bigpicture7
Senior Member
- Joined
- May 5, 2016
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Do you think the pandemic had anything to do with this, and do you think we're always going to be in pandemic-mode?And it’s largely been a commercial failure.
Ouch....had a lot more going for it...desirable and gentrified...
Not irrelevant at all, just more general.An irrelevant comparison.
^this.If the developer wants to risk "light[ing] a pallet of cash on fire" he can be my guest. Its his and his partners' money and risk, not mine and not yours.
Again, our cities were built on speculative risk. We need riskers to push the envelope.
Some people on this forum clearly work in the industry of assessing and transacting real estate value. That is but one (highly abstracted) view of our reality. It is not the totality of reality, nor is it what touches most of the people who experience the city and environs. In fact, much of the real estate around us was developed before any of us were born, some of it involving tremendous risk, and some of its creators faced financial ruin - but they faced such ruin on their on volition after taking too much of a chance. And if you asked any of them again, after the fact, whether they'd prefer a life of chance versus a stable life of wealthlessness, most would still choose the former. Policy that allows people to take such chances, while minimizing the risk for the non-chance-takers, is good policy. A narrow, transactional view of this situation is: "but they could never get financing!" Yet the most amazing business success stories always start with that premise and end with a crazy, resourceful story of somehow finding a way...patching together the right proposal...weaving in benefits for tangential stakeholders...and, yes, tax breaks on occasion.
I, for one, would love the chance to stand back and watch someone else's pile of cash ablaze, while hoping that something great rises from the ashes.