The New York Times explores how the Easton Town Center in suburban Columbus has contributed to several influential turn-of-the-21st-century trends in land use and community design, helping to reintroduce density as an attractive and profitable real estate design principle.
“You could say that the period from 1950 to 1990 was an urban planning aberration,” said Yaromir Steiner, chief executive of Steiner and Associates in Columbus, who moved to the area to help design and develop Easton Town Center. “We are finally correcting all of this.”
Steiner and Associates has taken the town center concept further at
Liberty Center off of I-75 in West Chester. The $300 million project opened late last year with plans for 800,000 square feet of retail space, 75,000 square feet of office space and 240 residences.
Lee Peterson, an executive vice president at WD Partners, a national design consultancy based in Columbus, estimated that after the development of Easton roughly 120 other mixed-use town centers have been built across the country.
Town centers, he said, are defying the trend of declining retail store sales nationwide.
“Town centers fit the scale that people like,” Peterson told
The Times. “Bigger isn’t better. Better is better.”
Read the full
New York Times story
here.
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