Quote:
Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright
The root cause of this is a reversion to the historical mean of how cities tend to organize themselves. It has never been the norm at any other point in human history for the center of the city to be the most impoverished and undervalued land. That is not logical for the obvious economies of agglomeration and other reasons that fundamentally make cities efficient. The only reason it occurred in the wake of WWII was the burst of capital made availble in the form of swords into plowshares suddenly making bulldozing whole neighborhoods or ramming freeways through urban cores possible.
|
Agree generally, with additional caveats required to address the fact that good transit access will always be able to meaningfully distort these patterns, making reality a little more nuanced.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright
The market for these white elephants has all but dried up in Chicagoland. You can't move a McMansion in Barrington for even what it was worth in the doldurms of the recession. The prices have continued to collapse with no signs of respite since 2008. There's a lot of wealth in a place like Barrington, but you have to ask yourself where is the tipping point when people start abandoning it in droves as empty mansions become the norm in exactly the same way the mansions lining LSD in Rogers Park/Edgewater or MLK or Michigan Ave in Kenwood were abandoned post war? At what point to people start chopping these 8,000 SF homes into apartments and renting them out to lower income folks as was the exact fate of prewar urban mansions after white flight?
|
This is, of course, completely and totally absurd. Yes, Barrington has not seen much appreciation in the post-GFC era but to suggest it is in some sort of disinvestment death spiral is a pure fabrication.
Here's a broad rule of thumb for observing real estate markets nationwide: If the economics are such that new construction is justifiable, then the overall fundamentals are pretty healthy.
https://www.redfin.com/IL/Barrington.../home/77441161
https://www.redfin.com/IL/Barrington.../home/13905613
https://www.redfin.com/IL/Barrington...home/161125642
https://www.redfin.com/IL/Barrington...home/146324514
^^Gee what a death spiral!
You are of course correct that the suburban office market is very unhealthy indeed but it was grossly overbuilt in the first place. Even there, the new Zurich office tower suggests things are not nearly as dire as you would make them seem. I don't think we'll see substantial suburban office construction for a few more decades (and it will probably look much different when we do) but eventually, given enough growth and rising prices in the CBD, it will come back too.