According to Charles Kenny in “The Upside Of Down”:
“University of Chicago economist Jesse Shapiro looked at US metropolitan areas to study which ones grew faster…40 percent of the employment growth was due to demands from all of those graduates for improvements in the city’s quality of life. In short, Shapiro found that cities with more bars and restaurants grew faster.
“Harvard’s Ed Glaeser and his colleagues similarly found that US cities with more live performance venues and restaurants saw faster population growth in the last quarter of the twentieth century (although bowling alleys were a growth killer).”
Or, as Alan Ehrenhalt states in “The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City”:
“The late twentieth century was the age of poor inner cities and wealthy suburbs; the twenty-first century is emerging as an age of affluent inner neighborhoods and immigrants settling on the outside. The movement of singles, couples, and empty-nest baby boomers back to the center gathered momentum in the first decade of the new century stalled in the recession at the end of the decade, and will eventually resume.”
Lancaster Square East needs to be razed and developed with upscale rentals and condos, housing that empty nesters and young professional desire.
Spending public funds lavishly to make the Lancaster Hotel fully competitive with the Marriott and turning the former Hess Department Store / Bulova building into a bowling alley are just about the worst possible things that the city can do.
