Brenton Skating Plaza is now offering bike rentals. Explore Des Moines’ scenic trails and experience Downtown in a whole new way! Mountain, Road, and Hybrid bikes available for rental (one hour, 1/2 day, full day, or 7 day rentals) starting as low as $12 per hour.

I’m very excited to see that we can now rent bikes downtown for two reasons:

1. I don’t own a bike, but sometimes get the inkling to want to go for a bike ride.
2. I just got back from Provincetown last Saturday and had rented a bike there for the week and had a great time riding it and exploring the Cape.

According to local news reports Des Moines’ first bicycle rental facility opened this week at Brenton Skate Plaza. Brenton has teamed up with Bike World to rent out bikes during the ice skating rink’s off season and in an effort to draw more people downtown, specifically to the downtown trails and views along the Principal Riverwalk.

Rentals are available seven days a week, weather permitting, until the ice skating rink opens back up in November. They are hoping the bike rental season to run annually from April to November.

Now that you’ve got your bike, there are some great bike mapping trails from BikeIowa. Just click on the this image for a printable PDF from BikeIowa’s website.

You can find more biking and walking trail maps on our Downtown Maps page.

Also have you heard about the Des Moines Bike Collective?
The Collective is part bike library, part bike co-op, and part bike school.

Here’s some details about the Des Moines Bike Collective from the BikeIowa website:

Bike Collective’s Purpose: To put more bikes under more people.

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Here’s a new video from the “Des Moines. Do More.” campaign.

One of the biggest incentives for people to move downtown are the tax abatements that the City of Des Moines is offering to lure people down here. I know it was a huge factor in my decision! I would be saving about $465 a month and that’s almost the size of car payment. The building I picked to live in, the Liberty Building, touted 10 year tax abatement on their brochures as well as a number of other condo projects that I looked at. No property taxes for 10 years, what an awesome deal, for me over the course of 10 years that’s a savings of almost $56,000. I was so tickled that I didn’t dig into what a 10 year tax abatement truly mean for me. So I hope this post may help future downtown buyers avoid the shock that I received the day I went to file for my tax abatement.

I went downtown to the City of Des Moines Permit & Development Center to file for the tax abatement, and started talking with the clerk. (Here’s where the surprise came.) I closed on my condo on March 3rd, 2008 but the deadline for tax year is February 1st, so even though I was filing now nothing would even be processed until sometime next February 2009 and I would see no tax abatement until September 1st 2009, a whole 18 months of taxes later. So to get the 10 years worth of abatement for myself, I would have to live there for 11 years and 8 months. I will have to pay almost $10,000 until then.

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 So take a look at what the City Council adopted last night as the new official city logo. Wow what a difference, I actually like this one, but everyone probably liked the old one when it first came out. The old logo was long over due for a makeover. The old logo was made to mimic the downtown bridges that cross over the Des Moines River on Locust Street and Walnut Street as wells as a giant D and M.

The new logo sports a smooth blue gradient on the arch that is meant to mimic our pedestrian bridges that span I-235 and you can see our city skyline is silhouetted beneath the arch. The new logo should show up on city owned buildings, websites and transportation vehicles sometime in the next few weeks.

A big city tradition comes to Des Moines this week. You can get a great meal this week for the low price of $20.08. Participating restaurants will be offering fixed-price menus where $20.08 will buy dinner for one or lunch for two. The special is running August 16th through the 24th and is being presented by: Des Moines Business Record; DSM Magazine; and the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau. 
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I know a lot of us surf the net from our mobile devices these days, for example, this morning I had a dentist appointment and while waiting, I whipped out my iPhone, opened up my Safari browser and started surfing. An idea came to me, a lot of weblogs and sites are starting to become in a mobile friendly version, I thought “Why not do the same for Living Downtown Des Moines?” This evening I did a little research on how to make this possible, and viola we now have both a standard mobile version, perfect for a Blackberry, Dare or Instinct phone and another version exclusively for the iPhone, complete with a little iPhone favicon.

I’ve added links to both of these on the right-side navigation bar at the top of the page for easy access.

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I thought it would be interesting to see what DVDs downtown residents might be watching, so I captured a screenshot of the top 15 as of today, Sunday, August 17, 2008.

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Since moving downtown in March, I find myself walking 300% more than I ever walked living in the burbs. I walk for my health, pleasure, shopping, eating out, grabbing a drink and running miscellaneous errands. With rising gas prices, walking all helps on the budget.

I noticed that cities are starting to be ranked and graded on their “walkability”. A site called Walk Score, gives downtown 50309 a score of 89 out of 100 possible points. Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.
Here are general guidelines for interpreting a score:

• 90–100 = Walkers’ Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car.
• 70–89 = Very Walkable: It’s possible to get by without owning a car.
• 50–69 = Somewhat Walkable: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car.
• 25–49 = Car-Dependent: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.
• 0–24 = Car-Dependent (Driving Only): Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!

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Having recently just traveled to the New England area of the country, and seeing different places, I noticed a lot of real estate “For Sale” and “For Lease” / “For Let” signs on places that advertised their spaces as condos, lofts or flats. So I began to wonder, what’s really the difference or is it just verbiage.

The building I live, is considered the Liberty Condos, but I always refer to place as a “loft”. So I thought I better do a little research on this matter. Here’s what I found:

Lofts:

• Are generally one large area as opposed to rooms
• Lofts usually have a 2nd level partially exposed to the 1st level
• Traditionally, lofts are above a commercial or an industrial space
• Loft living originated in Paris, and was usually owned by artists as a combination residence and studio. Over the past 100 years, however, loft living has evolved and is defined as any apartment-like units with open floor plans, huge windows, and exposed fixtures, in an urban setting
• Typically a loft is a conversion from what was once a industrial of office space
• Lofts are usually found in the downtown cores 
• Most lofts are two floors, have high ceilings, and offer amazing views of the city
• Loft has an edgier sound to it 

Condos:

• A condominium buyer owns the space within his or her individual unit; the common parts of the property, such as the land, building structure, etc., are owned jointly by the unit owners. Each of the condo owners within a property belongs to an owners’ association which manages the complex and collects monthly association fees in order to maintain the common areas. Because unit owners do not own the land beneath their unit, condominium units are often stacked on top of each other.

So during this research i also came across another term, “Loft-Style”. The difference is that lofts do not have any rooms, except bathrooms, while the loft style condos have rooms but still offer open floor plan, high ceiling and big windows.

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So I’m flying out of town this morning, but if I happen to get a little home sick, which will not occur, I love to travel, I can visit any of the following web cams to see what’s going on back in downtown Des Moines.

• KCCI’s Downtown Towercam
• Downtown Webcam
• Principal Riverwalk Webcam

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