While our scale is different, these considerations should be top-of-mind

I love that housing continues to pop up all over Old Town. It adds to the vibrancy of our central business district and brings a wonderful urban feel to downtown. I hope, as more development projects come to Old Town, that we never lose the "sense of family" you can find in the nooks and crannies of the district that welcome children to play and explore with their parents. Those experiences will cultivate a new generation of downtown residents who will be important to the city's future.

CEOs for Cities released their report on City Kids today. I think the report offers some interesting insights:

For 50 years, having that first child usually meant heading out of the city in search of a more “family-friendly” lifestyle. But now that young adults are 33 percent more likely than other Americans to live in close-in neighborhoods, progressive urban leaders are asking if they can break the traditional pattern of family migration to the suburbs.

To get answers, we turned to the Institute of Design. We asked teams of designers there to help us develop a deep understanding of the market and how they might be moved to alter their behavior.

Their approach was to study pioneering urban parents. Rather than ask people what they might do in hypothetical situations, they studied what people choosing to raise their children in cities are actually doing. They also interviewed urban and suburban “discontents” -- parents not completely satisfied with their current situations.

What they found is that the top concerns of parents about city living are safety, space and schools. But they found that satisfied urban parents had ways to address each of these concerns. The very nature of the city alleviated their safety concerns with its density and “eyes on the street.” They supplemented their lack of private space by using the city’s public spaces, such as parks and sidewalks. And they augmented their children’s education with the city’s diversity and cultural and other assets.

For pioneering city parents — and we found many of them — cities are the perfect place to raise children.

City Kids