More on "Transcending Tribalism"

Across the span of human history and cultures, the power of myth has exercised universal influence. Since the Enlightenment, that power has perhaps been disparaged as much as any other ‘unscientific’ intellectual trait. We have indeed come to worship so-called hard data and seek to be as ‘rational’ as possible.

Myths are recognized as story-telling from our distant past as a species. While they may have influenced our evolution as humanity, their value is seen as largely poetic – and few 21st century people would vote for poets as ‘essential workers’ If we are to look at tribalism in an honest way, though, we need to at least glance at myth. Each of the peoples making up the human population of earth has its mythic dimension. All around the world, there are equivalent stories – myths handed down across many generations.

We should note that one of the elements that binds a tribe is its “shared knowledge,” what “everybody knows” – where “everybody” signifies all those who truly count, that is, the members of the tribe itself. Wisdom, in turn, entails being suffused with that knowledge, internalizing it, grounding one’s relationships and behaviors in the traditional knowledge passed down across the generations.

I have therefore started a segment of my “Transcending Tribalism” project examining “Myth and Truth.” I am posting my writing-to-date in the Philosophy/Theology page of this website. It is only a start, but as it is already becoming somewhat lengthy this is a good time to put it out there for your comments.

This section begins with “origin stories” often called Creation Myths. So many of us are familiar with the Genesis stories in the Bible, but virtually all cultures (tribes) tell such stories. Let me just give the “bullet point” commentary of such origin stories:

·         The myths seek, in some systematic way, to draw understanding from human experience

·         They do so from an attitude of humility: the fact that there is something rather than nothing is not due to the prowess of humankind

·         We inhabit a world that is complex and relational

·         Our experience in that world is a matter both of fact and of meaning

·         The frequent similarities in the myths, and their apparent independence in development, appears to point to some common foundation, what has been termed transcendental attributes, or categories that have universal application

·         While providing a certain comfortable orientation for those accepting the myth, the stories demand that adherents seek to grasp a larger whole than the everyday practicalities, invoking a difficult search for meaning that requires transcending mere facticity (‘that’s just the way it is’).

I do then turn to something more specific: the mythology of the ancient Greeks. Where the more universal forms of myth, such as the creation myths, provide a mental framework for a relationship with the world as we experience it, the Greek tradition provides us with imagery and vocabulary that helps us name and understand powerful forces within humanity itself. The very term “psyche” that we use to name our inmost self stands for a Greek goddess whose spouse, interestingly enough, was Eros, the god of love. There are literally dozens of such mythological personalities: human emotions, personality attributes, or spiritual activities considered as mythic figures.

I summarize my look at what myth teaches about our human experience, at an individual level, in this abbreviated form:

·         Just about every reflective human being experiences these powerful internal forces. We are better off for being able to name them.

·         While we are often lost in the tasks of everyday life – and focus our attention there – humans are prone to the influence of strong and often conflicting capacities, sometimes below the level of awareness

·         In our dealings with others, then, those influences can be expected to be present

·         When we find ourselves in conflict with others, we might consider such strife to echo a similar (and sometimes identical) conflict within ourselves

·         With such a realization, we can access something transcendental – namely attributes that we share in our human nature

·         On the basis of such self-awareness, we may be able to rise above the very real divisions we experience, transcending the animosities, fears, viciousness, thoughtlessness, and violence toward a greater integration of our individual personalities and our collective identities.

From this simple overview it is readily apparent that myths as developed in societies ranging from so-called “primitive” cultures to the relatively sophisticated urban societies of the classical world display a remarkable complexity and richness. But what, if anything, do they have to offer us today, particularly in addressing and overcoming the deep divisions in 21st century America?

Truthfulness and Myth

We face a key obstacle in the way “myth” is used in ordinary language. Many, perhaps most, people would accept the definition of myth as “any fictitious story or unscientific account, belief, or theory” that is one of the meanings reported in the dictionary. Even in the most positive connotations there is sense of impracticality, unreality, quixoticism in applying the word “myth” in common English.

All of this pushes in the direction of making “myth” an opposing term to “truth.” This is not only a misunderstanding, but it is a destabilizing force in society. Why is this so? Remember the transcendental dimension we found in both creation myths and in myths at the level of the person. We call “transcendental” those attributes held in common – and that common bond is an essentially stabilizing force. Its persistence in time is what gives rise to the meanings associated with tradition (a conservative force) as well as those connected with creativity (a forward-pushing force). If socially and personally the force of myth offers us common ground in both the traditional and creative senses, then it may help us get beyond a tribalism that identifies solely with one or another of those meanings.

We must take a serious look at truth as a transcending dynamic – an activity that we engage in (indeed, that we live) – rather than a possession that we have.

Without at all denying the facts as we encounter them in the world, a transcending perspective tells us we can only understand those facts within the horizon of a wider context. That horizon requires us, on a personal level, to make of our experience a cohesive and coherent narrative, not a mere sequence of momentary facts. A sane personality requires integration, and a sustainable society likewise requires a higher, integrating perspective.

The mythic narratives impress upon us a common ground and an expansive drive that cannot be said to rest easily with simple facts simply accounted for. They are, rather, narratives that impel us as occasions for thinking. They only initially make us comfortable by familiar re-telling; upon reflection they ignite a profound restlessness of thought. It is in our search for meaning that we seek an encounter with the truth-value of mythic narrative.

 

The American Saga

The standard “origin narrative” (akin to a creation myth) of America hearkens to the story of English colonists coming to Massachusetts and Virginia in search of liberty. The narrative advances with the story of the American colonists, after considerable forbearance, throwing off the shackles of colonialism in the Revolutionary War, led by the remarkable generation that issued the Declaration of Independence and crafted the estimable Constitution of the United States. We might call this the “1776 account”.

A growing counter-narrative, and one that is an origin narrative that sustains another set of beliefs, might be termed ‘the 1619 account’. This is named for the New York Times long-form journalism project that seeks to re-frame the traditional account by setting the critical event as the arrival in Virginia of the first slave ship a year before the landing of the Mayflower in Massachusetts. The perspective shift includes not only the “original sin” story of slavery and the treatment of the black population, but also the appropriation of land from the indigenous peoples, their subjugation and forcible relocation, and the introduction of virulent diseases that drastically reduced their populations.

Our tribalism is marked by the degree to which one or the other of these narratives “rings true” to each of us. But what is important to recall is that each is a selective story that crafts meaning from certain facts – the key words being ‘selective’ and ‘meaning’.

As I proceed in the selection I’m posting on the Philosophy/Theology page, I elaborate on the tendency to cynicism and skepticism we encounter so often. As with the myths, however, a closer look at what the ancients understood as a Cynic or a Skeptic may turn out to be surprising. (I remind my students all the time the ‘there is no reason to do research unless you are willing to be surprised.’ If you already have all the answers, why bother?)

So let’s again pause for a recapitulation, as this segment of the study hits approximately its midpoint:

·         We consider Pilate’s troubling question, “Truth. What is that?” and are prompted to keep an enlarged sense of truth in mind, rather than trying to reduce it to a minimal concept.

·         In the same spirit, we try to keep our investigation as a prod to thinking, rather than seeking to rest in a ‘final answer.’

·         We can affirm that that any disciplined approach to truth will deal with an understanding – however provisional – that is strong enough to withstand further inquiry

·         We may recognize that experience shows that simply resting comfortably in whatever understanding of the truth that is endorsed by a ‘conventional’ outlook is likely to fall prey to the all-too-human risks of laziness, bias, illogic, or superficiality.

·         Keeping these elements in mind, we recognize that ‘to err is human,’ and that this is a transcendental attribute of our species. We should not be surprised then to find such fallibility within our own (tribal) thinking, as well as in the thinking of those of other groups. Such an awareness points us to the usefulness of intellectual humility

·         Nevertheless, we find that such humility should not discourage us in the search for truth. Even if we apprehend the world through imperfect sensory experience and with social filters that may shape our access to facts themselves, we find – both historically and in our personal dynamism – a drive toward a higher viewpoint, a transcending of our very real limitations. Indeed, an honest recognition of those limitations is an essential prerequisite for continuing on the path.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look Back to Forecast???

Since the last time I notified you about adding editions of the Landauer Forecast, I have posted the volumes for 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994 under the Consulting/Landauer pages on this website.

I’m struck by the relevance of these older publications. Why? Well, remember that the early 1990s were, like now, a period of serious dislocation - economically, for urban centers, and for real estate.

Then, it was the aftermath of the Thrifts crisis and the emergence of the Resolution Trust Company liquidation of S&L assets that roiled the waters. And cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles were struggling with their white collar sectors as finance and related services were coping with the banking fallout.

Now, we have the severe dislocation of Covid-19 to deal with, and the questions about the viability of Central Business Districts given recent migratory patterns and fears that Work From Home will play the major role in ‘the new normal.’

Reviewing these decade-old reports, I’m struck first and foremost by two thoughts. The first is how the data tools developed for the Forecast project kept the commentary honest, avoiding the many temptations of denial, varying biases, and the extremes of either ‘happy talk’ or ‘gloom and doom.’ The second is that mental discipline is needed to avoid extrapolating current conditions indefinitely into the future. A less myopic perspective - a term you’ll find right in the pages of the Forecasts - enabled me to take something of a contrarian perspective about the outlook for the rest of the decade.

