Not that long ago, more than a quarter of offices in the city of Bellevue stood empty, and downtown was marked by the skeletons of halfcompleted buildings and yawning construction pits collecting rain. Just six years later, 18 tower cranes have returned to the city's skyline, the office vacancy rate is less than 4 percent and shrinking, and the companies clamoring to get into town aren't upstart dot-coms but upscale tenants, including the first Neiman Marcus in the Pacific Northwest.

Looking east and south from downtown's glass towers is even more telling. The central business district (CBD) is bustling with workers and residents, but what's about to happen in the city's neighborhoods will change the way Bellevue and other cities on the east side of Lake Washington work. Bellevue continues to inspire investment while building a sense of community.

Bellevue's bounce-back from the tech bust at the turn of the century is impressive in its own right, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. Businessmen and politicians, not always natural allies in Bellevue, say today's success is built on decades of planning that sometimes inspired name calling, but looks astonishingly prescient -- even fashionable -- in 2008. "Somehow, Bellevue got it right, from the beginning," says Greg Johnson, president of developer Wright Runstad, which has been doing business in Bellevue for more than 20 years.

Wright Runstad has developed 14 million square feet of office and mixed-use projects. Its high-rise buildings help define the skylines of both Bellevue and Seattle. But the largest project in the company's 35-year history is not in either downtown, and with associated development, it's going to take another two or three decades to finish. The $1.5 billion "Spring District" being built between Bellevue and Redmond, along the 900-acre Bel-Red Road corridor, could be thought of as a second downtown. It will be both urban and residential. "It will be self-contained, with everything you need to live and work there in your daily life," Johnson says. "One of the reasons we felt it was attractive to build there is, the city had already laid the groundwork. It laid the foundation for its success with rules it put in place more than 20 years ago."

Bellevue is a comparatively young city, having incorporated in 1953, but that's not the place to start. "I think we're proceeding along a journey that's been cast ever since the county did the planning for a place called Bellevue, a subregional city to Seattle but a regional center for everything on the eastside," says developer Kemper Freeman, whose father opened the first shopping mall in the area, Bellevue Square, in 1946 and whose "Bellevue Collection" now includes downtown's Lincoln Square and Bellevue Place in addition to the mall.

"People who live and work here have a propensity to spend an extraordinary amount of time on what I call community building," says Freeman. Bellevue's schools, nationally acknowledged as among the best public schools in the country, were planned to be that way. "Schools are a classic case of a group of people here on the eastside who took a long view and said we need to have the best schools possible, so that anybody moving to the Northwest would want to live here," says Freeman, whose father was also the first chairman of the school district. Another example: Overlake Golf & Country Club, which opened for play on June 27, 1953, when Bellevue had about a thousand residents. "It sounds like a minor point, but to create a significant golf course early on attracts more people." Volunteers also founded Overlake Hospital Medical Center to put a hospital in Bellevue. "Having to be hauled across the floating bridge was a real risk," Freeman says. "My grandfather died of a heart attack when they were unable to get to Seattle soon enough to save him. That happened to a lot of people."