Business View Magazine | August 2019

271 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE AUGUST 2019 DES MOINES , IOWA SALT FOR ALL SEASONS SERVING THE MIDWEST FOR NEARLY 30 YEARS WWW.HUTCHINSONSALT.COM 620.856.3332 growth and housing – not a pretty position when you’re negotiating from a point of weakness. In the last ten years, I’ve found we’re generally negotiating from a point of strength and people want to be here for all the right reasons. When there are mergers and acquisitions, when a larger fish buys a smaller company, the actual job growth ends up occurring in Des Moines. For example, Nationwide Insurance, which is based in Columbus, OH, purchased this smaller insurer from Des Moines which has exploded and is one of our largest employers. They want to be here because the cost of doing business is lower than in much of the country, and our workforce is more productive. So, there’s this double bang for the buck to be here. And the employees want to be here because it’s an easy place to live. We just had another national ranking, recently, and when you do the ratio of housing costs, or cost of living, to wages, we rank Number One in the country. A couple of years ago, the Today Show called us the ‘Wealthiest City in America’ because your paycheck goes a lot further here in Des Moines.” Olson-Douglas believes that much of the city’s current good fortune is due to some visionary preparation performed more than two decades ago: “About 25 years ago, when downtown really was an eight-to-five center, we did a fair amount of planning. We brought in a design team from academia that saw Des Moines as a livable place that had broad support for arts and culture and a supportive philanthropic base. They came in and did some big picture planning for downtown, identifying that there were some strengths and opportunities in better connecting parts of downtown that were separate. We have a very iconic, gold-domed Capitol that’s separated from the central business district by about a mile. And the parts between were not inspiring. So, we have taken some of that visionary planning work and plucked off some big projects with the cooperation of the private business sector. We did some significant improvements to an area that we call Gray’s Lake Park, turning it from a gravel pit to a very nice park with a pedestrian bridge that draws over a million visitors a year. That happens to be along the route from downtown to the airport, which was identified as fairly dismal. So, we did some major streetscaping work along Fleur Drive that connects downtown to the airport. “We did a very large urban renewal project in the western part of our downtown, just west of our central business district, where the city and private business bought up five or six blocks of private property and tore a lot of it down for a park, and sold some of it to corporations. That area is now known as Western Gateway and we now have Wellmark Insurance Company, a Blue Cross and Blue Shield Company, headquartered along Gateway Park. Meredith Corporation, which recently bought Time Inc., is headquartered in downtown Des Moines. We have Krause at Gateway Center, the owner of Kum & Go, which has a new building. And there’s Federal Home Loan Bank - all located along the perimeter of this park, along with a number of old buildings along the edge that house restaurants, housing, and the like. It’s become a really nice, mixed-use district and an enviable spot for corporate growth. The other area that came out of this big picture vision planning was what we refer to as our East Village, which