Regarding the data tools, the 1991 and 1992 Forecasts completed the introduction of analytical tools for all the property types. But each was a “stand alone” evaluation - that is, a “within sample” calculation. It remained for the 1993 edition to introduce the “Market Quality Rating System” that allowed readers to see how the relative ratings within each property type could be standardized in a way that fairly compared the prospects of each property type with the others. The concept was to provide an analytic that was akin to Wall Street’s bond ratings - and this was a step in the evolution of real estate’s quantitative discipline.

But, keeping in mind the need to communicate without getting trapped in the statistical weeds, we devised an easy to understand color coding system of seven levels - dark green for the best/bright red for the worst - that could be displayed on a map of the United States. This served our clients well during the 1990s downturn and its revival during that decade.

We were accorded quite a bit of intellectual freedom in developing these tools during this period, when Landauer was owned by AegonUSA, a major insurer and institutional investor. After all, institutions need to know market conditions and the outlook for change, whether times are good or not so good. So even when ‘the maps turned red’, the rating system served a good purpose.

There came a time, however, when ownership changed and Landauer became part of a larger firm whose primary business was brokerage. At the end of the recovery of the 1990s, this transactional-driven owner was fine with a map that was mostly green - but as I began to forecast the end of the Dot-Com bubble and the recessionary start to the decade of the 2000s, we received pressure to suppress the full scale of the ratings (“We have offices in those Red-Dot markets!”) and a request to shift to reporting just a “Top Ten List” of cities. When I declined to go along… well, that’s another story!

Not to get ahead of ourselves, there’s a lot of US real estate in the “Red-Dot” realm as this is written in early 2021. Yet we may consider that 2022 and 2023 will find us evolving once again. If my perspective that we need to consider the balance of this decade as a shift to something new, not a “return to normalcy” but a “change of state,” reflecting on the experience of the economy and the property markets during the years covered by these Forecasts may have something useful to teach us going forward.

Stay Tuned!

20 Years: Whodathunkit?

So I’m receiving all these “congratulations on your work anniversary” messages via LinkedIn, and I usually breeze by them because many represent “start dates” for affiliations that, while important, were not truly notable turning points in my career.

But March 1, 2001 was the day that I moved from my 22+ year tenure at Landauer Associates and became the chief cook and bottle washer at Hugh Kelly Real Estate Economics, operating out of a third-floor home office in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn. It has been quite a ride!

Originally I saw this as a fairly temporary situtation. It seemed to me that hopping from a decades-long association with one firm to another long-term job relationship would be akin to a “bounce-back marriage” for someone newly divorced. It might feel familiar and comfortable, but decisions made during life transitions are rarely wise.

I had the good fortune to have a residual separation agreement from Landauer in place - the result of a forward-thinking condition I had put in place when Landuaer was purchased by Grubb & Ellis from AEGON USA. And I had the added benefit of having had an investment manager, Real Estate Capital Partners, say, “We want to be your first client.” So there was some capital to set up a new business, and a source of work right at the start. {I’m proud to say that the first client stayed with me for nearly the full 20 years - and ended the relationship only because of its own acquisition a few months ago.}

Some might believe that 2001 was not a particularly auspicious year to launch a solo consulting practice. The economy started the year a bit shaky, and of course 9/11 happened with its many social, political, and economic consequences. But as it turned out, my services wound up being much in demand.

First of all, it turns out that there were not all that many folks doing quite what I do. And so, in the 9/11 aftermath, there was a great need for those who could objectively look at the New York economy and real estate market reliably but also creatively. So I wound up doing an important study of what to do with Ground Zero for the Civic Alliance and the Regional Plan Association. (That study is on this website, under New York City/Notable Writings.)

Then, too, the Dean at NYU’s Schack Institute (Ken Patton) gave me a call to say, “Now you have more time for us.” That brought me more intensively into the academic loop, and gave me the opportunity to team teach with one of my most valued colleagues, Rosemary Scanlon. Since the Fall semester launched right after 9/11, our economics and market analysis course became a kind of laboratory exercise in studying a crisis.

It is worth noting the synergy between being in the classroom and actively serving clients. I firmly believe the discipline of academic rigor made me a better industry advisor, and the on-the-ground experience of dealing with real estate investment and development pragmatics made me a better classroom teacher as well as enhancing my formal research.

That nexus, and my increasing involvement with the Homer Hoyt Institute (where I’m a Hoyt Fellow), prepared me and then enabled me to undertake PhD studies at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. My thesis, recast out of the language of academia and into plain English, found its way into publication in 2016 as 24 Hour Cities: Real Investment Performance, Not Just Promises.

I don’t have a formal “motto” for my life, but the phrase “God writes straight with crooked lines” comes close! Now, in my Seventies, I’m finding plenty of opportunities to probe new and unexpected frontiers. As they say, “Watch this space.”

My Project "Transcending Tribalism"

I have mentioned that one of my two major projects for 2021 is an extended reflection on one of America’s most critical needs, “Transcending Tribalism.” Our divisions are profound. While some placed hope in the potential for healing in the results of the 2020 Presidential election, it is abundantly clear that no such moment of national unity has materialized. Sadly, we are as divided as ever.

In fact, the chasm separating us into “tribes” is at least decades old, and has been widening over time. Attempting to address the issue is itself fraught with danger, as I recognize that I’m personally a member of one of the tribes – let’s call it the Blues – and dealing with the division carries with it the temptation of moving (unfairly) in the direction of self-justification. Such an approach would be, practically by definition, counter-productive.

The temptation is particularly strong in light of the loyalty of the Reds (in the contemporary, not the 20th century communist sense) to a personality whose administration began with an assertion of “alternative facts” and then ended with a tweet to refuse certification of electoral college votes pending acceptance of “corrected facts” on January 6th.

Two quotes seem pertinent to me. One is attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” But, even so, I will need to keep in mind Oscar Wilde’s trenchant remark in the 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan, “I can resist anything except temptation.” The temptation to make the tribal division a matter of moral black and white, over and above the political Red and Blue, is too destructive to succumb to, in my judgment.

But there’s another danger to be concerned about, and that is the glossing over of standards that would then simply yield to false equivalencies.

History, both here in the US and around the world, is replete with examples of societies riven by faction. In most, this has devolved into a raw power struggle. Under those circumstances, it is all too easy to see “might makes right” as the outcome, rationalized as it so often is by the adage “history is written by the victors,” an aphorism going back at least into the 19th century.

In all humility, I aspire to do better than that.

I am heartened by the efforts of those, like Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela abroad and domestic figures like Dr. Martin Luther King and John Lewis, who sought courageously to redress divisions while adhering in a disciplined way to higher principles. If their success was only partial, that seems to me to be the

human condition. The inability to achieve a goal absolutely in a world of contingency, change, and choice should not inhibit attempts at making things better from here on out.

A critical lesson I take from such figures is the idea of loving engagement, which in turn is a principle of restorative justice. Gandhi’s principle of satyagraha (truth plus firmness) included a conviction that in nonviolent confrontation with an opponent one is taking care of the adversary’s soul, an act of love. I dare say that is hardly a consideration in today’s battle of tribes.

And yet it has been an effective approach – not perfect, but notably practicable – when hostility has proven fruitless in bringing a resolution to division. That is my primary clue in pursuing “transcendence” as a path, rather than “strategic victory.”

To add to the well-known leaders already mentioned, let’s remember the process and the structure that led to and took shape in the Good Friday Accords or the Belfast Agreement resolving ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s. The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, led by Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sagar, and Baroness May Blood who represented Northern Ireland at Westminster from 1999 through 2018, played a catalytic role in going beyond the sectarian violence to establish a new institutional relationship between the Republic of Ireland and the sovereign state of Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom.

The strength of the new relationship was tested, and proven, in the turmoil of Brexit, when the re-establishment of a ‘hard border’ between North and South became a deal-breaker in negotiating the UK’s departure from the European Union. The determination to retain the hard-won reconciliation of the Good Friday Agreement is a strong case-in-point for a commitment to a “transcending” value that bridges the separate interests of two opposing parties.

On a larger scale, the European Union itself is testament to how the seemingly improbable can be brought to pass. After the Second World War, Europe was devastated and suffered not only the physical damage of “total war” but the animosity remaining between the combatant nations. A “tribal” resolution by the victors – which was the short-sighted approach of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I – could easily have set the stage for a renewed phase of hostility, this time a ‘hot war’ between East and West, the Soviet Bloc (the Warsaw Pact) and the forces led by the U.S. and others in the Atlantic Alliance (NATO).

The key to an alternative path was a transnational effort – with the stunning support of the Marshall Plan – to rebuild Europe on a continental basis, with Germany and Italy of the Axis powers as partners with Great Britain, France, and other former Allied adversaries in arms. Again, not a perfect resolution, but one that has avoided war on the continent for three-quarters of a century.

In my “Transcending Tribalism” project, I am going to begin with the thinkers before moving on to the doers. I believe that if we can’t agree on fundamental facts, that is a problem that needs to be addressed before we can even consider a transcending politics. Of course, thinking and doing are not opposed. A theory that cannot be practically applied is really not much of a theory, after all. And action that has no overarching concept behind it has as much chance of hitting its target as an unguided missile.

So, my initial installment in the “Transcending Tribalism” series can be found on the Philosophy and Theology page of the website at “www.hughfkelly.com/philosophyandtheology/tribalism1” Your reactions and comments will be valuable as I proceed with this series.

