REAL ESTATE
What comes next for offices? We asked these experts.
While it’s just one quarter of positive net absorption, it has been improving for some time, giving us confidence this is a trend rather than an aberration. The bigger question is, what kind of pace will this recovery be able to sustain? We remain cautious for two reasons. First, office-using employment growth has been moderate to weak. Second, many pre-pandemic leases are coming up for renewal in the next few years, which could lead to some degree of downsizing.
https://www.costar.com/article/1362676397/what-comes-next-for-offices-we-asked-these-experts
Office Utilization Shifts Bring Down Property Valuations
The average price of an office building fell by 11% year-over-year to $174 per square foot at the end of 2024, as highlighted in our U.S. office market report, down from $196 per square foot in 2023. However, the drop was not as severe as 2023’s, when the average sale price of an office asset decreased by 24% year-over-year. The office sector suffered massive devaluation since the onset of the pandemic, with the national average sale price of an office down by 37% since 2019. Highly rated properties and those in commercial business districts (CBDs) saw the biggest declines in sale prices throughout last year. Class A or A+ properties decreased by 22% in 2024, while Class B properties slipped just 3% year-over-year. Similarly, the average sale price of CBD buildings fell by 28%, while suburban properties decreased by 15%. Conversely, properties in urban submarkets, defined as within a city center but outside the CBD, increased by 7% during the same period.
https://www.commercialedge.com/blog/national-office-report/
Real estate agent numbers plummet to decade low as industry undergoes transformation
In 2019, the last full year before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States, there were about 543,000 full-time real estate agents and brokers in the U.S., according to data gathered by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. After a slight dip in 2020, there were 524,000 brokers and agents in 2021 and 512,000 in 2022.
In 2023, that number dropped to 440,000, then to 398,000 in 2024.
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2025/02/24/housing-market-real-estate-agent-2025-nar-ai.html
Johnston to push back Energize Denver deadlines, halve penalties
Currently, building owners must comply with the regulations by 2030. The changes proposed this week push that back to 2032 and allow for owners to seek extensions beyond that date, according to the city. An interim compliance deadline would also be pushed back from this year to 2028. Penalties would be halved because “the focus of this program is on energy efficiency, not penalties,” according to the city. No penalties have been assessed, per Denver, and none would be assessed until late 2029 under the proposed changes. The changes would also allow buildings facing financial hardship or high vacancy rates, or a major tenant lease expiring around the same time as an Energize Denver deadline, to receive a two-year compliance delay.
https://businessden.com/2025/03/13/johnston-to-push-back-energize-denver-deadlines-halve-penalties/
YIMBYism is an American legal tradition. Here’s how to revive it.
From before the Founding through most of the 20th century, American property law promoted development, active use of land, broad ownership, and liquid property markets, far more than did the property law of our English forebearers. This happened for reasons good and bad, but the pro-developmental tradition played an important role in the tremendous rates of economic growth America saw in the 19thand first half of the 20th centuries. Only in the 1970s and 80s was this tradition rejected, not only in land use, but across all of property law. Conservatism, conservation, externality limitation, and localism replaced dynamism, changes in uses and owners, and national markets as the goals of property law.
https://www.niskanencenter.org/yimbyism-is-an-american-legal-tradition-heres-how-to-revive-it/
MOBILITY
As E-Bikes Surge, We Need to Address Both the Opportunities and Challenges
E-bikes can replace vehicle trips in many cases, significantly reducing carbon emissions and traffic congestion while contributing to more livable, accessible cities. The growing popularity of e-bikes also presents manufacturing and economic development opportunities in an emerging sector. E-bikes make up about 15% of the market for all-electric vehicles globally, and this is poised to grow. Despite their potential, many city and national governments have yet to define e-bikes clearly, require quality standards, or state where and how riders should safely use them. This lack of clarity has confused riders and retailers alike, particularly amidst questions about the safety of low-quality lithium-ion batteries and chargers.
https://itdp.org/2025/03/04/e-bikes-surge-we-need-to-address-both-opportunities-and-challenges-stmagazine-36/
Parking pricing strategies in the era of autonomous vehicles
The situation is further complicated by the arrival of privately-own autonomous vehicles (AVs), which are expected to significantly alter transportation systems and parking behaviors. Compared to conventional vehicles (CVs), AVs provide a wider range of parking options. Unlike CVs, which require drivers to park their vehicles in a lot and then walk to their destination, AVs can drive autonomously to designated parking areas, eliminating the limitation on walking distance. AVs could not only park themselves near the destination as is done for CVs but also return home for free parking or self-drive randomly around the destination until they are summoned by travelers (Su and Wang, 2020).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967070X25000927
How Autonomous Cars Can Induce Sprawl and Sabotage Climate Goals
First, robotaxis could induce more travel due to their visible upsides like convenience and the reduced financial burden. In the same vein, autonomous cars could encourage longer commutes, making people less averse to long commutes since they don’t have to drive themselves. Robotaxis also create more empty trips as cars circle around passenger-less, waiting for fares.
