Reimagining Cities-Disrupting the Urban Doom Loop

a unique dataset. Here, we offer a first-of its-kind, comprehensive view of all real estate products across our 15 cities and their 208 WalkUPs. We source and estimate data for: office, retail, multifamily rental, industrial, hotel, sports and entertainment, education (mostly a mix of office-equivalent space and dorms), owner-occupied (generally office and industrial), General Services Administration (GSA), and for-sale housing. 63 In doing so, this report provides insights into urban real estate trends under a new prism where we add other product types often not considered.

This section discusses important portfolio trends across our 15 cities and their 208 WalkUPs, revealing the vulnerability of Downtowns to office over-concentration. This issue has led to considerable challenges, and it continues to impact these areas today. We further illustrate this by discussing trends in rents and PPSF valuations, demonstrating how these outcomes are influenced by shares in Work and overall product portfolio diversity. We also discuss how these overall real estate trends impact the fiscal wellbeing of local governments through their effects on GDP and tax revenues. It is important to note that real estate has too often been a siloed industry; office developers, asset owners, managers and their peers only knew, and focused on, office. The same holds for retail, rental multifamily, for-sale housing and the rest of the real estate products covered in this study. This research indicates that it is crucial to adopt a comprehensive, place-based view of the industry. By recognizing the economic and social interconnections that merge within the built environment, we can foster a sense of place, generate economic value and support local government programs and services. AN OVERVIEW A crucial yet often overlooked aspect of understanding commercial and for sale residential real estate at the city and WalkUP level is the ability to see the product portfolio mix. This is primarily due to the difficulty, until recently, of finding and pulling together data on all real estate product types. For example, the market has far less data on owner-occupied commercial real estate and unique products like education uses than it does on traditional products like for-lease office and retail. Furthermore, the technology of developing place-based, bottom-up definitions of place and place boundaries has been missing, generally reverting to top-down boundaries like zip codes and industry-defined submarkets. By combining several data sources and using research-based methods, we’ve constructed

Our city-level findings reveal that, as expected, for-sale housing is the

predominant real estate product by square footage as of 2023. Of all the products, this residential use constituted 37% of all square footage inventory, ranging from as low as 9% in New York to 48% in Seattle. Live—the combination of multifamily rental, student housing and for-sale—is anywhere from 48% of the city’s real estate stock in Boston to just over 70% in Raleigh. These Live share extremes are even larger at the WalkUP level, ranging from zero to 98% of the product mix. We observe distinct trends in WalkUP types. In the Downtown WalkUPs office was the predominant product with 57% of total inventory (70% when owner-user, university and GSA office space is added). Just under 15% of the Downtown product mix across the 15 cities was some form of housing. Having

63 A methodology appendix is provided at the end of this report for more information on the sourcing and construction of the data set assembled for this study.

Reimagining Cities: Disrupting the Urban Doom Loop 33