Speaking of Change

Lots going on at the Home Office and beyond! So it has been about ten days since I’ve had a chance to work with the website. Nevertheless, my strong intention for 2021 is to keep adding content and commentary as the year goes along.

One reader has asked why I’m prioritizing “old” published work, instead of keeping on top of the day’s news in the economy and the industry, not to mention the “wider world.” Good question!

I’m certainly not ignoring the news of the day. I have already sent off to Commercial Property Executive my column for the March 2021 issue. That will post here as soon as it is published by CPE. And I’m at work on course preparation for “Ethical Issues in Real Estate,” which I will be teaching at Fordham in April. You can bet that I’ll be making that as up-to-date as I can - and am not averse to “previewing” some of the discussion here.

My two major 2021 projects - the textbook on Real Estate Capital Markets (being co-authored with Merrie Frankel and Tino Korologos) and the monograph (book?) on “Transcending Tribalism” - are also progressing. And the latter can certainly provide the occasion for some Blog posts.

So: please keep nudging me in the direction you (the readers) feel most helpful. I am amenable to suggestions, and have proven willing to change over the years!

And, on the subject of change, let me introduce the additions to the website I’m posting today.

The first is a Summer 1998 essay from Real Estate Issues, entitled “Changes of State.” By now I have published 400 or so pieces in industry and academic journals. I think “Changes of State” ranks in the top 5% in terms of importance. It draws on learning from hard science, from examples in industries beyond real estate, and finally on the experience of the real estate business to make the case that 21st century real estate could proceed in an “altered state”, with associated turbulence, when compared with the prior decades. Judge for yourself how relevant this 22-year-old article is: (on hughfkelly.com/industrypublications/realestateissues/changesofstate)

Like most processes in nature and in economics, a “change of state” does not materialize overnight and out of nowhere. A second post, “Be the Tortoise, not the Hare” from Asian Property (1990) argues for a commitment to long-term strategies in U.S. real estate market investment. Remember that 1990 found the commercial property markets - and indeed the economy itself and the whole financial industry - coping with the collapse of the thrift industry. While many were focused on exiting the market in the midst of its turmoil, uncertainty, and risk of loss, this article maintained “there is a way to invest wisely and minimize risk.” (See also my blog post of 12/29/20, with its reference to “Are You Kidding? Commitment to Real Estate Investment in the 1990s” from SIOR Professional Report.) The essay in Asian Property makes the case for the long view on real estate asset investment, a period that “allows the investor to capture the rise in property replacement cost and the recovery of the excessive risk now assigned to real estate as a capital market asset.” In retrospect, that was very much on-target counsel when it was written. It might very well be relevant again today. (find this on the website at hughfkelly.com/industrypublications/other/BetheTortoisenottheHare)

Also posting this week are the 1989 and 1990 editions of the Landauer Real Estate Market Forecast (under the Consulting page and the Landauer tab). I can propose to you that the “change of state” we are experiencing in the early decades of the 21st century had its roots in trends that were afoot in 1989 and 1990.

For instance, industrial real estate was considered a fairly unexciting part of the investment market in the 1980s. But the Forecasts noted that global trade, increasingly sophisticated technology, and consumer awareness were combining to advance the importance of the warehousing and distribution system. Even before the advent of the Internet and e-commerce, a foundation for a surge in industrial property development and investment was being put in place.

By contrast, retailing had been the darling of the 1980s real estate investment community, and both the shopping center development community and the “smart money” were placing big bets on its future. Even while recognizing those trends, the Forecasts noted that retail oversupply and the overly aggressive pricing of assets constituted palpable risks. The over-pricing, in turn, was related to a spate of excessive - and poorly underwritten - lending of the late 1980s, epitomized by the leveraged buy-out practices of some investment banks. Such retail icons as Bonwit Teller and B. Altman succumbed in consequence of such indebtedness.

This provides a reminder that the much-bruited “retail apocalypse” is not fully to be laid at the feet of Amazon and other e-tailers. The story of real estate practices seduced, ravaged, and abandoned by financial engineers would be retold many times in the 30 years since Bonwit and Altman closed on New York’s Fifth Avenue. As the 1990 Forecast remarked, “Real estate market forecasting concerns choices more than it concerns predictions.” Human decisions, not the determinism of blind forces, are at the heart of economics.

Finally, let’s not forget the sorry tale of Bonwit’s real estate, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street (next door to Tiffany’s). Donald Trump bought the property, to become the site of the first Trump Tower. The Bonwit Teller building was notable for several artistic features, including bas reliefs and an ornamental grille over the entrance that were coveted by preservationists and promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were, however, destroyed in the clearing of the site. “John Baron,” a spokesman for The Trump Organization, declared that art appraisers had determined that these features had insufficient merit and value to be saved, versus the cost of preservation. “John Baron” was later revealed to be Donald Trump himself.

Those who don’t read history are doomed to see it repeat itself.

Plus Ca Change....

Today I’m adding a number of previously unposted columns from 2018 to 2020 to the Industry Publications/Commercial Property Executive page. The 12 quarterly columns for those years are:

Slowing Ahead - CPE March 2018

The Big Policy Shift: Gauging the Impact - CPE June 2018

A New Route for the Decade Ahead - CPE September 2018

Wanted: Healthy Skepticism - CPE December 2018

 People, Get Ready for Extended Slowdown - CPE March 2019

Why You Should Be Watching the Yield Curve - CPE June 2019

How Trade Wars Impact Real Estate and the Economy - CPE September 2019

Get Ready for CRE’s New Normal - CPE December 2019

Investment Is About Expected Returns - CPE March 2020

COVID-19: The Economy Beyond the Tipping Point - CPE June 2020

Look Before You Leap – CPE September 2020

Rise to the Challenge – CPE December 2020

As you might imagine, the onset of the Coronavirus and its profound disruption of the economy, the real estate industry, and virtually every facet of society caused me to reflect on how change materializes, how it is anticipated or not anticipated, how we adapt (or not) to the alterations in our world, and what we can learn from the experience.

As the titles of my columns suggest, I was not a true believer in the narrative of a robust pre-COVID economy. First of all, I felt at the time that things were much more fragile than most observers recognized.

For me, the key clue was the Government shutdown during the winter of 2018-2019. That even those with good jobs in the public sector would be forced to food banks and sent scrambling to pay rent and mortgages by the loss of a couple of paychecks spoke volumes about how tenuous the economy’s strength was.

Beyond that was the peculiar situation of a fiscal stimulus, in the form of a large but unequally applied tax cut in the midst of a sustained economic expansion. This spoke to me of an attempt to “juice the numbers” by the president and his party’s congressional majority so they could run in 2020 on an apparently solid economic record. That “solidity” was much more apparent that real, though.

Looking past the short term, moreover, there was clearly an economic deceleration ahead for the 2020s, a condition identified in the Congressional Budget Office’s economic forecasts throughout the late 2010s. It was my judgment, expressed in these articles, that real estate (and business generally) needed to plan for that deceleration even while the good times were still rolling along.

None of this is to claim prescience on my part about the pandemic. But I can claim to have given prior thought to the preparations that can assist in coping with so-called “black swans.” (See the post on the website page Industry Publications/Real Estate Issues/”Black Swans: the Original Rara Avis.”) Although I can’t say I’ve fully thought this out, it does seem to me that there’s a lot of work to be done in developing an understanding of the differences between continuous change (which can be modeled economically) and discontinuous change (which is much more intractable, but arguably much more impactful).

In future posts I hope to explore the five forms of change I consider basic (cycles, trends, maturation, change of state, disruption). I have already discussed these in some detail in the book 24-Hour Cities: Real Investment Performance, Not Just Promises. But I think there is a real need to consider the interaction of these forms of change, which almost never appear in isolation.

To hint at what this means, let me propose the following provisional combinations:

Trends + Change of State = Emergence: the end of an era

Maturation + Change of State = Metamorphosis

Maturation + Disruption = Mutation

Change of State + Disruption = Metastasis

Clearly these are only hints, but I don’t see these as abstract ideas, but changes we actually experience in the world. And I find them well worth thinking about.

Won’t you join me?

Only connect... (rev. 1-24-21)

The phrase “Only connect…” is the epigraph of the 1910 novel Howards End by the British novelist, E.M. Forster. This book stands in a peculiar place in my educational history and, I suppose, in my personal development. So, to begin, a brief biographical story.

In the summer of 1968 I intended to take a course in “Post-War European Fiction” at Brooklyn College. (The “war” in question, of course, was World War II.) I had plenty of time between the close of the spring term at Cathedral College, the seminary I was attending, before the summer term began, so I grabbed all the books in the syllabus and read them. Hey - they were novels, and this wasn’t a heavy lift!

No good deed goes unpunished, as my wife would later tell me. When I showed up to register at Brooklyn College, the European Fiction course was closed out. So I did a quick scan of what other literature courses were available and wound up with “20th Century British Novels”, which included Howards End.

What I didn’t know when I signed up was something I discovered the first day of class. There were 18 students in the course, and 17 were women. Now THAT was an educational experience for a 19-year-old seminarian, I can assure you!

However, it wasn’t literature that was my primary reason for heading for summer classes that year. I knew I had a required Economics course coming up in the Fall term back at Cathedral, and the word was that the Eco professor was a terrible bore. So I was looking to avoid a bad experience more than seek out a good one. But that Economics 101 course at Brooklyn College was tremendous. It was taught by a Wall Street guy, an adjunct professor with a practical bent who could relate Samuelson’s textbook to events in the world. I was hooked —- in a way I wouldn’t realize for more than a decade.

