Comment by fixxer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fixxer | Hacker News Reader

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I live an hour outside of Chicago and mostly work from home; I'm in the city maybe 1 day per week. I fought moving out of the city for a while, but I have really come to love it, especially when it comes to raising kids. When I have to head into Chicago, I take the train. It is weird how quickly you can go from yuppie to suburbanite. My property taxes are high, but my overall cost (and quality) of living is better than if I was living in Chicago.

The housing market by me has been stable with small (tiny) growth and consistent demand. Turnover for new construction has been solid.

Retail & office space, however, is suffering. If you're close to small downtowns with character, the story is different, but strip malls and shopping centers are amazingly screwed. Great example is the Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles. Just the anchors and a movie theater remain.

That said, I look at that excess capacity and see opportunity more than peril. And, it is worth noting, that excess capacity for office/retail space is an issue in city centers as well. This phenomenon is as much a result of changes in consumer behavior as it is subprime aftershocks. It is reductionist to claim otherwise.

Good point. I've grown rather used to seeing mostly-vacant floors in office buildings in the Loop.

I wonder if perhaps we're seeing the results of a shift to the service economy in addition to the shift back to the cities. If we need fewer people to manually perform clerical work in offices, and more people to run the restaurants that we increasingly eat at, then that's going to create a definite shift in demand for different kinds of commercial space.

> different kinds of commercial space.

And different uses for existing space. I'm not a big believer in any economic theory, but I see supply-side drivers abound. Case in point, there are so many vacant ex-Dominick's you can rent/buy for a song.

While those ex-Dominicks buildings are for lease ("rent/buy for a song"), I have yet to see anyone acquire them at their old Bartlett, Schaumburg, or Algonquin locations.

Head up to Milwaukee and you'll see plenty of old Kohl's supermarkets that have all been sitting vacant ever since the chain shut down over a decade ago.

Oh wow, did all of your Milwaukee's Kohl's shut down? We have them here (Puget Sound area) still, and when we left Missouri in 2008 they were still there doing fine.

Kohl's Grocery Stores (defunct) is different than the department store chain, which incidentally is headquartered in the Milwaukee suburbs.

And the only reason Kohl's the department store chain still has its HQ in Wisconsin is due to extremely generous tax breaks from Scott Walker.

Not entirely; they were both run by the same parent company.

The grocery stores were vacant for a few years but I can't think of any since I left Milwaukee last year that were still dormant. Office Max, Joanne Fabrics, those types of retail took over most of them that weren't leveled.

I think changes in reproduction (and expectations to reproduce) may be driving a lot of the shift. Millenials have a relatively low birth rate compared to the Gen Xers at the same age, due, perhaps, to the economic situation. If you are not raising kids, you have a lot more free time and energy to pour into other things.

You also don't care about being in a good school district if you don't have and don't plan to soon have kids.

Yes - School quality and mass transportation were the defining variables in my apartment acquisition. Had I not had to worry about schooling, there are plenty of lively "bad" places where I would have been very happy for much less money - and the potential for speculative gain would have been greater.

> Millenials have a relatively low birth rate compared to the Gen Xers at the same age, due, perhaps, to the economic situation. If you are not raising kids, you have a lot more free time and energy to pour into other things.

So many activities to do in this day and age and in this economy. You can surf the Web so much..!

Have you noticed how desperate the Charlestowne real estate owner is that they're tearing up the surrounding parking lot to make pads available for tenants outside of the mall?

I heard they sold it recently; supposedly, they're going to remodel.

I like the natural prairie landscaping (weeds) by Von Mauer ;)

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