My latest ULI Case Study is The Syndicate in St. Louis. Located in downtown, the building formerly known as the Syndicate Trust Tower was built in 1907 and previously a department store and offices. It is now renovated into condos, artist apartments and retail space. Taking advantage of state and federal affordable housing and historic tax credits, the Syndicate has no fewer than eight financing sources. Credit goes to the developers, Minneapolis based Sherman Associates and St. Louis based LoftWorks.

The building is a beautiful example of the Chicago School style, with a gorgeous off-white terra cotta exterior. It was adjacent to and on the same block as the former Century Building, which gained noteriety in 2004 when it was demolished and replaced by a 900 car parking garage, a move supported by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In their defense, demolishing the Century Building enabled the Old Post Office, located across the street, to be renovated. The new parking structure also provides critical and easily accessible parking for the apartments at the Syndicate, which gives it a distinct leg up on the competition in the local market. It is a shame to know the Century Building is lost, but the Old Post Office and Syndicate are very well done, and that is good for downtown St. Louis.

The Syndicate is a shining example of a vast number of great historic renovations in downtown St. Louis in recent years, most of which are feasible beacuse of the state of Missouri historic tax credits, a program that precious few states have. And worth noting, the Syndicate is a short walk from the light rail system in St. Louis, which also serves the airport.

On a recent visit to Chicago to tour a huge logistics hub, I spent an afternoon wandering around happily in Naperville, a suburb about 20 miles west and a little south of the loop. I spent hours exploring their pleasant downtown and Riverwalk area. It was a wonderful way to spend a summer day.

I heard good things from colleagues about Naperville. They were right. I parked my car at a nice diagonal parking stall with a bumpout from the curb designed to preserve a street tree. Already impressed by that, I headed to the Riverwalk. The city has plenty of money, but they clearly have spent it well on public amenities. Riverwalk is the shining example.

Trails line both banks of the river as it meanders through downtown. There are bridges evevry block or so, some for cars and people, and others are covered pedestrian bridges. Public art, plazas, overlooks, gazebos and simple benches line the river as well, and, with the bridges provide plenty of vistas and places to sit and linger. There is also an adjacent pond where you can rent paddleboats, a huge municipal pool/beach/picnic area, and a carillon tower built less than 10 years ago. Even a simple hill with a big lawn was a pleasant place to hang out. I have eternal respect for the landscape architects who designed the Riverwalk area. I didn’t turn a corner without being impressed.

The adjacent historic downtown is very well done. From my parking stall with the street tree, to the historic buildings, mix of tenants, newer construction, crosswalks, benches and public space, I was impressed. In addition to the retailers, Naperville draws people downtown with public amenities such as the Riverwalk, library, concert pavilion and parks.

First, the city is lucky to have an intact core of historic buildings with a nice mix of businesses, but they have done a great job with new construction and parking. New projects are attractive and enhance the streetscape. There are no blank walls. Sidewalks are as wide or wider than before. Such attention is paid to detail that even service alleys have public art. That’s right, in the Main Street Promenade building, an arcade is located at the center of the building. From the sidewalk, I could see a fountain at the far end - the “terminating vista.” I wandered in and found a restaurant patio, but what was jarring is the fountain, ornate and burbling, was located on the service alley, 10 feet from a delivery truck. Most other development hides the alley - Naperville embraces them!

I began to get delirious with with urban serendipity envy. It seemed like everywhere I turned I liked what I saw. A kayak on the river was timed for my camera lens to capture. A church steeple peeked elegantly through the trees of Central Park. I could retire in Naperville and spend my days wandering the streets.

Naperville is clearly well off. I have seen other rich cities that wall off their wealth. Naperville appears to have funneled their resources in to public improvements, expensive as they are, that improve the greater good. Everything is downtown. Even city hall is even located along the river, fitting in with the setting nicely. I have seen few other public buildings that blend so well with nature, public space and surrounding downtown uses.

And to top it off, Naperville is connected to downtown Chicago by commuter rail as part of the Metra system. I highly recommend a visit. You can view my photos at Picasaweb here.

