We’ve been watching “the end of retail” in this space for a while, and my colleague Farhad Manjoo’s latest piece is about a development that should send that into overdrive—Amazon’s growing investment in same-day delivery service.
Read the piece. I think people tend to overstate the level of real resource misallocation involved in the 2002-2005 house-building boom. By now America is already underhoused by historical standards. But commercial real estate is another matter. The current downturn will end, and CRE construction will returm to some extent, but I don’t think the business of building shopping centers will ever come back. Retrofitting existing ones as health care facilities, by contrast, should be a booming business.
