my guess is the vacancy rate will rise in 2010 too.

About the time that the Indians and Chinese are ready to off-shore.

My sense is that there is some real nervousness with kind of a last hurrah feeling about this July 4.

A lot of municipalities are canceling their public fireworks displays. This whole change-of-living-standards thing is starting to hit home. But do you think any public official has the cajones to declare it?

Standard of living to fall for at least a year - Telegraph

Many people still see this a temporary blip...

dryfly: I have been getting the impression that for a not unsubstantial amount of time your office (i.e. the laptop and cell phone) are inside your car heading down the freeway.

Even a job description as "detached" as yours comes with substantial resource consumption (when I take your point to mean "office lite"). As literally a middleman (no negative connotations implied), you have probably minimal face time requirements among "white collar" job descriptions.

I don't think the typical office "business process" would work in a "working from home" paradigm, at scale. Yes of course there are professions that are largely about "execution" and "standard" process, and it's more a sliding scale than a yes/no thing.

I have seen multi-site and even multi-building organizations (admittedly mostly R&D). Most of the useful interaction is in person, and at least much if not most is people running into each other on the isle, in the break room, etc. In short, informal and ad hoc interaction in a context that makes it clear it is not intrusive. It is not necessarily that much in-depth information is exchanged that way, but this is how often communication is initiated.

It is simply impossible to compensate for spatial proximity with phone and email, even between 2 participants. For more than 3 people, forget it.

And I'm not even going to start on the social component that is way underestimated.

Now we will have falling rentable incomes as well as falling house prices.

The dark side just isn't what it used to be.

I gotta remember that one!

Yossarian, on another topic, I hear Summer finally arrived in Portland. Huah!

Our county and state gov't have been building an truly huge and staggeringly ugly office park virtually in my backyard -- once one of the prettiest places near Pgh.

Now flattened and paved for buildings so unloveable even Kunstler would be at a loss for words.

Ok, also although it is 1 mile off a 4-lane road, this road is a 5-mile a boondoggle that only connects to two lane roads, which are a min of 7-miles from another 4-laner.

So in general it is, given the current discussions, absolutely as bad planning you have ever seen. Everything about unthinking sprawl development is contained within this one project.

But at least the 10's of millions of subsidies for this thing are going to help small, hungry American companies that can use a hand up. Lemme see, there is Siemens and Phillips there for starters.

Those are small, hungry, American companies, aren't they?

18% is probably optimistic if new space coming on the market is taken into account. CRE is going to get hit very hard; I fully expect entire projects to go empty just like residential.