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2025/02/134417-how-autonomous-cars-can-induce-sprawl-and-sabotage-climate-goals
Denver to Boulder RTD train may be just years, not decades, away
There may be a train from Denver to Boulder and Longmont this decade after all. The Regional Transportation District’s plan to build a commuter rail line between those cities, part of the mega 2004 FasTracks program, famously hit the skids in the early 2010s after cost overruns pushed a completion date into the 2040s. Now, RTD, the Colorado Department of Transportation, and the Front Range Passenger Rail District are working together to start service between Denver and Fort Collins with stops in between by Jan. 1, 2029. An early analysis presented to the RTD board this week put start-up costs between about $800 million and $900 million for three round trips a day.
https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/28/denver-to-boulder-rtd-train-timeline-update/
16th Street Mall Project
Reconstruction is complete between Market and Champa streets! Crews are on site at various locations along 16th Street, and businesses are open. The full closure at Cleveland and 16th began Sept. 30, 2024 and will remain closed through late April 2025. The project is planned for completion in the fall of 2025. Catch the RTD Free MallRide on 16th Street between Union Station and Curtis Street. The Free MallRide continues to be rerouted to 15th and 17th streets between Curtis Street and Civic Center Station.
https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Department-of-Transportation-and-Infrastructure/Programs-Services/Projects/16th-Street-Mall?OC_EA_EmergencyAnnouncementList_Dismiss=0e8968ab-dc15-4880-8822-4289d17f7b65&lang_update=638308130042677085#section-1
The Untold Story Behind the Paris Bike Boom
Anne Hidalgo’s visionary leadership gets a lot of the credit for Paris’s bicycling boom. But is there a deeper story behind the success of the City of Lights? In this video, Shifter unpacks how advocates held the vaunted mayor accountable for making good on her big biking promises, as well as how a simple Metro-style bike map helped residents envision a future where getting in the saddle was a real alternative to driving, plus as a few other tips that we could learn from in the U.S.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/02/28/friday-video-the-untold-story-behind-the-paris-bike-boom
Manhattan Economy Improving, Thanks to Congestion Pricing
President Trump has said he wants to end the toll because he believes that reducing the amount of private cars in Midtown and Lower Manhattan would ruin the local economy. But that idea — which was neither supported by the congestion pricing environmental assessment nor by the experience of other cities with congestion pricing — has been proven false so far.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/02/27/memo-to-the-president-manhattan-economy-improving-thanks-to-congestion-pricing
Rail Transit & Population Density – Comparing and ranking 250 cities around the world
Good public transit connects people to places. Ideally, this is done efficiently and sustainably, with transit routes and stations serving and connecting the most amount of people possible. But in reality, there’s a lot of variation within and between cities in how effectively this is done.There are two main limitations with this transit data: 1) it only includes rail transit, not Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which in many cities provides comparable service to rail. 2) it does not account for frequency (i.e. headway) of routes.
https://schoolofcities.github.io/rail-transit-and-population-density/
Are Electric Vehicles the Future of Transportation?
EVs are the future of cars, but cars are not the future of transportation. Cars will always be one of the primary ways we get around, and EVs are, on the whole, much better than gas-powered cars. But EVs also have some real downsides that must be considered and mitigated. And more broadly, we need sustainable transportation and land-use policy that doesn’t lock people into car dependency and leads to a future with more mobility and less driving.
https://bettercities.substack.com/p/are-electric-vehicles-the-future
MOBILITY AND REAL ESTATE
Denser housing vs. the ’burbs
Builders installed about 66,000 housing units within a half-mile of RTD transit hubs between 2000 and 2019, according to an Urban Institute analysis of census data. But they installed more than 180,000 housing units away from transit, mostly single-family homes in suburbs, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained urban planner Yonah Freemark, who conducted the analysis. That fits a national pattern where far more housing was built away from transit stations (17.6 million units) than near them (2 million units) over the past two decades, Freemark said, despite persistent government promotion of compactness. “Getting more housing in places around transit is essential for reducing people’s overall costs of living,” he said, noting Denver saw some of the fastest growth in apartments by transit among U.S. cities. “But a large share of Americans prefer single-family homes.
https://enewspaper.denverpost.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx
Could the Comeback of the U.S. Pedestrian Mall Start on Bourbon St.?
