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Smaller Communities On the Rise

Similarly, many midsize cities like Cincinnati, Austin, Salt Lake, Denver, Indianapolis and Kansas City are redeveloping their downtowns, and business is taking its cue. In fact, the New York Times reported last January that jobs in Cincinnati were multiplying at a nearly 3 percent annual rate, 2.4 percent in Salt Lake City and a whopping 4 percent in Austin. The national average was 2.3 percent at the time.

"Corporate America has found in these [midsize] cities a fertile ground for the service-sector job creation that has played so big a role in the current expansion," the article noted. "Public spending, particularly for downtown redevelopment, also plays a role in these cities' prosperity."

Even cities smaller in scope are seeing investment in downtown, primarily in "Main Street" programs. Since 1980, approximately $10.9 billion has been invested in Main Street communities, according to the National Main Street Center (www.mainst.org). And during the same period, those communities have generated 47,000 new businesses, with net new jobs reaching 174,000.

The National Main Street Center's 1999 award-winning main street communities were San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Lafayette, Ind.; Bay City, Mich.; Cordell, Okla.; and Denton, Texas. In Denton alone, private investment has increased to more than $18 million since 1989, with a net gain of 138 new businesses and more than 600 new jobs. Occupancy rates in downtown Denton rose from 70 percent to 98 percent.

Many of the investments being made in smaller and midsize cities mirror those in major cities but on a lesser scale. In Richmond, Va., for example, $160 million is being invested to expand the convention center on the north side, and a streetscape program was used to develop the new canal walk on the south side. As a result of these efforts, Richmond has seen major multifamily development on the eastern side of downtown, while the western side is experiencing redevelopment and new development of office space. Media General, for example, is completing its $50 million, two-building headquarters complex for the company and its subsidiary the Times Dispatch on the western side of downtown.

"Downtown redevelopment is changing the whole urban dynamic, and it's therefore giving the businesses that locate there and the people that move there an entirely new atmosphere in which to do business and to live," says John Woodward, director of economic development at the Richmond Office of Economic Development. "The key ingredient of downtown Richmond or downtown anywhere is the differentiation that one gets from the sterile, cookie-cutter suburban office parks that are just prolific around the country."