Establishing a new factory in the United States isn’t just about putting a building on a piece of land, writes Gresham Smith Director of Energy Strategy Dave Verner in a Site Selection exclusive. “It is a dynamic capital investment that requires labor strategy, regulatory compliance, long-term operational commitment and even geopolitical positioning. Missteps in the early phases, whether in regulatory navigation, team selection or site evaluation, can compound into massive cost overruns or operational bottlenecks down the line.”
“While traditional indicators focus on infrastructure or business costs,” IMD World Competitiveness Center Chief Economist Christos Cabolis tells Site Selection, “our index captures how well a city’s digital infrastructure, services and governance actually function in practice, as perceived by the people who live and work there.” Read our full conversation with him in this online-only bonus Q&A: “Smart Insights on Smart Cities.”
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in our 71 years in business it’s who to learn things from, writes Adam Bruns. See the long list of thought leaders contributing to this issue of Site Selection alone and read a sparkling testimonial like no other we’ve received.
The New York Times discovered Atlanta’s Centennial Yards project last week, following the lead of Site Selection’s September 2024 exploration of this fast-moving redevelopment. The publication has talked to Centennial Yards CEO Brian McGowan a number of times over the years, including this 2012 story about government data transparency when he had left a post with the U.S. EDA to head up Invest Atlanta. “One of my goals,” he said then, “is to start bringing people together toward some common goals.” Thirteen years later, Centennial Yards embodies that aspiration.
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Top metros of origin for U-Haul moves to Chicago this year are Milwaukee and Indianapolis from out of state and Champaign from within Illinois.
Photo courtesy of U-Haul®
Celebrating its 80th year in business, U-Haul last week released a report examining one-way customer transactions from January to July 2025 to determine the leading origins for trucks, trailers and U-Box® moving containers bound for the 35 metro areas with populations greater than 2 million. “Many of the largest U.S. metros are in growth mode — a change from what was seen following the COVID-19 pandemic when people took advantage of remote work and migrated to less-crowded markets,” the company stated. “More recently, big cities and their expanding suburbs are back to greeting a robust inflow of U-Haul equipment.”
Excluding their home states, most of those metros welcomed the most movers from neighboring states. However, there are exceptions: While Michigan and Pennsylvania were the top two non-Ohio point-of-origin states for Cleveland, Ohio, Florida came in at No. 2. Florida also was No. 2 for Detroit and Indianapolis, and No. 3 for Houston.
The Urban Land Institute has announced 10 recipients of the organization’s 2025 Americas Awards for Excellence, chosen from 18 finalists and 94 original applicants. Among the winners is Hunter’s Point South Park in Long Island City, Queens, New York. Designed by Tom Balsley Associates (now SWA/Balsley), the park is part of Queens West, a large mixed-use development for the borough’s industrial waterfront for which the visioning process began in 1993. Phase 1 of the park opened in 2013 helped by a $25 million investment from the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). Phase 2 opened in 2018.
Other 2025 ULI Americas Awards for Excellence winners include Dayton Arcade in Dayton, Ohio; Mercado Urbano Tobalaba (MUT), a $600 million transit-oriented “microcity” in Santiago, Chile; the Pearl House office-to-residential conversion in New York City; Tom Lee Park in Memphis, Tennessee; and the Waterworks mixed-use development in downtown Toronto.
