05 June 2009

Build the Places the Market Wants

From an article in a Lansing real estate magazine, Chris Leinberger talks about how to turn Michigan around:
...If you don't offer the market the breadth of choice it wants, you're not competitive. If you're a Millennial, or if you're an urban dwelling Baby Boomer, and the only option ... as far as how you live is a one-to-the-acre single family house, you're just not competitive.

You haven't held onto your young people because you've not offered them the walkable urban way of living, and they've left.

It's not the only reason, of course, but it's significant. You've got folks in this country that would love to move back ....if there was any hope and any option that they could live the kind of life that they want to live.

When you start seeing more and more of that happening, you'll know. The young people, the entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s—when you start having your phone ring off the hook from your classmates that you went to high school and college with—that's the sign that the outside world is beginning to recognize that (your city) is making the turn.

...If you put in the infrastructure that allows walkable urban development to take place, you're going to put in place the preconditions for them to come back.

...Rail transit drives walkable urban places. I've never seen one dollar of real estate investment invested because of a bus stop. But if you have [rail] transit, it's a different story altogether.

...If you don't build the built environment that the market wants, it's going to Chicago, it's going to D.C., it's going elsewhere. . . .

... It is a necessary precondition for this state to move forward. You've got to offer choice. You've got plenty of drivable suburban product. Give the market what it wants. That's the future.

1 comment:

Dave said...

In the late 80s Lansing had a major demolition project in the downtown...a seedy section with a lot of blight and crime...the redevelopment ultimately brought a single A baseball team into the downtown - Oldsmobile Park, home of the Lansing Lugnuts.

Lansing has historically done well when the auto industry does well.