There is a movement towards the reurbanization of smaller cities. Duany, the planner has worked on a plan for my little town, Fort Myers and I am working on a mixed use project that will bring more people back to the city center. There is huge interest in my project as the traffic in SW Florida suffers the effects of sprawl and hideous strip development. I am fighting for Live/Work condominiums within the complex as I believe they can provide a backbone. The existing downtown area has the upper floors of the exisiting low rise buildings rehabbed into condominiums or rental apartments.
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Florida Trend Archives - AUGUST 2005 ISSUE
Hot Downtowns: Resurgence
Movie theaters, restaurants, entertainment and retail are following residents downtown, making city living more attractive.
By Cynthia Barnett, Amy Keller, Barbara Miracle, Mike Vogel
Just two years ago, it was as impossible to catch a movie in downtown Orlando as it was for a downtown worker in St. Petersburg to go grocery shopping on her lunch break. Today, those cities and others across Florida have passed perhaps the most important milestone on the road to rebuilding vital and vibrant city cores: Their downtowns have the infrastructure of everyday life — drugstores, movies, grocery stores — as well as the eateries, nightclubs and live/work lofts that marked the early stirrings of downtown revitalization a decade ago.
Of course, greater numbers of Floridians are still settling in suburbs and exurbs. But downtown living is increasingly attractive to both young professionals and empty nesters sick of sprawl. Other factors: Low interest rates and the accompanying boom in housing investment. And finally, taxpayer dollars: Billions of federal, state and primarily local-development subsidies spent during the past two decades are finally paying off. “They are all fueling each other,” says Carol Westmoreland, executive director of the Florida Redevelopment Association. “Downtown redevelopment has come full circle.”
floridatrend.com
I believe it can work. Everyone that is interested in this development wants, no, actually aches for the connectedness that good urban living can bring. Those signing up for the condos are not flippers, they are young professionals wanting to belong somewhere.
firststreetvillage.com
When I think of this atmosphere I think of the neighborhoods of New York and Chicago which are independent of the Central Business District(s) of their downtowns. NYC is a series of connected small towns each with its own character. San Francisco the same. MP |
