The World is Changing, So Should Your CID

I have an iPhone X that I bought in early 2018 for a trip I took to India. I wanted a better camera and a better operating system than the iPhone 6 I still carried around. Apple had done a great job selling me on the new technology in the iPhone X and the upgrade didn’t disappoint. I have stunning photos from my trip that make my heart sing every time I look at them.

Everyone who’s reading this likely has a similar story. Whether it's a new phone, a new app, or even a new outlook on life, our needs evolve and we seek things that better fit us. Companies like Apple recognize this and the result is constant innovation…a reimagining of what’s next to better meet our needs.

We would all do well to take cues from highly profitable companies. These lessons, however, not only apply to for-profit business models but in other arenas, too.

Innovate or Stagnate

The need to innovate, reboot, and reimagine applies to many constructs, including commercial submarkets and the public and private stakeholders who shape them. Understanding opportunities to create better, more valuable places will help commercial real estate interests and governments alike improve communities both big and small.

Back in the 1970s, commercial real estate (CRE) owners and developers put forth a visionary idea to protect as well as add value to their properties. They birthed a type of public-private partnership known as Improvement Districts. These organizations allowed CRE interests to make improvements to government-owned rights-of-way, thereby adding value to their properties and portfolios. Introduced in Georgia in the 1980s, these Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) allowed CRE owners to become big players in building roads, bridges, and other infrastructure important to their car-centric property models. Emulated over the decades and reshaped to better respond to more walkable-urban CRE trends, CIDs now exist in every noteworthy commercial area in metro Atlanta and are fast growing in many more.

As CIDs continue to form in urbanized nodes as well as smaller, less-dense communities, their shapes, structures, and missions have been retooled to fit the locals’ needs. More than three decades later, both private and public stakeholders would do well to reimagine the next generation of CIDs. Why? So we can see how investors, owners, and developers, along with city and county governments, can create better, more valuable places.

What Was, Is, and Could Be

To do this, I’ve embarked on a groundbreaking research project with Georgia Tech’s?Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation?and the?Center for Growth and Regional Development. Through my extensive experience leading CIDs through complex environments and the brilliantly analytical mind of?Debra Lam?and her team at Georgia Tech, we’ll take note of past trends as well as upcoming opportunities. Through a new perspective, both private and public stakeholders will be able to imagine more.

Surprisingly, there has been little study done on CIDs since the passage of Georgia’s state enabling legislation in 1984. Anecdotes and personal perspectives abound (including from me, a 25-year veteran of CIDs), yet more can be done to really understand them. They’ve affected billions of dollars, so it's worth looking into the following:

• Evolution: How have CIDs evolved over time? Are they still serving their original purpose or have those needs changed given shifting real estate cycles and trends?
• Stakeholders: Do CIDs primarily benefit the private sector or are governments eyeing them as a means to meet public-sector obligations?
• Financial Impact: What has been the overall financial impact of CIDs over time? What is the correlation of CIDs on real estate values?
• Standardization: What are the consistencies and inconsistencies in information? What’s tracked or measured and what are the best practices?
• Smart Cities: What role can CIDs play given the physical (infrastructure), digital (data), and social (people) frameworks necessary to effectively accommodate these needs and how do they currently drive innovation? How can programs, projects, or models be scaled across commercial markets of various sizes as they evolve over time?

Given the unique structure of CIDs (flexible, semi-independent, and public-private) my colleagues and I will look for opportunities to advance their evolving models. Through powerful machine learning analytics,?we'll gain a deeper understanding of the various submarkets that use CIDs and discover common threads to help them. We'll also seek out areas where further research is needed in order to gain an even more robust understanding going forward.

When finished, CRE owners, developers, and governments will have a peek into the future possibilities and opportunities provided by these powerful public-private partnerships. We look forward to sharing the results and reimagining what’s next.

About the Author: Malaika Rivers specializes in building commercial real estate portfolios and communities through strategic public-private partnerships between CRE owners, developers, and governments. She is a leading expert in Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) and advises on their best use as powerful tools for real estate and economic development.