The immortal words of John F. Kennedy are quite relevant these days. But change the word “country” to “community” and you get “Ask not what your community can do for you, ask what you can do for your community.” That how I look at it. I believe strong neighborhoods and community bonds are vital to democracy, and it is up to neighbors to work together to make it so by being involved at the local level and electing sensible officials who will make good decisions at the higher level.

The work of Richard Florida and the “creative class” is interesting and I buy in to it. We as a society have choices in where to live, and cities are aware that they need to provide quality places and not just jobs to attract critical talent. But we need to be careful that we don’t feel an entitlement that cities provide us with everything in a top-down sort of way. My casual observation since the release of Florida’s book is that too often city fathers and mothers of a down and out rust-belt town think they can create a hip district and attract a groundswell of young creative people. That is a bit simplistic, if not misdirected. More than ever, I think strong civic involvement is critical to creating long term sustainable communities.

I was in Tucson last year, and, as I love to do when traveling, I opened the local paper. Inside I found an editorial about the lack of community participation and interest in Tucson. Maybe it is the lack of year-round homeowners in Tucson, or perhaps the nice weather creating a lull of complacency among Tucson citizens, but it got me thinking about how nice it is that my hometown of Minneapolis is very civic-minded, and also why it is so.

Civic-minded as we may be, here in Minneapolis we are faced with a major change in how neighborhood groups work with the city to make improvements to the community. 20 years ago the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) was created to keep Minneapolis a vibrant place in the face of a drug and gang epidemic, suburban flight and declining school enrollment. A TIF district was created in our thriving downtown to disperse millions of dollars across the city - to spread the wealth. Neighborhood groups were formed across the city to work together and choose how to spend that money.

If the creators of the MasterCard “priceless” commercials were advertising for the NRP program, it would go something like this: TIF dollars to finance neighborhood development - $280 million. Neighborhood groups benefiting from NRP - 84. Real estate development resulting from NRP - $1 billion. Tax dollars generated from that investment over a 20-year period - $250 million. Citizen involvement in the decision making process of their neighborhoods - priceless.

A great number of community enhancements have resulted in the intervening 20 years. Minneapolis is a great place to live, in part because of the funding from that TIF district, but also because it allowed residents to have an increased say in the future of their city. You can find all the statistics to measure the success of the NRP, but the citizen involvement part is much more qualitative, and therefore interesting. It is indeed priceless.

Recently, the 20-year TIF district was extended for another decade, which will allow NRP to continue. But there will be changes in its level of funding and how it will be run. As a result, there will be fallout as neighborhood groups realize they may have their main source of funding curtailed.

Put in perspective, the city faces very different challenges than 20 years ago. And although we can no longer count on the same reliable source of income, I doubt interest in community participation will necessarily suffer. Rather, my gut says it will increase when neighbors realize they can no longer count on the city directly. This presents great opportunities to work amongst ourselves to raise money through other means such as grants and private dollars.

In other words, it is time for the residents of Minneapolis to ask not what the city can do for them, but what they can do for the city.

Three recent articles got me thinking about neighborhoods and their importance in society. The first, a column by David Brooks in the New York Times, was a discussion of the rise of conservatism in Britain. It contains references to the importance of neighborhoods, community, and dense social bonds as ways to improve society rather than top-down government policy. I’m no expert on British politics, but it strikes me that the notion of strong neighborhoods and community can be both a liberal and conservative virtue. All politics is local, right? Dare I say it, neighborhoods may be the only places where we indeed have common ground. Is improving the world best achieved with a top-down or bottom-up approach?

The second article, also in the New York Times, was about the importance of getting to know your neighbors. The author, who incidentally is writing a book about neighborhoods, gets to know his neighbors by spending time with them during their everyday routines, and even sleeping over at their houses. I told a neighbor of mine about the article, and she seemed to think we could get to know each other just fine without a sleepover. Still, Peter Lovenheim’s article in the Times is very thought-provoking, and getting to know your neighbors better could have some far-reaching positive effects on our lives.

