Easy to be hard

It’s so easy to be doom and gloom in the current environment, and as the media knows all to well bad news sells. And I’ll plead guilty — read my previous blogs. One of my former colleagues e-mailed me some pertinent advice last week, providing some silver lining at the same time. “You can’t be glass half full/half empty all the time.  Need one positive “story” every week – for example, it’s good to be in a golf course community, senior housing, student housing, tech is back (I hope), medical offices, urban infill and river communities (Milwaukee, Providence, etc.), tremendous strides in building green, etc.”

Well, we hit Green in our last blog.  Emerging babyboomer demographics certainly play into more golf course and resort communities for affluent, active seniors. Almost any real estate strategy involving medical facilities makes long-term sense. More older people translates into greater health care needs — hospitals, physical therapy centers, doctors offices, testing facilities, nursing homes, and spas. The echo boom lifts student housing, although I don’t think as many parents will be buying condo units for their matriculating offspring in the near term. Tech appears to be back, helping the brainpower centers around global gateway markets and various university towns. Beyond the handful of thriving 24-hour cities, several once forlorn urban centers indeed have made comebacks. Providence and Milwaukee are good examples in the northern industrial tier, but Denver’s downtown offers a model for bringing back discarded CBDs in Sunbelt suburban agglomerations (Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix take note). I’ll have much more to say about all these topics in coming months.