“Bourbon Street certainly has the economics such that, unlike other places, they can demand beer delivery early in the morning — and not worry about trucks demanding a welcome loading zone at 3 p.m.,” Speck added. The political challenges of closing a street to cars are never easy, even in the wake of deadly tragedies like the one that rocked New Orleans early this year, Speck added. But if New Orleans can pick the low-hanging fruit, other U.S. cities can follow suit.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/03/03/could-the-comeback-of-the-pedestrian-mall-start-on-bourbon-st
Great Funway to Open on Saturday, April 12
“The conversion of Upper Great Highway into a 2-mile long, 43-acre oceanfront park is a historic moment for San Francisco and California, and moves our city towards Streets Forward’s vision of transforming San Francisco’s streets into safe, equitable, and sustainable public spaces for all,” wrote Streets Forward’s Luke Bornheimer in an email to Streetsblog.
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2025/03/03/great-funway-opens-on-saturday-april-12
Bus Rapid Transit Impact on Property Prices: Comparing Two Natural Experiments in El Paso, TX
The findings of our study indicate a significant difference in the impact of BRTs on housing prices even within the same city. Properties along the Mesa corridor did not present a significant difference in price after the BRT opening, while properties along Alameda and Dyer lines showed a significant positive impact. This result suggests that BRT may be more beneficial to and valued in lower-income neighborhoods and less popular housing markets. In planning for future mass transit systems, it is crucial to take into account the unique urban context and the socioeconomic characteristics of the surrounding area especially for minority populations.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0739456X251317541
Cities Tackle Traffic, Parking Through Curb Management
In Denver, the city began drafting its Curbside Action Plan several years ago as a supplement to the region’s Denver Moves Everyone transportation plan, Alt explained. “The access to the curb has just intensified. What people are wanting, and what people need to do at the curb, has just changed,” she said during the Feb. 26 webinar, noting the growth of micromobility, package delivery and other uses has prompted the city to take a fresh look at how to manage this essential space. “It was time for us to think about what was going to happen next, with our planning process, with our curb, and how people are going to gain access to it.” The city’s plan, she said, recommends using data more effectively: “One of the things we want to do is think about how we are using that data to better utilize the curbside, and build upon it to finish out the rest of our recommendations within the plan.”
https://www.govtech.com/transportation/cities-tackle-traffic-parking-through-curb-management
Denver Airport Announces $13 Billion in Upgrades
Once the final Great Hall phase of DIA’s $2.1 billion overhaul is finished in 2027, DIA officials said they’ll begin more upgrades — costing roughly $12.8 billion — to handle a projected 120 million travelers a year by 2045. Airport chief executive Phil Washington reminded about 500 attendees at a 30th anniversary luncheon that DIA, “blessed with 53 square miles of land” will have “room enough” for more than the current six runways. “We have the capacity for 12,” Washington said. Planning is underway to add a seventh runway before 2035, which would give DIA one of the largest airfields, and an eighth by 2045.
https://www.governing.com/transportation/denver-airport-announces-13-billion-in-upgrades
A New Pitch to Fix Penn Station: Move Madison Square Garden
Expanding the train station, the busiest in the nation, is a pressing issue because construction has just begun on a $16 billion pair of rail tunnels under the Hudson River, the centerpieces of a project known as Gateway, which would double the current cross-Hudson capacity. The added tracks could help solve the frequent delays that cause havoc for hordes of commuters. But they will not relieve the gloom of daily slogs through Penn’s claustrophobic subterranean concourses. That’s why so many groups have offered up their ideas for improving Penn Station. The latest plan is proposing to pay for the construction of a new sports arena on a site that includes the former Hotel Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue, in exchange for the right to demolish the current Garden. The new train hall, unencumbered by the arena, could double the station’s capacity to 48 trains per hour, provide a suite of new safety and accessibility features and address riders’ biggest complaints about the cramped station, said Alexandros Washburn, who is leading the project for Grand Penn Community Alliance. There would also be room to create a sprawling green space, similar in size to Bryant Park, that would effectively serve as a giant backyard for a new 125-foot-tall train hall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/nyregion/penn-station-madison-square-garden.html
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Small Single-Stairway Apartment Buildings Have Strong Safety Record
Revising construction codes to allow for single stairways in four-to-six-story apartment buildings should prioritize life safety by including relevant active and passive fire protection strategies. The experience of New York City indicates that safety, housing supply, and affordability can all be improved simultaneously by enabling single-stair construction with proven fire safety measures.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2025/02/small-single-stairway-apartment-buildings-have-strong-safety-record
Trump administration to slash funding for enforcement of fair housing laws
Of an estimated 34,000 fair housing complaints lodged in the U.S. in 2023, these private nonprofits processed 75%, according to a report from the National Fair Housing Alliance. The rest were fielded by state and local governments, with HUD and the U.S. Department of Justice working on less than 6% combined.
