Joe Minicozzi asks, "What’s the value of a great downtown?"

Many of you in the Palm Beach County planning field will remember Joe Minicozzi. His ideas are written about in the blog, Smart Growth America; here is an excerpt:

     “As a community, if you have a finite limit of land, would you want $6,500 or $20,000, or $634,000 downtown an acre?” Minicozzi told Atlantic Cities. “People understand the cash-crop concept, so why aren’t we doing that downtown?”
     Minicozzi often cites an example from his hometown of Asheville. There, a Super Walmart two-and-a-half miles east of downtown is valued at a whopping $20 million—but it sits on 34 acres of land, meaning that it yields about $6,500 an acre in property taxes. A department store in downtown Asheville (that Public Interest Projects, Minicozzi’s parent company, bought and renovated) that’s now home to a beauty salon, retail, offices, and 19 condos, is worth $634,000 in tax revenue per acre—nearly ten times the property tax productivity per acre. Add sales tax revenue in to the equation and the downtown property is still worth more than six times as much as the Walmart per acre.

Something to think about when you're strolling the finite number of acres in our Lake Worth Dixie Hwy. corridor and along Lake and Lucerne avenues.