zimmerman/Volk Associates. Cities and older suburbs have captured an increasing share of building permits in recent years, Volk noted. In 15 of the largest 50 regions, cities’ share of residential building permits more than doubled between 1990 and 2007.
Author James Howard Kunstler, pessimistic about long-term trends, argued that demographic projections are misleading because the economy is going to contract radically, and many Americans will be unable to afford lofts and other one-person or two-person big-city housing units. Kunstler said many more people will have to share their dwellings, and conditions in large cities will become unstable.
The action, he said, will be in smaller cities such as Troy, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; and Akron, Ohio — places ”scaled properly to the energy diet of the future.” It’s worth noting that some of the places cited by Kunstler qualify as third- and fourth-tier cities — less populous environments, where Monti anticipates a strong demand for urban housing within walking distance of other daily needs.
Regardless of whether it’s in big cities and their suburbs or smaller communities, a consensus seems to have formed that mixed-use, walkable development will be a major wave of future construction. “People under 40 are demanding to live in a one-stop community,” observed Max Reim of Live Work Learn Play, a Montreal-based organization that helps developers plan mixed-use centers and find retail tenants.
Some suburbs are already benefiting from this trend. Terry Wendt, a Chicago area planning consultant, noted that in the Chicago area, “at least three-quarters of the rail suburbs have started to revitalize.” These are generally suburbs that boast walkable mixed-use centers.