It is the highest number of complaints since the first report in the 1990s, and over half were lodged for discrimination based on a disability. Now, of the 162 active grants going to the private nonprofits to do that work, nearly half are slated for cancellation, said Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-doge-housing-crisis-cuts-discrimination-d0c6e3b4b030787a1f60a7dc153153dd
2024 Terwilliger Center Home Attainability Index: Report of Findings, Data Tools, and Maps
The Terwilliger Center Home Attainability Index is a data-rich resource for understanding the extent to which a housing market is providing a range of choices attainable to the regional workforce. The data can help identify gaps in home attainability and provide better context to understand residential markets; explicitly identify and highlight racial, socioeconomic, and intraregional disparities and inequities; and enable national and regional comparisons to inform housing production, policy, and financing decisions.
https://americas.uli.org/research/centers-initiatives/terwilliger-center-for-housing/research-publications/home-attainability-index/
The Looting Of America’s Affordable Housing Fund
Three of the world’s largest private equity firms, Apollo, KKR & Co., and Blackstone, have all acquired or managed investments for life insurance companies that have borrowed more than $20 billion from the Federal Home Loan Bank System in the past five years, according to The Lever’s analysis of annual reports and financial disclosures from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Apollo, the largest private equity borrower, appears to earn over $200 million a year on the investments it makes using these loans. In those same financial filings, firms like Apollo disclose that they use the funds secured from the home loan banks to invest in their growing portfolio rather than affordable housing. The insurance companies managed by Apollo, KKR, and Blackstone haven’t originated a single mortgage in the past five years. “The Federal Home Loan Bank has become a de facto piggy bank for private equity and insurance companies,” said Ryan Gremillion, senior vice president of policy and research of the African American Alliance of CDFI CEOs, a coalition of Black-led community development financial institutions. “The system was created to support housing finance, but now the money is being funneled to private equity-backed firms with little connection to housing and community development.”
https://www.levernews.com/the-looting-of-americas-affordable-housing-fund/
States Consider Capping Home Purchases by Large Investors
The largest investors, those holding more than 1,000 homes, own more than 70,000 single-family rentals in metropolitan Atlanta, for example. Investors own more than 28 percent of the single-family rentals in the region, accounting for 10 percent of the entire rental market. Earlier this year, Georgia state Rep. Phil Olaleye, a Democrat, introduced the Protect the Dream Act, which would bar single-family home sales to businesses that already own more than 25 homes in a single county or have more than a certain amount in assets. Olaleye says the increasing consolidation of the single-family rental market by a few companies puts more people at risk of eviction, undermines social cohesion in communities, and could create “a generation of renters” who don’t benefit from the wealth-building that comes from homeownership.
https://www.governing.com/urban/states-consider-capping-home-purchases-by-large-investors
It Will Take 7 Years To Fix the Housing Shortage at Current Construction Pace, Economists Say
Ramping up home construction will be key to closing the housing gap. Unfortunately, total annual housing starts have been falling since their recent peak in 2021, due mostly to a decline in multifamily construction. Single-family home construction has been roughly flat since 2022, at around 1 million units per year, and isn’t expected to grow much in 2025 either. The National Association of Home Builders forecasts single-family starts to grow just 0.2% this year, to an annual rate of 1.01 million units, and rise an additional 4% in 2026, to a 1.05 million pace. President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda could be a headwind, particularly his newly imposed tariffs on Canada, which supplies much of the lumber used in residential home construction.
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/housing-shortage-supply-gap-data/
