Charter or magnet schools are probably the most practical policy mechanism to achieve the goal of bringing vitality downtown. I recommend that the city reach out to the Phoenix Elementary School District and the Arizona Charter School Foundation, specifically seeking to add more open enrollment schools throughout the city's core and help promote local partnerships with existing cultural amenities already located there.

Co-location with employment would help bring such destination schools to the area, where unproven demand likely exists now. Parents could drop off their kids on the way to work, and would be eager to do so if said schools uniquely benefited from their location by way of the educational experience offered. This in turn would attract more families to live near the schools and thereby help solve the chicken and egg dilemma of creating a more livable downtown. With increased residential population, other neighborhood amenities will follow. With neighborhood amenities, neighborhoods become more desirable and therefore more densely populated.