Wall Street Journal (February 12)
“Stand in the middle of the business district of any big U.S. city and the nearby buildings are emptier and a lot less valuable than they were four years ago. Listed office real-estate investment trusts have already faced the music: The S&P 500 Office REITs Sub-Industry Index has roughly halved in value since before the pandemic. The reality check for banks is just beginning.”
Tags: Banks, Buildings, Business district, Emptier, Halved, Listed, Office REITs, Pandemic, Reality check, S&P 500, U.S., Valuable
Washington Post (October 1)
“Offices in many of the world’s major cities are struggling to find workers to occupy them.” In contrast, during 2023 “Tokyo will add some 1.26 million square meters… of new office space, with little trouble occupying it…. Foreign investors, some of whom are dumping properties overseas, are snapping up buildings.” While Tokyo’s post-COVID recovery “has been more circuitous…it may be more complete than global peers.”
Tags: 2023, Buildings, Circuitous, Foreign investors, Major cities, Office space, Overseas, Post-Covid, Properties, Recovery, Struggling, Tokyo, Workers
Washington Post (January 19)
“The nation is in the midst of one of the biggest workforce shifts in generations.” Many prefer working at home or at least “want a ‘hybrid’ situation of working two or three days remotely. Cities must adapt to this new reality or risk a downward spiral of falling commercial property values, lower taxes on those buildings and ghost downtowns that could lead to increased crime and homelessness.”
Tags: Adapt, Buildings, Cities, Commercial property values, Crime, Downward spiral, Home, Homelessness, Hybrid, Lower taxes, Reality, Remotely, Risk, Shifts, Workforce
Bloomberg (June 13)
“China’s skyscraper age is over,” but not everyone realizes this. China currently boasts “46 percent of the 500-foot-plus buildings under construction in the world,” but things are changing. Standing at over 2,000 feet, Shanghai Tower provides a stark reminder. Though it “is the world’s second-tallest building…only 60 percent of Shanghai Tower is rented out, and only a third of current tenants have actually occupied their leased space.”
Tags: Buildings, China, Construction, Leased, Rented, Shanghai Tower, Skyscraper, Tenants
The Economist (September 10)
“New techniques mean that wood can now be used for much taller buildings,” potentially reducing the carbon footprint by nearly 75% compared with conventional steel and concrete structures. A 14-story wooden structure in Bergen, Norway will soon be unseated as the world’s tallest when an 18-story wooden dormitory goes up at the University of British Columbia in Canada in 2017. But UBC’s Brock Commons will soon be surpassed by a 21-story building in Amsterdam. “Some architects have even started designing wooden skyscrapers, like the proposed Tratoppen…a 40-floor residential tower on the drawing-board in Stockholm.”
Tags: Amsterdam, Architects, Buildings, Canada, Carbon footprint, Concrete, Norway, Skyscrapers, Steel, Stockholm, Structures, Tratoppen, UBC, Wood