My reason for these reflections are the ways that life experiences connect over time, and the ways that seemingly disparate disciplines weave together in the way of the world. It is my experience of the mythic Ariadne’s Thread, solving a problem by multiple means, sometimes backtracking if necessary, making choices among alternatives, and having the courage to abandon dead-end paths to strike out in more promising directions.

The immediate impetus for this blog post is the uploading of two new bits of content to the website.

• The 1988 Landauer Real Estate Market Forecast on the Consulting/Landauer page, and

• A pdf of the notes pages of a presentation I gave to the Real Professionals Network on January 21, 2021. That’s under Economic Analysis/Data and Trends

The Landauer Forecast, naturally, comes to mind as part of my professional path, which diverged in unexpected ways from those I envisioned during my seminary years. However, in that divergence, there is more connection that some might imagine. I’ve left very few of my experiences behind, but draw on all sorts of learning in dealing with the many choices life, the economy, and the real estate business lay out before us all.

The 1988 Forecast reminds me of one of my great limitations. When Madelyne Kirch of the graphic design firm J.P. Lohman told me that the color palette for the publication was going to be “taupe and teal”, I was totally at a loss. I had to confess that I was an “eight Crayola guy” and had no idea what Taupe and Teal were as colors. Instead of fighting it, though, I had to trust professional judgment that was beyond my ken (and maybe learn something new).

The very cover of this edition speaks to the connection of established ways and new perspectives. There is a brown triangle at the base of the cover - a brown that was dubbed “Landauer Brown” at the firm (see the 1984-1986 Forecasts on this website). This was literally the firm’s signature color, as we signed our reports using brown felt-tipped pens. But then there is a taupe background color, an oriental looking calligraphy swoosh (first used in the 1987 edition), and a teal circle that suggested the rising sun of the Japanese flag (which, yes, is red - I know). Not for nothing was this the first of the Landauer publications to be issued in a Japanese translation.

As in the previous year, John White contributed strategic commentary - still worth reading, in my opinion, as he makes numerous points of perennial value. It’s interesting to note that he wrote “Even the most provincial of investors will be strategically better off if they monitor the economy and relate this to their own real estate. Wall Street seems very remote to much of the country, but believe me, it is a mirror of global economic thinking. This monitoring process plus patience and coolness will bring their own rewards.”

Of further note is the contrast of this perspective to John B. Bailey’s introductory letter to the Forecast which places a different emphasis, “real estate remains a parochial product.” The diversity of opinion within the firm was part of its intellectual ferment, and I sought to capitalize on this by inviting the heads of each of Landauer’s regional offices and major divisions to contribute “sidebar” commentaries to the publication. The variety of perspectives truly helped ground the forecast empirically.

Yet it fell to me to capsulize the firm’s point of view in a new section, “What to Watch For in 1988.” For today’s real estate students and junior executives, this may serve as an object lesson in the strength of collaborative effort as well as employing a “managing upward” approach within an organization. “Only connect…”

That commitment to “connection” is, I hope, apparent in the January 2021 presentation I made on Tuesday to the Real Professionals Network. (Whoops! I just noticed I put the wrong date on the title slide…. ). Some of these slides I re-used from the Miami CREW presentation of January 12th, but the thrust of my theme “We stand in a new era” was original for RPN. {This is also the third quarterly joint economic presentation I’ve made for RPN with JLL’s chief economist, Ryan Severino.}

The connection is not only the detailed linkages between economics and real estate (as the Landauer Forecasts underscore), but the connection of each to the broader society.

The introductory slide asked the audience to reflect on context and foundations, and reminded them that the Framers of the Constitution and their generation bequeathed us an extraordinary legacy by considering both. One of the audience, Emil Malizia of North Carolina, later asked me to elaborate on a reference I made to John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Aristotle. Here’s some of my thoughts on that, which I shared with Emil.

Locke's reference to "life, liberty, and property" is from his Second Treatise on Government, and was well known to the Virginian delegates to the Continental Congress, including George Mason as well as Jefferson. Mason was important in many ways, including being a key drafter of "The Virginia Declaration of Rights," which specifically held that fundamental human rights included " "the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possess­ing property, and pursuing and ob­taining happiness and safety."

Clearly Jefferson was fully aware of Mason's enumeration, but chose not to adopt it wholesale. Why? It seems that he (Jefferson) was already conflicted by the moral weight of human property (i.e., slaves) and in the bill of indictment which was the Declaration of Independence did not want to provide the apologists for George III with the advantage of "whataboutism" (You say you are suing for "liberty" but what about your own slaves???).

There could also be a deeper move on Jefferson's part: a conviction that happiness is connected to "the moral sense." (See Garry Wills' book Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Joseph Ellis' The American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson.) This idea of happiness as rooted in moral uprightness was a key concept in the Scottish Enlightenment, in figures such as Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith. Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, and was likely unknown to the delegates to the Congress in Philadelphia drafting the Declaration of Independence. But Smith's earlier (1759) work The Theory of Moral Sentiments would certainly count as part of the intellectual framework of the founding fathers.

What is the reason for connecting to Aristotle? Hannah Arendt argues persuasively in her On Revolution that the Declaration and the Constitution can hardly be understood without an awareness of how steeped in classical education the founders were. In fact, she argues that it was that classical balancing of liberties and the law that distinguished the American Revolution's success from the later, and less successful French Revolution.

Here's where I find a powerful connection from "the pursuit of happiness" through the concept of "moral sense" back to Aristotle. In Book Ten of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle summarizes his idea that happiness (eudaemonia) is connected with virtue (arete). He further recognizes that happiness does have a relationship with a certain level of material well-being, but is not entirely coincident with material prosperity (part of his argument for moderation in all things, which the Romans adopted in the phrase "in medias res stat virtu").

Here's a brief quote for you from Ethics, X: "Happiness stands in need of external accessories to but a small extent, less than the happiness founded on moral goodness.... a man and member of society will choose to act on moral grounds [even] as a human being he will have need of external goods to permit him to live on a human level."

To me, this last idea - certainly known to Jefferson - would be a profound cause of the cognitive dissonance which anyone reflecting on slavery would experience, since slaves themselves might have the "moral sense basis" for happiness, but would not have the "moderate material well-being" foundation. The Declaration's bill of indictment of George III stressed how England's oppression violated colonial rights by restricting liberty in material ways. Jefferson could argue consistently that this impeded the "pursuit of happiness" while sidelining the "property" argument invoking slavery, that has a much weaker moral basis. England had formally ended slavery in 1772 - something the Virginia planters were definitely NOT on board with!

In an age of 24-hour news cycles that are dominated by passing events of dubious consequence, keeping aware of context and foundations - yes, of “connections” - has proven invaluable to me as a thinker and a doer. I recommend it.

Why Bother?

Today marks the observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday and is, of course, also two days before the Inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden.

I have added two documents to the content of the website. Both are writings from the 1980s:

• The market study I performed for East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) that provided the empirical analysis for the feasibility of the “Nehemiah Program”. Nehemiah is an ownership-based affordable housing project that has developed over 6,500 residential units. It is still ongoing. Look for the document on the New York City page, under notable writings.

• And, under Consulting/Landauer, you can find the 1987 Landauer Real Estate Market Forecast.

In the all-too-ephemeral world of blogs, and fast-click websites, why bother with such documents, originally written before the launch of the World Wide Web (August 6, 1991 by the way).

I’ll say that it is exactly because of their age and the tendency of many to push the lessons of the past from memory that it is important to not only make such documents available, but to underscore their contemporary relevance.

On Nehemiah, let me highlight four points.

1. Real estate is not just about ‘the elite’, about high finance, skyscrapers, and glitzy developments. One of the salient features of real estate - vital for all working in the industry to bear in mind, and for those seeking a career in this business to grasp early one - is its ubiquity. Only far at sea or beyond the stratosphere do we find ourselves outside the real estate domain. Every human being is connected to land and the built environment, across the entire strata of society.

2. Real estate performs both stabilizing and transformative functions across those social strata. As you can read in the Nehemiah market study, an in-depth (census tract level) analysis revealed that in the most physically devastated communities in New York impoverished areas, population stability and social cohesion was dramatically correlated with single-family home ownership. Yet the entire prevailing approach to “affordable housing” was large, heavily subsidized, rental projects. These were prototypically “bad density” developments, with associated levels of crime, poor health, and generational poverty. Nehemiah dared to be transformative by developing substantial blocks of new homes, at controlled levels of cost, supported by faith-based community action, requiring a level of real equity and responsible lending, and allowing homeowners to reap the equity gains of housing, in just the same way that “the middle class” had enjoyed in the post-World War II suburban housing boom. In all, more than a billion dollars of wealth has been created by this one program alone - in one of New York’s most difficult environments.

3. From an academic and professional standpoint, the study clearly illustrates how far we’ve come in terms of technical capabilities. The maps of the neighborhoods were created by coloring in a base of census tracts with “magic markers” and the statistical work was accomplished on old-fashioned spreadsheets - of the paper variety. But it also illustrates how attention to “the basics” pays off. This was a crude exercise in economic geography, but in principle it is just the same as GIS applications at work today. I will say that the conclusions of the study was hardly pre-ordained. In fact, when the EBC leaders first approached me with the question about how to revitalize these economies, it was far from clear that there were any economic anchors or positive trends that could encourage investment. It was an early example, to me, of what became my maxim: “There is no point in doing research unless you are willing to be surprised.”

