Is this the end for commerical real estate? Or even civilization itself? Do we all need to go build crazy rat rods and dress in black leather like in the original Mad Max movie? No I don't think so. But there's a lot more change, and more crazy times ahead, in my opinion. This video did give me the idea for this blog, though.
I'm a blogger, one of the millions of bloggers that toss their personal thoughts and ideas out here on the interwebs. I'm not a professional blogger, I don't make a living blogging, but I have been at it for over 14 years now, and my top few blogs have pulled in over 300,000 pageviews. So some people check out my ideas at times.
I've been an amateur futurist, and and economics geek, much of my life. Since I was a kid, I've tried to figure out where things were headed, where society itself was going. As a Gen X kid in the 1970's, life moved really slow, compared to our current world. Change was a slow, gradual process back then, major changes took years. Over the 45 years since, I've run into a few theories of long term trends and cycles that have helped me get a better picture of where the future is likely to take us. During that time, as us older folks know, things began changing at most every level, and the rate of change keeps getting faster and faster.
I've been blogging about the current recession that we seem to be heading into, in posts like this and this, since 2019. By the late 2010's, it became apparent to me that a whole lot of change, and major inflection points in economics and society itself, were coming in the 2020's. I predicted a major economic downturn would be coming in early 2019, and hinted at it in early 2018.
But now we are beginning the 4th year of what I call The Tumultuous 2020's, and appear to be heading into a seriously deep and gnarly recession. Not what?
The idea of finding new uses for old, abandoned, or unused buildings, has fascinated me for more than a decade. I wound up in central North Carolina during the Great Recession, a place I'd never lived before. The only job I could find there was driving a taxi. Day after day I drove past the old, crumbling textile and furniture factory buildings, imagining what could be done to revive them. I often sat in front of an abandoned warehouse building, alone in my taxi, dreaming of building a bike and skate park in it, something like Ray's MTB in Cleveland. While I never got any of those ideas off the ground, the rehabilitation of unused and abandoned buildings is something I still think about. I believe it will be a major part of the change in this decade, a continuing period of extensive change throughout society.
I went looking for the blogs and YouTube channels about adaptive reuse of commercial buildings, just out of curiosity, and found there weren't any. There are several scholarly articles, a few business articles, and a number of videos. But no one has brought these ideas together in one place. So I decided to do it. We'll see where this all goes. As real estate, housing and commercial, crashes in many parts of the U.S. in 2023, this is a trend that will definitely grow in the coming years, once business people find new ideas and banks feel safe funding commercial real estate again.
There's a lot to dig into in this area, and lots of new ideas are needed. I like to dig into weird stuff like this, and I'm an idea guy. So here we go, hopefully some of you will find good posts in this blog, and related content as it heads forward. All aboard! Let's see where this idea will go...
No comments:
Post a Comment