Flexing live/work spaces

Flickr photo by faster panda kill kill.

Christopher Eley says he routinely puts in 15-hour days at the gourmet meat market he has owned for two years. At the end of a day like that, the last thing the Indianapolis businessman wants to do is face a long drive home. And so he doesn't.

Instead, Eley secures the doors to his shop, called Goose the Market, and treads upstairs to the 2,000-square-foot flat he owns.

"It has worked out really well," said Eley. "Obviously, I spend a lot of time at work, and this shortens the commute and saves on expenses. Plus, I was able to purchase the building, and most first-time business owners don't have that opportunity."

Eley and his like-minded neighbors have embraced a movement in residential development known as "live/work," which typically combines a residence upstairs with a business at street level. Though just a few years ago it was solely the province of frugal artists who scraped by in a combined studio and apartment, the idea has expanded and has begun to attract a broad range of professionals.

"It harkens back to the idea of living over the store" that was popular many decades past, and is part of the broader revival in downtown living, said John McIlwain, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a development think tank in Washington, D.C. "It's like doing rental over retail, only here you would own both units."

McIlwain acknowledges that, like the rest of the housing market, the live/work niche is not exactly booming.

"It will be more attractive when the market comes back, though, to small entrepreneurs or people who are accountants or have small businesses," he said.

Yet the concept is hardly dead -- in the depths of the housing recession, developers have unveiled live/work projects across the country, from Los Angeles to Lowell, Mass., and from Honolulu to Huntsville, Ala.

In a nod to the times, some have switched the residential component to rental. And their offerings are not uniformly styled, McIlwain says.

"Some have a garage in back that can be (legally) converted into an office, (and) some think of it as an open space down and an apartment above," he said.

There are lots of variations, he said. "It's more likely to be a kind of extra office space or convertible space," and some of the plans may be flexible enough to convert to a second residential space for a family member.

Eley's downstairs neighbors in the five-unit Douglass Pointe Lofts project in Indianapolis are mostly retail, and they include a hair salon, a yoga studio, a personal trainer and two marketing firms. Four of the five business owners live upstairs, he said.  ...CONTINUED

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