Suburban Office Parks Are Losing Their Beige-Tinted Shimmer

Just as the tide has turned against large-lot suburban residential subdivisions, corporations are moving back into town (or, as in the case of Dublin, Ohio, doing everything they can to make their suburb more urban in character). The best and the brightest of the rising labor force, it turns out, don’t care to live and work in sprawl.

“'The whole corporate campus seems a little dated,' says Joe Mansueto, chairman and CEO of Morningstar, who moved the company’s 1,100 headquarters workers across the Loop to a new office tower at 22 W. Washington St. two years ago without even considering a move to the suburbs. ‘We’ve always liked being in Chicago. It helps keep employees on the pulse of what’s happening in our society. It keeps them current with cultural trends and possibly technological ones.’”

Baeb’s article also points out that central city locations help recruiting efforts not only with young, urban professionals but also with workers throughout the region: “For most people in greater Chicago, it’s easier to commute downtown than to a suburb on the other side of the metropolitan area.” That, of course, is a textbook illustration of what transportation researchers call “regional (or “destination”) accessibility,” the single most powerful indicator among land-use factors of how far people will drive, on average, over the course of a year. Central locations both facilitate transit access and reduce driving distances.