I agree with you but there will come a point where our increased cost of living will catch up to Austin. We're still a pretty safe bet but places like Boise/Nashville/Reno are potentially going to start looking more appealing than Austin.

All very true. I admittedly glossed over a lot of this in an effort to not take us too far off topic. At any rate, these are issues. If they don't moderate, they could eventually cause enough pain to take us into a recession. So far, they haven't though. Some of those issues could start moderating for many reasons. If China ends their never-ending lockdowns, war in Ukraine ending, etc. Again, this is off topic and way more complicated than we can/should get into here.

My basic point is that much of the recession prediction game has been a lot of worrying and guessing rather than being evidence based. There's just not enough evidence yet to say that we're definitely going into a recession.

Thanks everyone for the responses and helping me understand. My only reason for bringing it up on this particular skyscraper was because of the Reddit/r/Austin thread where people were questioning whether (or why) this tower is going up right before an “imminent” recession.

I'm on Team Mild Recession at the moment -- there's enough job creation and aggregate demand to ameliorate the worst of it. Of course the Fed can crush that with more interest rate shenanigans, but . . I think they're actively trying to straddle that line and not be reckless.

We're still a hot market, though, and I get the sense that COVID uncapped a whole different type of demand for Austin, and from a different set of folks who may be more resistant to recessionary forces than the average.

If these projects have secured funding, there is a good chance they will be completed no matter what shape the economy is in. If the economy does become soft, it might take a good long while to sell or lease all the expensive apartments, and the already squishy demand for office space might tank badly. That will all be on the owners of these projects, a situation that they'll have to deal with post-construction. In a really bad economy, these projects could fall into receivership, but, at this point, if they have construction loans secured, they'll likely get built.

The cities you listed are having the same problems (Nashville) or are much more expensive (Boise and Reno). There aren’t many cities not experiencing a cost of living crisis, only those that are still in the throes of economic restructuring (very few of these left).

Part of this is a natural consequence of the economic restructuring away from manufacturing and resource extraction (which distribute jobs widely between a variety of cities and rural areas) and toward tech, professional, and service (which concentrate jobs in preexisting urban cores), which places disproportionate pressure on a small selection of locales to absorb all or most of the national population growth.

Imagine a world where Grand Junction had grown into a larger city anchoring a larger ~1 mil metro.

WOW this looks familiar
 

https://www.emporis.com/images/show/...r-exterior.jpg It's evidently unused!

That is straight up ugly!!

I watched that building go up back in the 1960s from my 12th floor dorm room in Monroe Hall at Tulane. It was a truly strange looking building perched on the edge of the CBD by the train station. It's always struggled financially. Built as an office tower, I think part of it was converted to apartments many years ago. Not sure what is going on there now.

I am almost certainly the minority opinion in this, but I think this building is almost to the point where it's so ugly that it's nice. Kind of like the old Verizon switching building in NYC that had been maligned for decades. I liked it, since it set off so many other nice looking buildings beside it.

The camera is pointing all over the place today.

https://i.imgur.com/vsQvof1.png

Good view from up there, but not of many construction sites.

Maybe it got blown by the wind.

If anyone happens to live at The Quincy, share some photo updates please. :)

Concrete is being delivered.

https://i.imgur.com/Ez6aEoe.png

The Quincy is now managed if not also owned by Kairoi. What a good place for a 98RR webcam. :)

Here you go. This is from a follower on Twitter. I'm just happy to get it, so I'm not criticizing the camera angle. :D

https://i.imgur.com/jloV6A8.jpg

I mean...it feels like you're kinda sorta criticizing the camera angle, but not really too much. :)

They finally moved the camera back, so it's really easy to see the work that's been done.

https://i.ibb.co/KG206Ht/Capture98-1.jpg

Saw the crane base onsite when I passed by today