NEW YORK, NY.- It seems everyone is a little country these days: Markets for Western-themed fashion have been reenergized, and country music is hotter than it has been in decades.

“We call it the ‘Yellowstone effect,’” said Joel Cowley, CEO of the Calgary Stampede in Alberta, one of the largest rodeos in the world. “There’s a romanticism about the West and the cowboy that comes and goes. But I’m not sure in my lifetime that I’ve ever seen it as high as it is now.”

Cowboy culture going mainstream has translated to economic opportunities for cities and towns with a Western heritage. This summer, 1.5 million fans attended the Calgary Stampede to experience the annual rodeo show filled with concerts, cattle and circus performers. Those 10 days were a record turnout for the Canadian city’s marquee event, and officials are trying to emulate that vibrancy for the other 355 days of the year. Similar moves are taking place in other cities known for their cowboy culture, including Denver, Houston and Kansas City, Missouri.

In Calgary, that means transforming the area where the Stampede is held, and the adjoining neighborhoods, into a year-round entertainment and cultural district that influences growth and investment downtown, said Kate Thompson, president and CEO of Calgary Municipal Land Co., which is charged with redeveloping the area, which has hosted fairs since 1886.

“We sometimes joke that we’re building an Olympic Village while hosting an Olympics,” she said.

Calgary, like other cities and towns that were once shipping points for livestock, is discovering that the low-lying, unfavorable, often-flood-prone land that made sense to devote to livestock and processing cattle instead of homes and businesses offers a hotbed for new developments.

These cities hope their real estate projects will result in something similar to the successful stockyards redevelopment in Fort Worth, Texas.

There, local leaders worked with developers for more than a decade to capitalize on the city’s cow town heritage. The success of that project brought scores of sports and entertainment events, millions of visitors and new developments, including hotels, restaurants and retail, with plans for more.

Thompson’s group, which is owned by the city of Calgary, has been one of the driving forces behind transforming roughly 290 acres of fairgrounds, parking lots and low-density development east of downtown into a new district with multiple arenas, restaurants, stores and hundreds of residential units. The first phase included a new light-rail stop near the park, $100 million in infrastructure improvements and a $500 million expansion of the BMO Centre arena that began hosting events in June.

Next, the group has plans to build thousands of additional residential units and venues for art and opera, as well as parks, a youth center and the Stampede Trail, a wide commercial street that can be closed to traffic for festivals.

Similar redevelopment projects are in the works throughout the United States. In Denver, a $1 billion-plus project transforming 240 acres of stockyards, where the National Western Stock Show takes place, has been building new educational and entertainment facilities on underutilized land. In Houston, county officials recently announced a project to redevelop NRG Park and continue to host its famous rodeo, including potentially developing mixed-use projects on the venue’s underused parking lots.

And in Kansas City, Missouri, the American Royal Livestock Show is breaking ground on a new $350 million, 127-acre suburban home. The West Bottoms neighborhood, where the stock show once stood, is the focus of a $500 million investment. West Bottoms is modeled on the Dumbo neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, said Ian Ross, founder of Somera Road, the West Bottoms’ project developer, where after decades of abandonment, rundown warehouses were reborn as galleries and workspaces starting in the 1980s.

“The West Bottoms was where Kansas City was born, where the cattle trade began,” he said. “I think people are seeking those authentic, story-driven neighborhoods and are eager to help bring them back to life, unlike these new, somewhat-sterile mixed-use developments.”

It helps that these Western cities have momentum, with growing populations and economies, making it more feasible to build or redevelop real estate that may have been on the periphery or devoted to industries that have receded or departed. The Meatpacking District in New York City and Fulton Market, once a center for produce in Chicago, are two examples.

“The bottom line is cities are looking at underutilized land to accommodate population growth,” said Greg Kwong, an executive vice president at CBRE. “The fact that you have a Western or stockyard theme could even be coincidental.”

Big-city stockyards for holding animals before they were slaughtered had fallen into decline by the 1950s, when changes in marketing, logistics and refrigeration made it easier for companies to process and package meat in one location.

But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were instrumental in growing cities in the Western United States and Canada, especially after the introduction of the railroads and refrigerated train cars. This created nodes for shipping livestock and processing cattle, said Dominic Pacyga, an academic who curates the Packingtown Museum, located in a Chicago industrial park near where the city’s famous Union Stock Yard once stood. Stock shows and agricultural fairs grew out of this economic shift as means to promote these industries to consumers and companies in the East.

Since then, special events such as the Calgary Stampede and the National Western Stock Show have kept these campuses alive as yearly highlights. Now, city leaders see a new future for these sites.

“There’s real estate pressure,” said Brad Buchanan, CEO of the National Western Center Authority in Denver. “There’s an opportunity to add to the future of this place without losing what got us here in the first place.”

Many of the new developments maintain the area’s regional identity and heritage, and various project architects have reused wooden posts or exposed steel beams, or taken visual inspiration from ranches and barns. But developers are also leveraging investment, including government funds to, in part, build sites that showcase the future of agriculture and livestock.

The National Western Center is home to a Colorado State University campus called CSU Spur, which focuses on agriculture and sustainability. That campus finished construction in January 2023. A majority of the funding — $688 million — for that project, which includes new equestrian and livestock centers and entertainment venues, comes from bonds in measures that lawmakers had passed to fend off a threat from the National Western Stock Show moving to the neighboring city of Aurora.

Near CSU Spur, the Exchange Building, where the chalkboards that traders once used to note the day’s cattle prices still hang, just commenced a redevelopment plan to turn the space into a hub for startups focused on the future of water technology and food. Andrew Feinstein, a fifth-generation Denver resident whose firm, EXDO Development, played an instrumental role in revitalizing the stockyards-adjacent RiNo neighborhood, learned that his great-uncle, a union leader, had taken meetings in the building.

Feinstein sees the site as an iconic asset that nobody has yet reimagined, one that, over time, will have significant effects on surrounding areas.

But the opportunities come with challenges and sometimes unintended consequences. The projects can be difficult to take on, since a lack of modern infrastructure can complicate construction and efforts to reconnect neighborhoods.

Michael Hancock, the former mayor of Denver who played a crucial role in the National Western Center project, said that adding modern pipes and roads, as well as cleaning up the environmental challenges of a former cattle lot, presented hurdles. And most neighborhoods clustered around the stockyards have large populations of working-class and immigrant residents who worry the redevelopments will place pressure on local housing markets.

Neighborhood groups, including the GES Coalition, which represents Denver residents in Globeville and Elyria-Swansea, are worried that new developments will lead to rising rents and have pushed the National Western Center to consider more community-focused projects. Feinstein said that he expected the accusations of displacement, but that he saw the investment and new infrastructure that came with the stockyards project as a rising tide that would help locals and the city.

“Denver is trying to hold on to its Western heritage and its Western spirit, while embracing modernity,” Feinstein said. “And I think if we get things right at the National Western Campus, we’ll pull that off.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.