Chattanooga Innovation District — 140 Acres Built on Public Gigabit Fibre

In 2015 the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee designated 140 acres of downtown as an Innovation District. It rests on three assets described by Brookings: placemaking (about USD 120 million of riverfront parks and cultural-institution expansion from 2005, and roughly USD 480 million of private downtown construction investment by 2015), anchor institutions (EPB, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, The Enterprise Center) and a collaborative ecosystem (CO.LAB incubator, the 90,000 sq ft Edney Innovation Center, the GigTank startup competition, Lyndhurst and Benwood foundation support).
The technology backbone is EPB's municipally owned network: USD 228 million in local revenue bonds and USD 111.6 million of US Department of Energy smart-grid funding financed fibre, 175,000 smart meters and 1,200 intelligent switches, enabling 1-gigabit internet. The NetBridge programme offers high-speed internet to low-income households at half price.
Evidence is mostly descriptive (Brookings, 2015) rather than a counterfactual evaluation of jobs or firm growth. Nonprofit Quarterly reports that Chattanooga ranked in the top ten of 102 metro areas for income inequality in 2014, had the seventh-highest rate of rent increases, and that ZIP 37408 (Southside) saw the second-fastest gentrification in the US, with the white share rising from 7.2% to 45.9% between 2000 and 2010. Lesson: the district-plus-public-fibre model is transferable, but inclusion and housing safeguards must be designed in from the start.

Read the full analysis: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/an-innovation-district-grows-in-chattanooga/