Unfolding Trends That Will Dominate the Next Year

In a prestigious office tower minutes away from Philadelphia’s City Hall in the heart of its downtown, you can find a Primrose school, one of a national system of accredited private preschools. You can also find one at a 53-acre mixed-use community in Brookhaven, GA, which features residential units and 66,000 square feet of retail space. In the Grant Park submarket of Atlanta, there is a Primrose School occupying the space where an obsolete warehouse used to sit.

Move over street-level retail and green walking trails. The latest amenity for mixed-use projects is a school, according to Jo Kirchner, CEO of the educational institution. There are more than 25 million children under the age of 5 living in the US today and the majority of their families live in child care deserts, she explains. Which is certainly of interest to city and school officials, but mixed-use developers? Yes, Kirchner says. “Primrose schools, for instance, draw in parents twice-a-day, five-days-a-week, many of whom are higher-income millennials—the most active generation of homebuyers in the nation.”