Oh my goodness, thank you. My wife had to move her store in 2020 in the midst of lockdown; you'd think rents would have been low, but no. Since then, many of the places that wouldn't lower the rent then, have sat empty ever since. This is in Austin, TX, a town that has had a healthy economy during that entire time.
Weirder still, many of them were on the market, theoretically for rent, but if you called them up it turned out they weren't actually available, and the landlord wasn't interested in renting them. I couldn't figure out why you would pretend something was for rent at $X, and let it sit empty for years, rather than actually rent it at something <$X. Now it makes sense.
Wait, were they not available at $x, or not available for < $x? Because if it’s the former, then this article doesn’t really explain your experience, right?
Several instances of both. In at least one case they told us that they wanted to rent to a big-name tenant at a larger space in the same complex, before they started renting any of the smaller places. What seemed odd to me is that they would nonetheless put the property "on the market", i.e. online listing, even though if you called up they would say it's not for rent. I figured it had to be to claim that it was "available for rent" in some technical sense, but I didn't know why.
In others they would just have too high a price, and it is still empty six years later so they are clearly not unaware that they have it priced too high. Simple math showed they would be better off renting at a lower price than going years without anything, but it was quite common so it didn't seem like it could be simple stupidity.
The test, I guess, of this explanation is whether or not the flow of money out of private credit causes the end of "extend and pretend", and the market finally clears.
Could be this (from the article): "Another scenario I can think of is that the financial model for the building requires spaces to be filled by “credit tenants,” meaning name-brand businesses of a certain caliber and creditworthiness."
Might not be available unless your name ends in 'tarbucks'.
Yep. The owner assigns much higher value to leasing to a large national chain. They often hold out for one, refusing to lease to more risky businesses.
Another thing that I read about on this topic was that once a land lord has gotten into a groove of extend and pretend they lower their costs and cut out the overhead of property management. This means that if they took on one tenant they would have to ramp up property management costs (and potentially refurb/improvement costs) and they are not willing to do that, so you end up with the situation where you can't rent a property even if you want to.
It seems to me he contradicts his own thesis here: "The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill. For example, if you want to learn a language, you need to learn a lot of words. Any method that tries to skip over the fact that there are tens of thousands of words to learn is doomed to failure. All skills are like this, it’s simply that the “atoms” of learning are usually less obvious than in languages."
...but we don't learn our first language, or any other, by first learning a few thousand words and only then speaking. We start using the very first words we learn, in real life situations, and add words as we need them. It's the real-world applicability and project-based method that he pronounces skepticism of elsewhere in the same piece.
Every coach of every sports team ever, knows that you need drills, but you also need to play actual games, to keep kids motivated to do those drills.
True that, but it could be both cause and effect. There are reports that gut bacteria can induce depression, which benefits the bacteria because it sends more calorie-rich, highly processed food down the gullet (think ice cream binges when depressed). Not hard to believe that gut bacteria optimized for a particular kind of food could evolve the ability to induce their host to eat that food exclusively. It would have the side-benefit (for the bacteria) of reducing competition from other microbes that aren't optimized for that, by starving them out. Things aren't always just cause or effect, especially in biology.
Maybe. IMHO there is also a microbiome hype train in the recent years. Most of these microbiome studies aren't considering a lot confounding factors. Here is a paper: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)01231-9 that found only very little evidence for association between ASD and gut microbiome.
I agree, comparing to other expensive markets seems a bit odd, rather than comparing to markets with some other similarity (population, geography, median income, et cetera). The full table in the original report is much more interesting:
One of the authors of this paper, David Reich, has written a book called "Who We Are and How We Got Here", which is worth reading. My thoughts on it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2605841954
In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesn’t really make you wonder at all. It’s obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didn’t?
this really seems like a naive question. what about this administration dropping the case seems out of place from the rest of the corruption occurring within it? do you honestly think this administration dropping a case in favor of a powerful business instead of fighting for the consumer as anything other than corrupt?
Bribes, campaign donations, presidential ballrooms. The current administration has settled MANY cases that they'd already won, it's very easy to buy favors now.
> If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed.
This is more why DOJ cases should remain independent from the executive branch. Politically controlled prosecutions means justice is intrinsically unequal. Having states be independent is helpful, but not in this regard.
Federalism is a red herring. For every case of "federalism is good because it let the states do this good thing" you can find a case of "federalism is bad because it let the states do this bad thing".
On the other hand, I'm not sure a European style tribunal would have been allowed to settle the case early.
Yes. It's good that the states can serve as a check on the Federal level government. But why can the federal level government give up on cases on a national level? Just because a different party was voted in?
No matter what your politics, sooner or later someone you don't agree with will be in charge at the national level.
There are also cases where states take on cases that the national government never pursues in the first case. IIRC, states pursued the tobacco companies when the national government would not (Democrat or Republican).
Of course, it happens in federal courts, so you also need separate and independent branches at the national level. But states that can act independently are important as well.
Courts in Europe are often older than the countries. Indeed, many "countries" of Europe have governments that only existed since the 1920s, or 1940s (depending on which World War wrecked the old system). Nonetheless, court rulings persisted through that period. So there's a string of independence here that's hard to replicate.
Furthermore, prosecutors are part of the court system over there (not part of the executable branch like here in the USA). IIRC: most European countries are Inquisitorial, rather than Adversarial (like USA).
Finally, because European systems have no "two party system", the "rulers" are rarely one party. Its often a coalition of two different parties, maybe even three parties.
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The USA's adversarial style of prosecutor vs defendant is extremely unique. Both good and bad. One of the bads is that prosecutors will give up on cases that mismatch with the politicians in charge.
But there's many mechanisms that would have prevented this situation from arising in France or Germany.
The problem is that the Department of Justice is part of the Executive Branch, and due to the burgeoning of the Imperial Presidency over the past several decades, that means that as soon as a new President is voted in, he can order the DoJ to change all their priorities to match his.
Our system doesn't have to be this way, even with the federal/state split; it doesn't even have to be this way with the designation of the DoJ as being within the Executive Branch. It's taken a lot of erosion of norms and flagrant breaking of laws to get to the point the US is at now.
Weirder still, many of them were on the market, theoretically for rent, but if you called them up it turned out they weren't actually available, and the landlord wasn't interested in renting them. I couldn't figure out why you would pretend something was for rent at $X, and let it sit empty for years, rather than actually rent it at something <$X. Now it makes sense.
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