4. As a final point, I’d say that Nehemiah makes a point about real estate ethics. My bosses at Landauer Associates (John White, Landauer’s CEO, and Ed Madsen, Chief Appraiser) authorized me to work on this project pro bono publico and to issue the report on the firm’s letterhead, just as we would have for a wealthy or powerful client. Real estate ethics, like all ethics worthy of the name, is about “doing the right thing” (pace, Spike Lee), not about mere legal compliance and staying out of trouble. My bosses were not afraid to commit the firm’s resources generously, even at the risk of raised eyebrows in the real estate community of that time. Ethics, among other things, is about virtue, and equity, courage, doing good, and beneficence have more to do with “right action” than simply staying out of legal difficulty.

These concepts find a degree of ratification, at a level more familiar to professional real estate practitioners and academics, in the Landauer Forecast series, including the 1987 edition posted today.

1. Compared with the previous year’s Forecast, 1987 marked a commitment to more sophisticated and transparent analysis. The crude computer graphics of 1986 were replaced by more professional work, thanks to the involvement of the talented Madelyne Kirch and other staff from J.P. Lohman Associates. “Every picture tells a story.” Elevating the graphic quality is not just a matter of “eyewash” (as Ed Madsen called much PR), but enabled the communication of complicated economic ideas when linked to thoughtful commentary.

2. The entire project worked, and helped bolster the firm’s reputation, by tying theory and practice intimately. It was the experience of real estate fieldwork, across the country and abroad, that gave credibility and generated insight far beyond the mere review of data and documents. (This, by the way, was a template for my teaching and academic writing as well. Good theory is not “just theoretical”; the test of good theory is in its applicability.)

3. As it happened, 1987 was something of a turning point for the real estate industry, and the Forecast addresses that in some detail. If today we are also at a turning point, there is much to learn from reviewing the interpretations, the economic and market dynamics, and the expectations (correct or incorrect) at such a critical time. John Kenneth Galbraith, in his A Short History of Financial Euphoria, pointed out the danger of short memories in the investment realm. Amnesia leads to repetitive (and potentially avoidable) pitfalls. History, as the aphorism goes, may not repeat itself but it does rhyme.

4. Here’s another thought worth passing along: a saying attributed to Albert Einstein reminds us “ Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Real estate has often been reduced to the “Location. Location. Location” mantra. Or some other triad beginning with “Location.” The 1987 Forecast dares to propose a more complex “American Property Formula” of seven elements

   • People

   • Economic Activity

   • Location

   • Physical Quality

   • Functional Suitability

   • Harmony, and

   • Government

   Even in 2021 we could do worse than using these attributes as a screening device in the real estate business and in real estate education as well.

5. It was at the point when the 1987 forecasting effort was beginning the Landauer’s then-Honorary Chairman John White walked into my office and blew me away with the statement, “Hugh, I’m passing the mantle on to you,” meaning that I now had the primary responsibility for a project he had initiated in 1983. This was humbling, to say the least. I did not then - and have never since - had John’s legendary reputation at the pinnacle of real estate consulting, strategy, and investment deal-making. But I did inherit the responsibility!

   John taught me many things over the years, but one was the willingness to bring team members together and to give them as much weight as they could shoulder, without ever leaving them without his support as a leader. That proved true in the 1981 Investment Analysis of the NY World Trade Center, the 1982 complex re-financing of the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue, the 1985 site search for the Saturn Corporation automobile plant, and numerous other assignments.

   Another remarkable trait which I’ve tried to emulate was John’s ability to have a synoptic grasp of the cross-hatching factors at work in real estate, and to articulate their meaning in plain English. John hated jargon and tried his best to banish it from the firm’s consulting reports. And he was never afraid to own his opinions, as you can read in the chapter of the 1987 Forecast headed “Commentary: John Robert White Views 1987.” He passed the mantle, but still wanted his valuable point of view available.

6. One final point, too easily overlooked by its placement on the back cover. In addition to Landauer’s seven US offices, three international shareholders who joined the firm’s ownership structure in 1985 are credited: in London, Hillier Parker May & Rowden, and the bank Baring Brothers and Company; in Paris, Les Societes Bourdais. The globalization of the real estate industry was afoot. Landauer had long represented international investors in the US, and now with the understanding that property was no longer merely a “local industry”, the firm institutionalized its commitment to a world-wide perspective. In the 21st century, there can be no more significant perspective to keep in mind.

What? Contribute to the VFW? (Well, Yes)

Those who know me for a long time might think this is an unlikely proposition. But read on for my reasoning. Transcending tribalism might just begin with small practical steps —- and a surprising commitment to open-minded-ness, as well as the truth.

380 East Third Street

Brooklyn, NY 11218

January 16, 2021

Kevin C. Jones

Adjutant General

Veterans of Foreign Wars

Kansas City, MO 64111

 

Dear General Jones,

 Let me start by saying that I’m grateful for the communication I recently received in the Help Veterans fundraising effort. I have, under separate business reply mail, made a $50.00 contribution to further your work on behalf of disabled veterans.

This was not an appeal that I would ordinarily have welcomed, but it did make me reflect on where we stand today, ten days after an insurrection at the US Capitol that surely spits on all that our veterans have sacrificed for in their service. While I can (and do) actively engage in supporting our political process with the utmost respect for democracy and its implicit reverence for diversity of opinion, as we pass from one presidential administration to another now seems a time when those now in service and those who have served to preserve and protect that process deserve my support – in cash.

 I will tell you that as I reach the age of 72, my formative experience of America’s foreign wars was Vietnam. I was a formal conscientious objector to that war, based as it was on untruths like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, flawed theories that were effectively neo-colonialist, and particularly inequitable in terms of the sacrifices drawn from the poor and uneducated while the affluent and college-educated were provided means for avoiding, delaying, or mitigating combat service. I in fact resigned a divinity student exemption in order to make my objection, and performed inner-city “alternative service” under the draft regulations.

 A half-century later I have no regrets about that, but feel a sense of having honored a moral code anchored in my faith. But I also feel that there was a sincere patriotism in my choices: a sense that America had a higher calling than “might makes right,” and that any exceptionalism we might claim placed moral claims on us collectively as a nation and individually as citizens.

 Still, in my application statement to the Selective Service, I was very careful to distinguish between my objection to our wartime policies and my respect for those who – willingly or under lawful duty – were put on the front lines in Southeast Asia. Similarly, I was careful to note that while (in my view) Vietnam was an “unjust” war under the principles of Catholic theology, other conflicts (notably World War II) had a strong claim to moral justification.

 I still maintain such principles. And it is in such a spirit that I’m pleased to contribute to the VFW in hopes that your advocacy and direct support for physically and mental scarred veterans, and for the families of those who, in the words of Lincoln, gave “the last full measure of devotion.” Bravo to you.

 And beyond this monetary contribution I am, by copy of this letter to members of Congress and key members of the incoming Biden administration, exhorting them to support your efforts to “fight for hard-earned VA benefits and assistance … in financial relief to cover rent, food, and other essentials… and survivor benefits.” This is beyond partisanship and is indeed a rebuke to the tribalism that has infected our polity, a tribalism which culminated on January 6th in a violent contravention of the oath taken by each member of the military service.

 I’m grateful for this opportunity to support your work.

 

Sincerely,

Hugh F. Kelly, PhD

 

Considering - Carefully - the 2021 Outlook

Today I add three documents to the content pages of the website:

• The 2021 edition of Integra Realty Advisors’ Viewpoint annual, for which I have again served as the principal analyst and writer. (see Industry Publications/IRR Viewpoint)

• And two annotated presentations given in January 2020 and again this week (January 12, 2021) to the Miami Chapter of the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW). These can be found in (Economic Analysis/Trends and Data)

I’d like to offer some background thoughts for your reflection. Not only are we at the start of a new year, but also at the inflection point of a new presidential administration and a new congress being seated in Washington.

While our attention in the past week has been consumed with the invasion of the Capitol on January 6th and the Article of Impeachment passed yesterday indicting President Trump for inciting insurrection and violation of the 14th Amendment, I’d like to keep the focus here on the economy, our expectation, and how those expectations are formed.

That’s the nexus with the documents I’m posting today.

In yesterday’s New York Times, economics reporter Neil Irwin published an extensive article under the heading “Economy/Public Relations” and the headline “What Trump Had Right About Going Against the Grain.” (NYT, 1/13/21, pp. B1, B6). Irwin argues, “[The Trump economy] may not have been the best economy ever, as he has repeatedly claimed, but it was easily the strongest since the late 1990s, and before that you have to go back to the late 1960s to find similar conditions.”

I have many reasons to be critical of Mr. Irwin’s analysis - not on factual grounds; he is an excellent reporter and a keen, careful observer - but on the common tendency to cite presidential traits as economically determinative. This tendency is called out as “the narrative fallacy” in Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s The Black Swan (see, especially Chapter Six). We reduce complex economic patterns to simple stories about causes and effects, far beyond what we can know with confidence.

So the article cites Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago in support of the thesis that the Trump era tax cuts and deregulation helped the economy outperform forecasts. Mulligan is quoted, “Forecasts systematically overpredicted the Obama economy every year, and throughout the Trump administration, they underpredicted.” Mulligan was, as it happens, the chief economist of the Council of Economic Advisors to Mr. Trump, so in effect he was patting himself on the back.

