Downtown Long Beach Associates (DLBA) will host this year’s California Downtown Association (CDA) Annual Conference this week, October 24-26.
CDA, which represents thousands of diversified businesses throughout California, has selected Architects of Change: Leading Downtowns to Success for this year’s theme. Downtown executives, city management, city partners and elected officials from across the state will have the opportunity to attend a wide variety of educational seminars. Topics include, but are not limited to, economic development, special events and marketing, and mixed-use developments.
“This is a terrific opportunity for Downtown Long Beach to display itself as a progressive urban laboratory illustrating the many positive changes it has undergone during the last few years,” said Kraig Kojian, President and CEO of DLBA. “I believe this year’s theme, Architects of Change, speaks to the evolution of Downtown Long Beach.”
In addition, conference attendees are certain to benefit from the experience and insight of keynote, Dr. Chris Leinburger, who is a land use strategist, developer, teacher, consultant and author. His appearance in Downtown Long Beach will coincide with the release of his new book, The Option of Urbanism: Investing the Next American Dream, which highlights that the age of urbanism is upon us, giving market, economic, fiscal and environmental reasons to develop walkable urban places.
To make the conference an absolute must-attend, Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster will host a Mayor’s Forum where he will be joined by mayors from other California cities to discuss issues facing cities today. The forum will be moderated by Pulitzer-Prize, Grammy and Golden Mike Award-winning syndicated radio show host and Los Angeles Times columnist, Patt Morrison, and will take a hard look at the future of our cities and focusing on our Downtowns. The dialogue will include the role of regionalism, neighborhood issues, quality of life and whether central cities can survive a painful downturn in the economy and tax revenues.
Conference participants will also tour Downtown Long Beach, enjoy a welcome reception at Café Sevilla, attend a social gathering aboard the historic Queen Mary, and take part in a Pub and Club Crawl throughout the Downtown. As an added bonus, attendees are encouraged to experience the variety of public transit available in Downtown, including the Aqua Link that ferries passengers from Rainbow Harbor to the Queen Mary and the free Passport Shuttle.
“The California Downtown Association has continued to grow yearly and our conferences reflect our outreach to members in organizations and cities both large and small,” said CDA President Florence Weiss. “We are excited to showcase Downtown Long Beach at this year’s conference and look forward to the networking and professional opportunities the conference will provide. And of course, with all these downtown professionals together, there’ll be great fun as well!”
Downtown Long Beach is an ideal location for CDA’s annual conference. It was recently named by the Urban Land Institute as one of the Top Ten Turnaround Downtowns in the nation and also recognized by California Planning and Development Report as California’s #3 Best Big City, touted by its editors as having “…ethnic restaurants and shops everywhere, often underneath new loft residences. There may be no West Coast downtown that is a more enjoyable place to be a pedestrian.”
For more information on CDA and the annual conference, please visit www.californiadowntown.com or call (562) 485-3133.