For years we ended our presentations with a slide that said Michigan must get younger and better educated or we will get poorer. Where younger meant a place where Michigan was retaining those who grew up here and attracting mobile…
The Atlanta BeltLine is explicitly deigned to both improve the quality of life of current city residents and to attract new residents to the city, particularly mobile young professionals. This dual purpose is how placemaking should be done everywhere. The…
Just finished reading the End of the Suburbs by Leigh Galagher, assistant managing editor at Fortune. Highly recommended. She details, with data and stories, the new reality that more and more Americans want to live in high density, walkable, mixed…
Our research clearly indicates that where recent college graduates concentrate you get prosperous economies. And increasingly that concentration is occurring in vibrant central cities. Specifically high density, mixed use, walkable neighborhoods. For the details see our Young Talent in the…
Lots of comments on the Andy Basile email I wrote about in my last post. Most quite positive. A few pushed back. Let me lay out my thoughts on why I thought the email was so important and then give my…
Terrific article by Christopher Leinberger in this month's Atlantic. It's about the increased consumer demand – in both cities and suburbs – for walkable neighborhoods linked by train. The article and his book the Option of Urbanism are worth reading.…
More book recommendations. As you know we have concluded that retaining and attracting talent – particularly young college graduates – is one of the keys to growing the Michigan economy. Two books cover the topic best: Who's Your City by…