A recent article on The Big Money, by Jonathan Weber, discusses growth across the country moves away from suburban and exurban fringe and toward center-cities and close-in suburbs.

Here are few excerpts from the article that caught my attention:

What’s behind this shift? Empty-nesters don’t need the big house and don’t want to mow the big lawn. High gas prices are making long commutes less practical. The urban renaissance in big cities…and the revival of charming, vibrant downtowns in small cities…is making the bedroom suburb and the strip mall seem positively dull.

Retailers are the most obviously affected by these trends. For decades, locating a store in a mall on the fringe rather than downtown had a lot of obvious advantages: plenty of easy parking, tons of drive-by traffic from big-box neighbors, and newer buildings with better infrastructure.

These benefits won’t disappear overnight. Over the long run, though, they will diminish in importance, especially if more big retail chains and shopping-mall operators go out of business. Downtown shopping districts, meanwhile, will benefit from increased investment and more proximate residents. If we assume, as many economists do, that the country is “over-retailed,” some downtown development plans based on more shopping will stall, but the center will still prosper relative to the fringe — and more businesses might find the downtown storefront affordable.

Locating downtown is sometimes associated with the “buy local” movement — the idea that the community benefits if businesses and consumers spend their money with independent, locally owned businesses. But you don’t have to buy into this ideologically to position yourself as the friendly, local alternative to the big national chain, and part of the way to do that is to locate in a cool space — in a historic building, say — rather than a sterile strip mall or office park.

You can read the full article at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30810275/

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