Bill Bishop just released a book called The Big Sort, which looks at how we Americans prefer to live near like-minded people, and have indeed sorted ourselves accordingly, often living in neighborhoods that are lopsided politically. An article in the Economist about the Big Sort, describes a Ron Paul-ville in west Texas where libertarian supporters can live free together.

Perhaps the Ron Paul neighborhood is a bit extreme, but as an observer and writer of the real estate development world, I can see how like-minded people wind up near each other. Housing and retail developers use complex psychographic analysis to identify target markets and determine design. The result is retirement communities, golf communities, green communities; you name it, you can probably find a place that suits you. We cannot hold developers accountable for the increasing divide among liberals and conservatives, but give them credit for idenifying niche markets in a society with many choices and building developments that resonate.

It does beg the question: what does a neighborhood that pleases both liberals and conservatives look like?

What is interesting about these three articles is they all relate to neighborhoods, how they work and the importance of strong community. I realize the very fact that I reference articles from the New York Times and the Economist probably pegs me as the latte-sipping sort who lives in an elite, blue-voting, urban neighborhood. That isn’t quite the case. My neighborhood in Minneapolis (I call it the Lower East Side) is a blue collar area of the city with mostly small homes. It is changing over from an older, blue collar neighborhood as younger, more white-collar buyers move in for the value and the proximity to parks and light rail.

I know many of my neighbors, albeit not too well until a few of us started having kids. But I value the neighborhood in general, and believe that neighbors need to work together to have a strong community.

Design of places is important, however. I have seen a great number of new developments that offer a range of housing and market to a broad cross section of the market, and, critically, they are designed so as to encourage a strong sense of community. Simple things like sidewalks, porches, and public gathering places like playgrounds, bandshells, and town squares, allow neighbors to meet and get to know each other. They aren’t forcing something on society, but they sure do make it easier to be neighborly.

My neighborhood is that way. Like I said, we are kind of diverse, we have small lots, sidewalks, playgrounds and other amenities for a healthy community. I wish we had a formal neighborhood square at our core, but at least we have some good neighborhood bars, bakeries and coffee shops that act as third places.

Yes, design is important, which informs how we interact with our world. It is hard to dislike a neighbor when you are sitting on their patio sharing a drink; it is easy to do so in an anonymous online forum. It is much easier to be civil when walking down a sidewalk or sharing a train than when you are behind the wheel of a car, enclosed in the safety of two tons of steel and glass. People become artificially empowered in their cars, and thus we have road rage. If you bump in to someone when you walk down the street, you can say sorry, or if you find each other attractive, exchange phone numbers. If you bump in to a friend on the sidewalk, you stop to chat and maybe head to the nearest pub or coffee shop. If you bump in to someone with your car, whether or not you know them or find them attractive, you have to call your insurance agent. If someone cuts you off, you honk, maybe make a gesture, and possibly become aggressive and race ahead and cut them off yourself. Now which urban reality is more neighborly? There is the potential for human interaction at an urban scale that cannot happen in automobile society. Which do you prefer?

Alas, design isn’t everything. To take up David Brooks’s discussion, good community only happens when members of the community get together to make it so. All the great design only goes so far when nobody is there to use it. My neighborhood is a great place because of design, but also because we neighbors want to make it so. We have a lot of civic involvement in Minneapolis because enough of my neighbors care to do something about it.

So I say spend more time in public. Get to know your neighbors, liberal and conservative. Make some positive change in your little corner of the world. Make your neighborhood more pleasant through design, or mere civility. Or just sit and watch the world go by, together.

Kids are easy to entertain in a city. Ellis and I made a visit to Chicago a couple months ago, and all I had to do was ride the train, or just see a train. He could stand under the “L” and watch all day. To see for yourself, watch the video of Ellis on You Tube here. It starts with him going crazy yelling “train, train,” then pivoting his head to watch the cars go by. Then he says, “Bye, bye, train.” At the very end he says “another one?”

We had a nice couple of days, walking the streets, riding the “L,” visiting the Children’s Museum, eating smoothies and Dunkin’ Donuts, and then capping it off with another train ride to Milwaukee to see grandma and grandpa. A great urban weekend for a little urban kid.