Dive Brief: - The versatility of LED lighting gives property owners a value-creating lever they can pull if they make the investment, architectural lighting company Color Kinetics says in a report. - Philadelphia invested $6.85 million in 2024 to install more than 200 color-changing floodlights outside the city’s 123-year-old City Hall to turn the building into a canvas for expressing what’s happening in the city. This “real-time civic platform,” Color Kinetics says in the report, “enables the City of Philadelphia to respond to events, causes and celebrations through lighting.” Some $12 million in economic value can be traced to the project, the report claims. - The report showcases three other lighting projects that together have generated roughly $10 million in economic value by turning the built environment into a focal point that attracts additional investment. “Public lighting,” the report says, can “contribute to tourism, economic development, community pride, and urban revitalization.” Dive Insight: Since facility managers started leveraging the technology to reduce energy costs in the early 2000s, LED lighting has grown into the second most common type of lighting in commercial buildings, behind fluorescent bulbs, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Forty-four percent of U.S. commercial buildings used LED lighting between 2012 and 2018, compared to 68% which had standard fluorescent bulbs in that time, EIA says. In its report, Color Kinetics says the programmable nature of the technology makes LED lighting a kind of media that can be deployed creatively to give a dynamic quality to the built environment, leading to projects that have “economic, cultural and social impact.” In West Sacramento, California, private developer and property manager Fulcrum Property partnered with the city in 2017 to build an open-air multi-use space called The Barn that helped generate economic interest in what was a neglected industrial part