Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
Office broker stats don't cover everything. Mostly they do buildings that have been on the leasing market at some point. Not government buildings, older owner-occupied buildings, small buildings, etc. Based on those two figures it's within the margin of variation as to which is largest.
But if Downtown was larger that would be a sign of Downtown strength, obviously. You worded that oddly.
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What I meant was that Downtown Detroit would be quicker to fill up because it is smaller. The vacancy rate drops at an apparent faster rate than the suburban market; ie, a company taking up 100,000 sq ft downtown would be more significant than that same 100,000 feet out in Southfield.
Anyway, the point is I don't actually think that a newly developed downtown in Southfield would necessarily fail because of the decreasing vacancy rate in downtown Detroit or because of the already present Royal Oak and Birmingham downtowns.
I guess I believe Metro Detroit's economy to be large enough to accommodate all of it and that a likely reason for Southfield's supposed new downtown to fail is because it wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing?
This looks ugly as shit....
...and instead should look something like this.
Obviously not to the same caliber since I'm sure the above picture would be way expensive and slow to develop with current market conditions (and a few other obvious differences since this image is of a development in San Francisco), but this was created out of vacant land and I don't see how it'd be that hard to do the same except over parking lots in a fairly busy suburb.
A lot of Metro Detroit projects do seem to fail quite simply because they're done without a lack of vision and ambition. People aren't going to be drawn to the cheapest developments possible. Get some decent architects (I'm not asking even for starchitect status, just people who know what looks good) and developers and maybe people will actually be drawn to the area.
Edit: Actually, something a lot like Hudkina's drawing. Just with dense development.