Top Ten Downtown City Revivals

Downtown is a phrase that conjures up a state of mind just as much as it is an actual location.  The term was first born in New York during the early 19th century to describe the hustle and bustle of the lower area of Manhattan.  Downtown was the heart of the city, where businesses and residential life created a beautiful blend.  Soon, this idea swept across the nation, defined by city centers with skyscrapers, homes, businesses and plenty of jobs. Keep reading to learn more about America's downtown, and the top ten cities where the downtown revival is worth checking out and find the full article here.

In the U.K., it’s called the “city centre,” in Germany, das Zentrum. Here, a century of explosive downtown growth defined the rise of America’s cities. They were the place to experience … everything and anything. We were drawn to them like luna moths to street lamps.Sadly, by the time Petula Clark‘s “Downtown” became a hit, in 1965, city hubs had already suffered through a couple of decades of ugly decline. In the post-World War II era, Americans left the cities en masse for the burgeoning suburbs. That urban flight led to years of neglect, rising crime, and industrial decay.But the American downtown has come crawling back from its near-death experience.Thanks to a surge of redevelopment in the mid-1990s, loft apartments were carved out of vacant office buildings, empty storefronts were taken up by trendy cafés, and once-downtrodden neighborhoods started to attract artists, rather than criminals.They’ve become places where people actually want to live.“People, young ones especially, love historical buildings that reintroduce them to the past,” says Dan Cort, author of the book “Downtown Turnaround.” “They want to live where they can walk out of the house, work out, go to a café, and still walk to work.”The past few years have seen a long list of high-profile companies moving their headquarters back downtown. Motorola Solutions ditched a Chicago suburb for the city’s once-gritty West Loop; Amazon is building its headquarters, featuring three crystal domes, in downtown Seattle.Such revivals boost property values to new heights and bring in some much-needed tourism dollars.To find downtowns that are rising from the grave, our data team considered several factors for downtowns* in the 200 largest U.S. cities:

• Downtown residential population growth since 2012
• Number of restaurants, bars, grocery stores and food trucks per capita, and growth since 2012
• Number of department stores and independent retailers per capita, and growth since 2012
• Number of jobs per capita, and growth since 2012
• Home price appreciation since 2012 (we picked downtowns where the median price was no more than $400,000 in 2012, so they were really in need of revival)
• “Premium” of buying a home in downtown, compared with the median home price of the whole city
• Residential and commercial vacancy rate (the lower the better).

Our top picks are not yet the ones that never sleep, but thanks to having turned around, they are now what the Urban Land Institute calls “18-hour markets“—a mix of shops, restaurants, and entertainment that generate excitement deep into the evening. Just listen to the music of a gentle bossa nova…