Bright Lights, Home Workers - Company Business and Marketing

Home Office Computing, July, 2000 by Marilyn Zelinsky Syarto

OFTEN, ONE OF THE PLUSES OF URBAN LIVING IS A QUICK, CAR-FREE commute to the office. Even so, increasing numbers of work-at-home city dwellers are prompting real estate developers to build more suitable housing. Apartments and condo units designed especially for urban home-business owners and teleworkers are popping up in major U.S. cities.

In New York City, Full Spectrum Building & Development recently broke ground for The Millennium on Fifth, dubbed "Harlem's first smart home office building," a city-subsidized planned community. Tenants will have access to a T1 line for high-speed Internet access and a fully equipped business center on-site.

"Typically, renovating a house in Harlem means adding a coat of paint and nailing down the loose floorboards. No thought is given to how the tenant will use the space," explains Full Spectrum vice president Carlton Brown. "Information workers are the fastest growing segment of our city's economy. They need to be wired at home."

New York has plans to upgrade its infrastructure to allow for more buildings like The Millennium, including a project to transform a 175-mile stretch of an unused water-main system into a pipeline for fiber optic lines.

Creating dream homes for telecommuters takes more than wiring a building, says John Vivadelli, president of AgilQuest, a Richmond, Va.-based provider of reservations systems for mobile workers. Instead, Vivadelli says, developers should build "televillages"--self-contained complexes that combine residential, retail, and business amenities linked by a fiber optic network to the Web.

"A televillage is much more than a high-tech building," Vivadelli explains. "It's like an incubator where like-minded workers cluster to produce a certain synergy and lifestyle." Developers looking to attract demanding tenants need to view real estate as a flexible service rather than a static product, he adds.

Fanning Out Televillages under development elsewhere include Loft Condominiums for live/work tenants in Santa Fe, N.M.; Turtle Creek Condos for home businesses in Dallas; and Riverside Neighborhood high-tech apartments in Atlanta, to name a few. The last is designed to resemble a European-style town square, ringed with brownstones containing live/work apartments and support businesses like copy centers, all linked by PostSmart--a community Web network that keeps tenants updated on neighborhood goings-on.

Televillage-type housing "takes a long time to get approved and completed in urban areas because there are more political layers to peel through," admits Neil Takemoto, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Town Builders Association (www.ntba.net), a virtual gathering place for developers and planners of modern towns. "But cities realize they have to change. To people working in the new economy, housing options, choices, and flexibility equal freedom."