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Comment by badcppdev | Hacker News Reader

To stretch the analogy there are large bombs going off and damaging the profits of the lenders who financed various loans. These will continue.

US banks weight in at $2T. The Commercial Real Estate market weighs in at 20T although only a portion of that is office buildings in cities.

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To put this in perspective, retail has been in free-fall for decades in the United States, yet as of 2018 the US had something like 23 sq ft of retail per capita when countries like Japan, UK, Germany, France etc. average around 4.

It takes eons to clear out nonperforming real estate inventory. Just ask the Rust Belt.

But what is the retail sq ft per capita in urban cores? In the vast endless car-required suburbia that is American, that big box stores dominate, and pull up the average isn't surprising. The easiest way to visualize an acre is a Best Buy, after all. But how about if you only look at stores in Manhattan? What's the per capita SQ ft there?

According to what I can find on the Internet, there is 55M retail square feet in Manhattan for its 1.6M residents, so about 34 square feet per person.

Keep in mind that this figure doesn’t account for tourists, commuters, etc; but also keep in mind that over the last decade several large million+ square foot malls have opened in Manhattan itself (Hudson Yards, the Moniyhan station hall, the future Penn Station renovations, the Fulton transit center, the World Trade Center Oculus, etc.) The Hudson Yards one just lost its anchor tenant.

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