Kaid Benfield

Corporations moving to town

Director, Sustainable Commuities and Smart Growth, NRDC; co-founder, LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system, Jun 06, 11.

Tagged with planning, business, real estate, urban development

In the late 1990s, when Don Chen, Matt Raimi and I were researching our book, Once There Were Greenfields, we lamented the flight of business from America’s central cities to increasingly outer suburbs and farmland. In that book we frequently turned for data to metropolitan Chicago where, for example, Ameritech had built a half-mile-long “landscraper” near O’Hare Airport far from the Loop, Motorola had set up camp in Schaumberg, and Sears had fled the iconic Sears tower for Hoffman Estates.

Now, just as the tide has turned against large-lot suburban residential subdivisions, corporations are moving back into town (or, as in the case of Dublin, Ohio, doing everything they can to make their suburb more urban in character). The best and the brightest of the rising labor force, it turns out, don’t care to live and work in sprawl.

Writing in Crain’s, Eddie Baeb reports that the new trend is changing the face of greater Chicago:
“Companies seeking to tap a broader talent pool and get into the flow of innovation are looking back to the urban core. Sara Lee is only the latest suburban company to seek a new headquarters in downtown Chicago. United Airlines made the move in the past decade, as did Navteq Corp. and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc.

“’The whole corporate campus seems a little dated,’ says Joe Mansueto, chairman and CEO of Morningstar, who moved the company’s 1,100 headquarters workers across the Loop to a new office tower at 22 W. Washington St. two years ago without even considering a move to the suburbs. ‘We’ve always liked being in Chicago. It helps keep employees on the pulse of what’s happening in our society. It keeps them current with cultural trends and possibly technological ones…’

Full commentary
Source: NRDC Switchboard, May 31, 2011

More Commentary