As a counterpoint to Mulligan, Irwin quotes Lawrence Summer of Harvard as a “left-leaning” economist with ties to Democratic administrations. It makes for an interesting exercise in journalistic controversy, but to me there are at least two objections to make. The first is one of our most serious and symptomatic issues: casting topics immediately into a “tribal” context. (That’s one of my major projects for 2021 - attempting to think about ‘transcending tribalism’.) The second objection is that seeing economics through an ideological lens creates, however unconsciously, an altered perspective. But - and this is a big ‘but’ - for every economic perspective a framework is necessary.

I don’t pretend to have the God’s-eye view that would overcome these objections by moving beyond criticism to a detailed alternative and superior postulate. It is still useful to keep this challenge in mind, though; otherwise, how would our thinking progress?

Why do we fall into conventional ways of thinking? If it is purely ideological, then the diagnosis of tribalism rings very true - and should cause us to be particularly wary, no matter which side of the divide we find ourselves occupying. It was Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology, who noted that economics sometimes “descended from heaven to earth”, in other words, interpreted events and patterns based upon pre-conceived normative expectations and saw economic behaviors at variance with prediction as somehow problematic.

Irwin falls into this trap in discussion how economic rules of thumb (think, for instance, of the Philips Curve and the Taylor Rule) have become shortcuts for setting expectations for professional economists and policy-makers alike. And then we are all surprised when the world turns out differently.

Then, the next time, we do it all over again. Why?

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow, devotes a whole chapter to our tendency to fall into comfortable patterns of thought. He forthrightly terms laziness to be a constant temptation in a mind that has an internal propensity for jumping to conclusions. This may seem quite harsh. But it seems to me to be more than just a psychological failing. We are trained, in economics, to see structural relationships and when a familiar configuration appears, to follow the pattern quickly toward its conclusions In a more complicated but isomorphic (that’s a big word that just means ‘changing in a similar way’) configuration, that’s what econometric models do. They become a ‘machine for jumping to conclusions’, to borrow Kahneman’s phrase.

No less a figure than Alan Greenspan reflected on this tendency in “Never Saw It Coming” (Foreign Affairs, November-December 2013). The “maestro” lamented that the most sophisticated models of central banks and of Wall Street failed to anticipate the Global Financial Crisis either in its origins or in its ramifications. The models, by their nature, were dually determined by their structure and by their assumptions about inputs. Both were - and are - imperfect.

So too, today, we see with chagrin that the Coronavirus pandemic which has defined and delimited the US and world economy was not “in” the models. So it was not predicted. And, fatefully, those models will probably not give us a clear guide to the ‘way out’ of our 2021 problems.

That’s because, in my view, the models and indeed neo-classical “equilibrium economics” are excellent in getting linear change and patterns of continuity correct, at least to a high degree of approximation. But they are not good at all in patterns of disruption and discontinuity which are due to endogenous failures - including institutional and market failures such as we saw in the early 1990s and again around 2008. And they are spectacularly poor at treating the economic fallout of so-called exogenous variables such as war, famine, and pestilence.

So those are the concerns you’ll find me wrestling with in the three document posted today. I believe the themes that will be dominating the policy debate in Washington in early 2021, and probably well beyond, will sound familiar: regulation and taxes; spending and jobs; deficits, inflation, and their burdens on future generations; picking up the slack in the post-COVID economy; the policy choices of tweaking around the margin versus going ‘big and bold’. I care about these issues as much as anyone else. But fundamentally I believe we need to think more deeply, more creatively, and with a more open mind (not jumping to conclusions) about them. This post - and the documents added to this website today - are my ‘thinking out loud’ about those topics.

Won’t you join me in sharing YOUR ideas?

Watching Ideas Blossom: The Landauer Forecast (I)

A couple of weeks ago, on December 29th, I mentioned my intention to digitize the compilation of Landauer Forecasts pulled together from my files. Today I am uploading four editions covering the 1984 - 1986 publications (we had a mid-year outlook in 1984). These can be found in the Consulting/Landauer pages of this website.

Let me share with you some thoughts about the evolution of the Forecast, about what it taught me about business leadership, and what I observe about changes in real estate as I review these documents from 35 or so years ago.

The experience of scanning the Forecasts brought me back to my original job at Landauer, which I commenced on July 1, 1978. This was supposed to be a 3 day “temp” assignment, but it didn’t exactly go as planned. One of my tasks was running the copy machine in the back office. But, curiosity being what it is, I couldn’t resist reading what I was duplicating. This is what got me “hooked” on real estate. As one of my mentors at Landauer, Ed Madsen, said: “Real estate is less like a subject you learn than it is a disease that you catch. Hugh, it’s clear that you have caught the bug.”

Exactly so, as I scanned the documents I’m posting today I saw some things I’d like to highlight for you.

Just superficially, the simplicity of the presentation is striking. The text of the 1984-1986 publications are literally type-scripts. This was an era before computers had become ubiquitous in business offices. Documents were typed on IBM Selectric keyboards, and saved for revision on “mag cards,” or magnetic memory media. The content was written in long-hand or dictated, transcribed by professional secretaries, and reproduced for publication on the very same Xerox machine I was first tasked with operating.

But although the medium remained constant, the Forecasts already show a commitment to change, to increasing sophistication in bringing content to readers. The first editions were like newsletters. Indeed, John R. White first privately circulated his outlook to Landauer’s key clients at the start of 1983 in just such a form.

The 1984 publications expanded the distribution, with an idea of stimulating critical thinking in the industry more broadly. I’m struck by how, even at the outset, these were not just opinion pieces: on every page there is data to be found, factual information about the economy and the markets that undergirds the outlook and enables the reader to follow John’s logic in forming judgments about what would likely be in store for real estate (and for the nation) in the year ahead.

Yet there is a powerful synoptic view pulling the data together. One of John White’s great strengths, and the reason that is counsel was so widely sought, was his ability to put facts into context. And in that process, John was able to bring clarity to the expected path of the economy and the real estate industry. Even more striking, in my view, was his ability to distinguish how the economic and market cross-currents would have differing results across the property types and the dozens of metro markets from coast to coast. All of this is on display right from the start.

As a business leader, however, John did not seek to make this an “ego project” for his personal points of view. The 1985 edition was the first to be published as a bound document within covers. John attributed the commentary to the experienced judgment of senior professional staff in seven regional offices, supported by the firm’s research team and its databases. A true leader is connected, by definition, to a team and the dedication of that team is enhanced by the acknowledgment of their contributions.

The 1985 edition was the one in which I was first given important responsibilities. I find that my writing style, even then, was finding its voice, one that is recognizable even now. It was not just a stylistic signature, though. In the very first paragraph under Economic Conditions, a concept that I needed to explain and support to John and our executive team is articulated: “economic subsidence, a settling of the components of the economy after 15 years of inflation-driven boom and bust.” The tension between national fiscal and monetary policy, an issue that has never fully relaxed, is discussed and its inhibiting impact on investment decisions recognized.

Looking forward, it was this edition that warned of the danger of increasing moves by Savings and Loan institutions into commercial real estate, saying “S&Ls are simply not staffed to analyze and choose” such investments, giving rise to increasing liabilities. Also, the “significant deterioration in public and private syndications” was underscored. In the subsequent years, those warnings proved well justified, even though in late 1984 (when this forecast was written) real estate seemed to be riding high.

And the 1985 Forecast hinted at “technical measures” that we were developing to enhance the critical analysis of market conditions and outlook Two of those measures - the Office Momentum Index and the Retail Matrix - were unveiled in the 1986 report for the first time. John Bailey, serving as Landauer’s “Managing Director in Charge,” linked my name with John White’s in this year’s introductory letter - a linkage for which I am still grateful.

As computer capabilities became more available in offices, the 1986 edition was the first to include graphics plots drawn directly from personal computers. With this, the ability to provide readership with a visual display of quantitative information (to use Edward R. Tufte’s important phrase) helped give shape to our perspectives. This was not only a communication tool, but an aid to improving the quality of analysis in the first place. We take this for granted today, but immense credit should be given to Landauer’s management leadership in investing in such innovation and in encouraging its public deployment, to the benefit not only of Landauer’s own clientele, but to the industry and even to the firm’s competitors in providing models for emulation.

One important consequence of the innovative indices was to “put a number” on the relative strength of markets and property types. This was not without controversy obviously, for some would be offended by finding their particular real estate areas falling to the bottom of the lists. But I can vividly recall John White articulating the responsibility to bring “bad news” if that was warranted by the facts. At one of the firm’s regular staff meetings, he said directly, “If we have to report uncomfortable conclusions, then so be it. That’s Landauer.”

Such integrity of judgment and courage in communication would prove essential in future Forecasts when storm clouds would gather over the economy and the real estate markets.

"In Dark Times"

In my professional writing, I try assiduously to keep my personal political preferences to the side. My opinions in that realm are not what readers looking for real estate economic expertise are seeking. Rather (or at least so I believe) readers want well-supported independent judgments based upon an analysis of verifiable facts. And that’s what I try to provide, even as I realize that a regurgitation of mere facts is not enough to either keep the interest of any informed reader or to provoke (stimulate) fresh thinking.

Nevertheless, even casual readers will surely detect a consistent perspective in my commentaries over time. That’s inevitable, since my economic philosophy is grounded in principles that may evolve over time but which have a core set of values as their touchstone.

