That is a tad dismissive. Instead of not wanting to see empty storefronts, consider residents who would like to start a local business, but can not because the rent on commercial properties is prohibitively expensive. Then remember that there are residents who would like more jobs in the area.
By the way, I am very supportive of lower property values. I've just mostly given up on this issue, since from my conversations with random people all around the world, most people don't really want that to happen. Like, they want the property values to go down, but they don't want THEIR property to go down.
Well, the government at the very least. From the article:
> Banks are highly regulated, so they can’t just loan whatever they want. The government insists that banks keep high margins of safety in their portfolio, and commercial loans are risky, so the terms they can offer are designed to limit risk. […] Second, the bank must keep a strict loan-to-value (LTV) ratio — so they won’t lend more than 80% of the value of the building (and often less than that).
The government says banks can’t loan more than 80% of the value of the building because it’s too risky. But what banks have done is instead maintained an inflated value of the property so they can loan out a higher percentage, which has led to the country being full of empty, overvalued property. Ie, a high risk of collapse—which is just what the regulation was intending to prevent. Lying about the value of an object to get around regulations is often considered fraud.
And beyond that: people’s assets are mostly residential real estate, not commercial real estate. So I don’t know that people will get that worked up about commercial real estate devaluing.