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To: Live2Sail who wrote (41080)	9/9/2005 6:38:08 AM
From: MoneyPenny	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

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. " 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

To: Live2Sail who wrote (41080)	9/9/2005 10:35:36 AM
From: John Vosilla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

"I was in Houston a couple years back. I was surprised and shocked. It was a much larger and cosmopolitan city than I expected" And those downtown skyscrapers can be overwhelming. Too many were built during the mid 80's office boom with no though to interaction with pedestrians and the creation of an urban city where people work and play. No city has as much potential going forward IMHO when you also consider the future growth in both population and business in the whole area and only one major urban corridor for perhaps 8-10M people looking out 15-20 years.

To: Live2Sail who wrote (41080)	9/9/2005 10:51:37 AM
From: Moominoid	Respond to of 306849

There isn't much in the evening in downtown LA but the downtowns in places like Santa Monica or Pasadena or even Alhambra there is.

To: Live2Sail who wrote (41080)	9/9/2005 6:35:24 PM
From: Doughboy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

I'm surprised you list Houston as a walkable city. I don't know what neighborhood you were in but I always use Houston as the prime example of the hollowed-out city. I flew in and out of there for several years and always stayed at a downtown hotel. During the hot afternoons, all the office workers traveled in the glass skywalks or tunnels, and no one would set foot in the street, except for the poor waiting for buses and the homeless. And in the evening I would take walks after dinner to clear my mind, and I could walk the entire circuit of the downtown area (more than 2 miles) and would see at the most half a dozen people. It was like neutron bomb had been dropped on the place. Maybe it's changed in the last decade (I heard there was a move afoot to add downtown apartments) but as far as I could tell, Houston was the worst when it came to downtown life. As for DC, they've done a pretty good job filling in the downtown again. After the MLK assasination riots in the 60s, downtown DC was not a place that one would have wanted to live. Capitol Hill was crime ridden; white flight was rampant. Several large companies located across the Potomac in Arlington VA because there were no height limitations on buildings. The big department stores shut down in DC in the 80s. When I moved there in the 1990s, there were pockets of neighborhoods that were revitalized, Dupont Circle being the prime example, but that was still not downtown proper (generally the Pennsylvania Ave corridor from the Capitol to the White House). The housing boom changed that; gentrification crept toward downtown. The prostitution havens like Logan Circle and Thomas Circle (which are walking distance to the downtown offices) have now become hot places to live. A magnificent redo of Union Station, the train station, and the adjoining Federal Law Center building spurred development on the Capitol Hill side of Downtown. And the new convention center and the MCI sports arena filled in the middle. There are now a number of luxury towers right in Downtown that make the city very livable. You can hopscotch from coffee shop to coffee shop or restaurant to restaurant all across the span of downtown. And the final piece of the puzzle is to revitalize the SW or Anacostia area, which has been seemingly immune to economic recovery over the years. That may change with the FCC and Fannie Mae moving their offices there, and the new ballpark. DC is a model for urban revitalization, but I wonder if it may be unique in that the feds have thrown a lot of money at it (including a tax credit for first time home buyers in the district) and DC has had explosive job growth for nearly 15-20 years without interruption.