{"id":1004096068,"date":"2014-05-07T12:04:58","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T20:04:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.commercialsearch.com\/news\/?p=1004096068"},"modified":"2022-12-08T19:32:01","modified_gmt":"2022-12-09T03:32:01","slug":"the-other-central-business-districts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.commercialsearch.com\/news\/the-other-central-business-districts\/","title":{"rendered":"The OTHER Central Business Districts"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Robert Bach, National Director of Market Analytics, Newmark Grubb Knight Frank<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Bob<\/a>\u00a0A couple of months ago in this column I wrote about how the demise of the suburban office market has been greatly exaggerated. Our first-quarter analysis supports this claim. With two-thirds of the total office inventory, the suburbs accounted for 86 percent of first-quarter absorption and 56 percent of space under construction. Suburbs have suffered from bad PR, but they are recovering.<\/p>\n

Central Business Districts (CBDs), on the other hand, have enjoyed good press ever since the TV show, \u201cFriends,\u201d convinced a generation of 20-somethings that it was hipper to live in Manhattan than Brady Bunch territory. Not all CBDs are created equal, however. While apartments, restaurants and entertainment venues are sprouting in most downtowns, it\u2019s also true that many CBD office markets aren\u2019t recovering as quickly.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s compare the office markets in the original 24-hour CBDs of New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle with the 53 CBDs anchoring other metro areas with populations of at least 1 million. I use the term \u201coriginal 24-hour CBDs\u201d because most of the other 53 CBDs livened up only recently, whereas these six were 24-hour CBDs before it was cool. In my analysis, I have included submarkets adjacent to traditional high-rise CBDs that have attracted office tenants in recent years, often technology and marketing companies in search of creative space or cost-conscious tenants looking for bargain-priced space near the urban core.<\/p>\n

The analysis reveals that the original 24-hour CBDs are in a class by themselves. Consider the following:<\/p>\n