Quote:
Originally Posted by intrepidDesign
Time and time again I see this. Getting corporations to relocate from the suburbs is like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
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It's "robbing Peter to pay Paul" if you think about Peter and Paul as basically the same. If I like Paul way better and don't care much for Peter, and say, for example, he stole money from Paul in the past, I'm happier with Paul having the money.
I care a lot about the health of the metro region. I'm excited when a large HQ moves to or expands in the suburbs, like Caterpillar, Takeda or Zurich. I'm
more excited when a large operation moves downtown from anywhere. That's where most businesses belong and it was temporary market distortions and externalities that led them to decamp to highway-served greenfields in the first place.
Chicago's metro is better served if infrastructure and services can be concentrated in a hub. It's easier to get employees to one central place than it is to get them to numerous sprawling sites. Having a concentration of business downtown allows us to leverage our existing assets without having to dilute or reproduce them multiple times. I prefer dense, walkable, transit oriented environments and having a tax base and employment downtown makes it easier to serve that and build more of it. For all those reasons, I'd be super jazzed if Walgreens or someone like that left a highway-offramp campus behind to rot and moved to the city, despite not being especially interested in seeing rot develop anywhere.