More Companies Moving Back to the City

The suburbanization of business headquarters may be coming to an end.

1 minute read

April 29, 2010, 10:00 AM PDT

By Nate Berg


More businesses are ditching their suburban office park headquarters and moving back into the city, according to this piece from Harvard Business Review.

"The change is about more than evolving tastes; it's at least partly a reaction to real problems created by suburbs. Their damage to quality of life is well chronicled. For instance, studies in 2003 by the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion linked sprawl to rising obesity rates. (By contrast, new research in Preventive Medicine demonstrates, people living in more urban communities reap health benefits because they tend to walk more.) Car culture hurts mental health as well. Research by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman and his team shows that out of a number of daily activities, commuting has the most negative effect on people's moods. And economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer have found that commuters who live an hour away from work would need to earn 40% more money than they currently do to be as satisfied with their lives as noncommuters."

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 in Harvard Business Review

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