Most Rockford leaders agree a healthy, active downtown is essential to our entire city's economic success. The million dollar question is how to create a city center where people want to live and work. Now some developers and city leaders say the answer is artists.

"We need cool, creative people to stay within our city boundaries, to move downtown and once you get that collection of really cool people, living and working, other people want to live down near them," says Ron Clewer, a steering committee member for the new downtown development group the Element.

Monday night, a city council committee gave first-round approval to a project that would encourage artists to locate downtown. It's an arts overlay zoning district. It would allow people loosely termed as artists, including architects and engineers, to move into combined live-work spaces downtown, without having to apply for a special use permit.

Unlike the currently sanctioned home-operated businesses, ventures within the overlay area could have multiple employees, post small signs outside and would be granted parking space.

To anchor development in the area, the Element is working to bring in a 35- to 40-unit arts-only apartment complex built by the non-profit realty group Artspace. The Element is currently raising money for a study that would determine where to place the complex.

Rockford aldermen are also giving the green light to a separate downtown development to start bringing in TIF dollars. The complex stretching from 317 to 325 West Jefferson Street is being rehabbed into a storefront downstairs and six apartments up top. Now tax dollars from the surrounding area will start funneling back in to help pay for the project.

"It's not a very large-scale project but it's one in which, if we get a lot of people on a smaller scale to buy in, we can replicate that, 15, 20 times and hopefully we'll see great improvement over there," says Rockford Alderman Joe Sosnowski.

The Jefferson Street project is already underway and is expected to wrap up later this year. Meanwhile the arts overlay district could be up a vote from the full council in two weeks.