The four columns I am posting today in “Industry Publications/Commercial Property Executive” rest on the foundation of that core values set.

• “People, Get Ready For Extended Slowdown in CRE Demand” (March 2019)

• “Get Ready for CRE’s New Normal” (December 2019)

• “Investment Is About Expected Returns” (March 2020)

• “The COVID-19 Economy: Beyond the Tipping Point” (June 2020)

In those columns, as in other of my writing, you will note a real skepticism about the cheerleading of the Trump Administration about the alleged “best economy in history” prior to the pandemic’s arrival and then the downplaying of the COVID threat from early 2020 even until very late in the year. My skepticism was, in all candor, reinforced by the notion floated about “alternative facts” as early as January 2017 by spokespeople for the President. Those of us dealing in facts - especially numerically verifiable facts - take great offense when empirical evidence is dismissed or disparaged. And that has been a regrettable pattern in both the assertions of the now-outgoing Administration and in its behaviors.

Such a pattern, sadly, found what is (I hope) its culminating expression in the assault on the US Capitol yesterday by those summoned by Mr. Trump to Washington, with the invitation “come to DC on January 6th: it will be wild”. And, true to form, it was wild in the sense of being unreasoning and feral. The damage done to our public discourse was far greater than that inflicted on our public property. And the damage to America’s international reputation adds to my dismay, since that reputation has been built for generations on values I hold particularly dear.

This week and next I will be spending time at the annual Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. This is a gift to myself I’ve been enjoying since 2005, an opportunity to engage with smart people outside my usual circle of economic and real estate colleagues. I’ve found that getting beyond the “silo” of my day job(s) has been a very healthy practice in keeping tabs on my assumptions.

Back in 2016 I started keeping a file “Thinking in the Time of Trump.” One of the consistent strains of contributions to that file has been what philosophers call Epistemology, a fancy word for the study of knowledge itself - its sources, scope, and validity. In plain English, this is an attempt to consider how we know what is true and what is not true. The blurring of “truth” has been an increasing problem in our public life - and therefore in our social and working lives - in an era where the Washington Post’s tally of the President’s false or misleading statements now exceeds 25,000. Today’s New York Times Op-Ed page has a column headed, “America Is in a Reality Crisis.” Needless to say, such an environment makes the already difficult job of making sound real estate and economic judgments, much less forecasts, an even trickier assignment.

When a group of us were developing Fordham’s curriculum for a real estate masters degree, I insisted that an Ethics course be required for all our MSRE students. Here is another place where serious philosophical understanding can and should intersect with business practice. What are our responsibilities - beyond the minimum requirements of legal compliance - to clients, to our colleagues or employees, and to others touched by our real estate decision-making? And, let’s be honest, what does the President’s background as a real estate figure do to set public expectations about the integrity of those of us whose careers are identified with this field?

In the 1970s I was privileged to have the noted political philosopher Hannah Arendt as a teacher at The New School for Social Research. One of Arendt’s many books is “Men in Dark Times.” At one point in that text, she notes that for the philosopher Rousseau, “the human nature common to all men was manifested not in reason alone, but in compassion, an innate repugnance to seeing a fellow human being suffering.” For an economist, this is a great reminder that a key difference between pure math and economics is that in math a number is just a number, an abstract concept. But in the economic realm each number must stand for something in the world, and most often that “something” is a human being.

For those who think that economics needs to be abstracted from considerations such as compassion if it is to be “objective,” it is useful to recall that before he wrote “The Wealth of Nations” Adam Smith put together “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Smith’s view of “economics” (which was still called political philosophy in his day) incorporated an understanding of prudence, justice, and beneficence. Though we are self-interested, we are not - as persons - isolated economic agents, but live alongside others. That’s integral to real estate activity, most certainly. And so our real estate judgments and behaviors cannot be mere objects of calculation but should be informed and guided by our society’s need to survive and flourish. Today, we call that widening our perspective to consider the web of stakeholders affected by our activities.

This blog-post can be categorized as a form of “apologia.” This Greek term doesn’t mean “apology” or an expression of regret. An Apologia is an attempt to make clear the grounds for some course, belief, or position. So if I’m generally careful to avoid overtly political comments, I feel that today is a good moment to explain why my real estate economics cannot be entirely divorced from my philosophical values.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

In today’s post, I’d like to hit four items:

1. Some uploads of my published material relating to cities in the COVID era, with special emphasis on New York City.

2. A “reveal” on my major projects on the 2021 docket.

3. A sense of my upcoming activities in the month ahead.

4. A comment on this week’s politics - with a stress on how this website’s material bridges the complicated confluence of such varied streams as economics, philosophy/theology, academics, and the political environment.

The Uploads: I was asked by various publications to share my thoughts about the impact of the pandemic, as it was evolving in 2020. These are “short form” pieces, published between May and September 2020. They can be found under the New York City Tab/COVID Experience. The articles are:

• “Size Does Not Fit All” (Westchester Business Journal, May 2020)

• “Reprised Observations on Black Swans” (The Counselor, June 2020)

• “The Impact of COVID-19 on Cities” (New York Real Estate Journal, August 2020)

• “Higher Education: An NYC Asset, Even in COVID-19 Times (The Mann Report, September 2020)

My Biggest Upcoming Projects: I have two major writing projects underway, both of which are in the research and early draft stages. I expect they will be occupying a lot of my time in 2021. I’m very open to ideas and suggestions, and urge readers to reach out to me via “hughkelly@hotmail.com” with your thoughts.

• I’m collaborating on a Real Estate Capital Markets textbook, for the academic publisher Cognella. We are hoping to have a preliminary edition (a “beta product”) available a year from now, with publication by the Fall 2022 Semester. More info available to those contacting my email address.

• Given the deep divisions marking America, divisions which look like they’ll persist and further challenge “e pluribus unum” in the years ahead, I’m preparing a monograph or book length treatment provisionally entitled, “Transcending Tribalism.” I’ll be drawing on challenges that have marked the past 100 years when deep divisions faced societies: Gandhi’s movement in colonial India, post-WWII Europe, South African apartheid, the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and of course the civil rights and racial strife in America. My thought is that each of these needed resolution not by the victory of one side over the other, but a “transcending” movement of moral quality. This is obviously not a simple topic to address —- nor does it recommend simplistic solutions. But (in my mind, anyway) it is the most critical issue facing us, and highly worthy of serious thinking. YOUR THOUGHTS?

January 2021: The year is beginning with a flurry of presentations involving the economic and real estate outlook for the immediate and mid-range future. All are “via Zoom”

• January 12th will see my annual presentation to the Miami chapter of the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) - the 22nd talk in this series dating back to my Landauer days. This year Danielle Squires of Wells Fargo Securities will also be on the program.

• January 19th is the third in a quarterly series of presentations for the “Real Professionals Network”:, a multidisciplinary group committed to mutual business development and collaboration. Ryan Severino, chief economist of JLL, will be sharing the virtual podium with me.

• On either January 25 or 26th I’ll be speaking with a small private group, based in Cincinnati, about how this public health and economic disruption is affecting the urban outlook - for 24-hour cities, some of the emerging smaller “vibrant cities”, and the far more numerous urban areas seeking a “reinvention” in the 21st century.

In the midst of it all, I’ll be taking some time (as I do each year) to attend the sessions of the American Philosophical Association, where items of Ethics, Civic Education, Sustainability, Diversity, Justice, and even Gentrification are on the agenda. Gotta keep that side of my brain engaged!

This week in Bedlam. The breaking news over the weekend of President Trump’s hour-long pressure call to Georgia state officials, seeking to undo election results in his desperate - I would say “mad” - attempt to stay in office has been characterized as futile by Republicans and Democrats alike, and as delusional by both legal and mental health commentators. This prompted me to return to my 2008 essay (under the Philosophy tab on this website) “Judgment: Imagination, Creativity, and Delusion” which treats such topics in depth. Delusion is a psychopathology, an entrenched belief or view of the world that is impervious to objective evidence. It is closed-minded, in accepting only self-reinforcing inputs. Importantly, as my essay explicitly states “immense consequences can be engendered, especially if the delusion is implanted in and propagated by political, economic, or other social-network systems.” The ability of an individual to sustain his activities, even with some success, is not proof that the pathology is not present, as the case of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick so dramatically illustrates. It is our misfortune to be witnessing in real time such a delusion working itself out publicly, with already grave social and economic consequences. This is why I consider the writings in the Philosophy/Theology pages of this website to be integral to my professional and real estate academic thinking. I hope you, as readers, will concur.

Food for Thought

Here it is January 2nd, and at least one New Year’s Resolution has survived: I’m continuing to bring current the website by adding content.

You’ll find new material (or at least new to these pages) in the Philosophy area (now being re-labeled “Philosophy and Theology”. That material includes

• A formal philosophy paper on the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (fl. 1300), with the Latin title Esse Est Deus, written for a graduate seminar at the New School of Social Research in 1993. This seminar triggered a continuing interest in this very thought-provoking think, who is still a lively provacateur for philosophers and theologians today.

• Two Sermons (!) that i was invited to deliver (in 2015 and 2018) at the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church. How a Catholic like myself wound up in a Methodist pulpit is a story in itself, but it has happened..

  • The first is “Gospel Values, Economics, and Social Justice”

  • The second is “Do You Have Anything Here to Eat?”

    Perhaps the titles of the sermons hint at the connection to my day job.

