“It was twenty years ago today…

The brief line that begins The Beatles’ titular song from the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a good place to start a story on central business district revival because it was approximately 20 years ago that The Institutional Real Estate Letter published a front-page story titled, “The Death of CBD: Can Office Properties Survive?”

But it is a good line for another reason. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is a baby boomer classic. And we all know what the baby boomers did. They moved to the suburbs.

Skip forward a lifetime and the people in the workforce today are the children of baby boomers, known as “millennials,” and we all know what they are doing: reversing direction, eschewing suburbs and moving back into CBDs.

“Now, the question I get the most is, ‘are the suburbs dead?’” notes Arthur Jones, a senior managing economist at