These Lively Neighborhoods Keep Urban Office Markets Humming
These Live-Work-Shop communities offer lessons in what can keep a neighborhood active.
Many prominent Live-Work-Shop neighborhoods are outperforming the broader market in which they reside, according to CBRE, lending hope to this slice of the office market. CBRE points to Chicago’s Fulton Market and East Austin in Texas among others as examples of these communities where average quarterly net absorption has significantly outstripped their home markets since Q1 2020.
These communities offer a high walk score and are very attractive to younger professionals that like living close to their offices and having a wide array of retail, entertainment and social amenities nearby.
Chicago’s Fulton Market may be among the best known Live-Work-Shop neighborhoods. It combines a cluster of Michelin Star restaurants with highly functional office space. About 40% of this office space was delivered within the past two years. Fulton Market’s mix of special neighborhood amenities with newly opened office space puts it on a different plane than the rest of the Chicago market.
East Austin in Texas is another strong market considered by some to be one of the best places to live in the state with its urban/suburban feel. Still another is the Penn Plaza area on New York City’s West Side, with Penn Station, which has many daily commuters, and underwent a major rehabilitation. In the area is also Penn 1, a skyscraper between 33rd and 34th streets, west of Seventh Avenue, as well as the famous Madison Square Garden.
Another strong Live-Work-Shop neighborhood is the Seaport District in Boston, which has been improved in recent years with offices, the Institute of Contemporary Art, restaurants and housing. It is now considered one of its city’s most sophisticated neighborhoods, transformed from former abandoned warehouses. The fourth area that’s noteworthy of this trend is Denver’s well-known Cherry Creek neighborhood. According to real estate practitioner Kristin Harris, who wrote a blog about the area, “With the Cherry Creek commercial center at its heart, Cherry Creek North is the tony sibling of the three Cherry Creeks. It is exclusive, luxurious, walkable…,” she says.