• “50 Years in 1000 Words” is a personal report I contributed to a compendium put together of reflections by those who, like me, started seminary studies at the North American College at Vatican City in the Fall of 1970. Like the sermons, this piece elucidates the connection between my professional and scholarly life and the spiritual journey that has transpired over the past half-century. It illustrates the adage “God writes straight with crooked lines.”

Lastly (for now) under the heading of 24-hour cities, I’ve posted a Powerpoint presentation with notes that I made at the Homer Hoyt Institute in May 2017 on “The Future of Cities in the Trump Presidency.” Looking back, while my crystal ball was not perfect, this presentation did correctly envision the disruptions to come in the areas of US institutions, urban policy (or lack thereof), the rule of law, trade, education, and other topics that would come to dominate the news, even to the present day.

Archival material added and to come

Today’s uploads include a National Real Estate Investor article about Landauer Associates, my professional home 1978 - 2001. This is a 50th Anniversary feature piece, and still a great outline of how a premier real estate consulting company with a diverse practice was organized and served its clientele. Not incidentally, the article lays out how research played a significant foundational role for the firm. Look under the Consulting page/Landauer.

A second upload is a 1991 article I wrote for SIOR Professional Report entitled “Are You Kidding? Commitment to Real Estate Investment in the 1990s”. This piece was something of a “contrarian” perspective published at the depths of the Savings and Loan Crisis, when the Federal Government was acquiring the troubled assets of the Thrifts via the Resolution Trust Corporation. The essay begins'

With the investment community avoiding real estate with the icy disposition of a spurned lover, the early 1990s may seem to be the wrong time to bring up the subject of a long-term commitment.

Now, as 2020 (thankfully) elides into 2021 and real estate transaction activity has been cut about in half since 2019, I believe this contrarian perspective may again be useful to the investment community.

Lastly, as I undertake this renewal of my website, I have compiled a complete set of the Landauer Forecasts during my tenure, a set of contemporary discussions of the state of the industry and its outlook from 1984 through 2001. I will be digitizing these in the coming weeks. Hopefully these will not merely be helpful for historical reasons, but will illustrate how research helps shape industry judgement and decision-making, as well as showing the evolution of several analytical techniques developed in the course of the Forecasting process.

More content added: Dec. 26, 2020

In addition to Real Estate Issues, I contribute to many industry and academic publications. I have just posted the 2019, 2020, and 2021 editions of Emerging Trends in Real Estate . I served as lead researcher and writer for ET through the 2020 edition, and Bill Hughes capable took the baton in for the 2021 issue. Also, I have served in a similar role for Integra Realty Resources annual publication Viewpoint. I have posted the 2019 and 2020 editions today, and will post the 2021 issue (now in final pre-publication preparation), and will post that when IRR officially releases it.

In the next couple of days, I expect to be posting copies of the quarterly Economists Column that I write for Commercial Property Executive. As they say —- WATCH THIS SPACE!

Hugh

Back at it!

After a hiatus from managing this website, I’m preparing for a more active presence in 2021. Today I’ve updated my brief bio, and posted in “Industry Publications/Real Estate Issues” five essays published between 2018 and 2020.

• Black Swans: The Original Rara Avis

• Ethics in Real Estate Education (with Desmond McGowan and Steve Norris)

• Real Estate Ethics in Practical Application (with Desmond McGowan and Steve Norris)

• The 2020 Economy: Beyond the Tipping Point

• Had Enough Disruption Yet? (Reflections on the First Summer of COVID-19)

Watch for ongoing additions to content, It has not been dull….

Hugh

Comments on Trump Infrastructure "Plan"

A real estate reporter asked me (last week) to comment on the "infrastructre plan" put forward by President Trump on February 12th. Prior to the phone interview we scheduled, I send the following comments to her via email. Since my remarks were too detailed to be used in full (and her publication was targeted to a non-professional audience), let me share my thoughts via this blog post

General remarks:

• It turns out that Trump's campaign promises about infrastructure are no more reliable than his marketing promises about Trump University, only the fraud here is more massive.
• The scale of the program will likely never hit the size Trump claims. Leveraging $200 billion in federal "seed money" into a $1.5 trillion infrastructure program, with already strained state and local budgets bearing the majority of the burden, is unrealistic.
• Remember that the 2017 Tax Act has already hammered the taxing capacity of state and local governments by capping the SALT (state and local tax) deduction. In effect, it is classic Trump financing - push the burden on someone else, preferably someone smaller and weaker.
• The context is the infrastructure deficiency level analyzed by the American Society of Civil Engineers, a ten-year shortfall estimated at $4.6 trillion. Against this, $200 billion is chump change. (Only an economist can say that!). The ASCE grades America's infrastructure "D+". That's a grade that would put my students on academic probation.
• Simply on a cost basis, Trump's approach is fiscally foolhardy. Long-term infrastructure improvements need to be bond-financed, and the Treasury can borrow (today) at 3.02% for 20 years. States and municipalities must pay higher rates, depending upon their bond ratings, and many have very restrictive limits on the amount of allowable indebtedness as well as requirements for voter approval of public bonds. In real estate, the normal procedure is to leverage a small ratio of high yield equity to acquire a larger amount of lower-cost debt. Trump's proposed structure is an example of "negative leverage."
• Wall Street is a major winner under this plan, since driving down financing from the Federal to state and local agencies multiplies the number of debt issues which need to be devised and marketed - huge fees for investment banks. And, of course, every dollar that goes to an i-bank is a dollar that does not go to roads, bridges, rail facilities, and airports.

More Specific Comments:

• The real cost of infrastructure deficiencies is in lost productivity. This directly affects real estate (especially commercial real estate) because lost productivity negatively affects profits, and it is profits that pay the rent for tenants. There is great irony in what Trump prioritized in his economic agenda. The Tax Act, for example, is an example of government subsidizing profit gain without stimulating increased productivity. Infrastructure improvement, on the other hand, means improved logistics, less lost time to employee commutation, and greater efficiency in the delivery of energy, to name just a few economic benefits. And then there is The Wall, which has no productivity benefit for its $25 billion (proposed) cost, and will likely be inflationary by exacerbating an already stressed labor market.
• Well-designed infrastructure can more than pay for itself by increasing the value of the real estate around it. That's what TIF (Tax Increment Financing) and TOD (Transit Oriented Development) do so well. The tax cuts, by contrast, are generally recognized to be a net economic loss insofar as they don't pay for themselves, even under so-called "dynamic scoring." By prioritizing a net-negative intervention (the Tax Act) over a net-positive intervention (infrastructure), Trump and his team display considerable economic illiteracy. In a way, it is a bait-and-switch economic shell game similar to alleging that casinos will jump-start the economy of troubled cities. (see the results in Atlantic City.)
• The Tax Act is probably more harmful to residential real estate than this infrastructure proposal. Moody's Analytics calculates that most cities (including Austin, Atlanta, and New Orleans,not just "blue state" cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco) face home price declines of 2% to 6% in home values due to the Tax Act.
• Your (the reporter's) worry about labor costs [affecting housing affordability] is better directed to the deleterious impacts of the Cotton/Perdue "RAISE" immigration bill, supported by Trump and his team (Mulvaney and Miller). So-called "merit-based" immigration skews new arrivals toward white-collar workers, discouraging construction workers, agricultural workers, and lower-skilled service workers such as landscapers. The RAISE bill would cut legal immigration in half at a time when we have a 4.1% unemployment rate. It's a disastrous idea.
• I think you (the reporter) are on the wrong path in looking for rural areas with low cost housing as being any significant part of America's future. Rural areas have been depopulating since the 1930s (and probably before) because there is little economic opportunity "out in the country". We are sometimes nostalgic for Mayberry, but you'll find few romantics among those who actually live in Appalachia, rural Mississippi, West Texas, or southern Illinois. Have you ever been to the Ozarks? or eastern Washington State?
• It is particularly frustrating to think of the many lost opportunities that will be missed under the combination of Trump Administration policies, not just for business but for the ordinary worker that Trump called "the forgotten man." Large-scale infrastructure projects provide jobs at many levels of skill, especially for under-employed blue collar workers. Moreover, they provide entry-level jobs that are not dead-end jobs but gateways to an upwardly mobile career. It gets back to productivity again: as skills grow, so does productivity (output per worker; output per hour). That is the way to grow GDP in a sustainable way. No one on the White House economic team seems to understand this basic economic concept.

This may be a bit of a rant, but I actually would argue that these points are important and based on very sound economics, the kind of economics that Eisenhower understood in laying out the Interstate Highway System and Kennedy understood in proposing the Apollo space program. Such infrastructure efforts spurred a half-century of growth. Trump's plan doesn't even merit being called an "idea."

Four years of "Emerging Trends" added

This afternoon, I have placed Emerging Trends in Real Estate, for years 2015 through 2018, in the Industry Publications tab. Emerging Trends is published by Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers. I have served as lead writer and research for these four editions.

Topical Materials from RECAP/HQCapital Newsletters

Since 2001 I have been privileged to write a quarterly newsletter and occasional white papers for Real Estate Capital Partners (Now HQ [for Harold Quant] Capital/Real Estate).

I have posted several of those pieces to the website, and will add to the list over time. Topics include observations on the real estate outlook under President Trump's policies, thoughts on evolving cities and secondary cities, natural resources and natural disasters, international factors such as the rise of China (2005) and the expectation of tightening labor markets (2014).