Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.
So, you’re a super-millionaire and you want to make a difference? There’s a downtown area somewhere in the U.S. that needs you. It’s become something of a new trend for successful business people to see new opportunities in reviving and reinvesting in American downtowns on the brink. Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans founder and Cleveland Cavaliers majority owner, is investing his resources in downtown Detroit. He’s gone on a major binge of property acquisitions there in recent years, and has helped to fuel a population boom by relocating his company’s headquarters downtown and incentivizing his workers to follow. In Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh of the online shoe retailer Zappos is making a huge investment into the once-thriving but now seedy downtown Vegas area. Hsieh is actively luring start-ups and more established businesses to relocate to some of the office and residential buildings he’s rehabbing, hoping to help spur a business revolution that will turn downtown around.
Gilbert and Hsieh may not be the only solutions for their cities, and their projects are certainly not panaceas. But they do represent innovative thinking that can be good for both business and the city. Could other successful business leaders follow in their footsteps?
Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.