Demand for Downtown/Midtown housing continues unabated...

[Jason]

Rents can vary a lot from city to city but construction costs don't vary as much.

Detroit is a very low rent place, but buildings are still just as expensive to build.

In order for new construction/renovations to make business sense, rents need to be higher. But I don't know enough about the subject to know what to do about it. I can't imagine rent going up very much unless the neighborhoods become less patchy, but the neighborhoods can't become less patchy without new construction and new construction needs higher rents.

[wolverine]

Rents can vary a lot from city to city but construction costs don't vary as much.

Detroit is a very low rent place, but buildings are still just as expensive to build..

Cost of construction is the same as most other midwest cities except Chicago and Minneapolis. I don't think high rents are a result of construction costs. It's developers banking on consumer ignorance and short supply with high demand.

[Detroitnerd]

It also has to do with the tools in our toolbox here.

For decades, government and business heavily funded new construction and demolition. In fact, the amount of public money that has gone into funding the wrecking ball here in town is astonishing.

That sort of funding has created a concentration of demolition and wrecking companies in the metro area.

Only very slight funding has gone to rehabs, renovations, repurposing, re-use, upgrades, etc. And if you hardly fund re-use, you tend to get planners and architects who don't consider re-use. If you hardly fund rehabs, you get engineers with a tear-it-down-and-start-over mentality.

My point is that you get the skill sets that you subsidize.

That is why it would have been better to put people to work rehabbing lower floors and mothballing upper floors of some of the buildings we knocked down. The cost would have been about the same, but we would have been building those skills locally. And it's beginning to look like we need them, yes?

[wolverine]

It also has to do with the tools in our toolbox here.

For decades, government and business heavily funded new construction and demolition. In fact, the amount of public money that has gone into funding the wrecking ball here in town is astonishing.

That sort of funding has created a concentration of demolition and wrecking companies in the metro area.

Only very slight funding has gone to rehabs, renovations, repurposing, re-use, upgrades, etc. And if you hardly fund re-use, you tend to get planners and architects who don't consider re-use. If you hardly fund rehabs, you get engineers with a tear-it-down-and-start-over mentality.

My point is that you get the skill sets that you subsidize.

That is why it would have been better to put people to work rehabbing lower floors and mothballing upper floors of some of the buildings we knocked down. The cost would have been about the same, but we would have been building those skills locally. And it's beginning to look like we need them, yes?

Construction labor is transient. The workers will appear when there's demand.

[Detroitnerd]

Construction labor is transient. The workers will appear when there's demand.

No, construction labor isn't transient. My father was a construction worker. I come from a long line of construction workers. They haven't been all that transient since the 1910s.

Besides, I'm talking about firms, not workers, and the skills and scope of vision they have. The more specifically you fund tear-downs and build-outs to the exclusion of other projects, the less they even consider rehabs, which aren't funded much and are less profitable.

[Hermod]

No, construction labor isn't transient. My father was a construction worker. I come from a long line of construction workers. They haven't been all that transient since the 1910s.

Besides, I'm talking about firms, not workers, and the skills and scope of vision they have. The more specifically you fund tear-downs and build-outs to the exclusion of other projects, the less they even consider rehabs, which aren't funded much and are less profitable.

In New Orleans after the floods, the locals were complaining that out-of-area construction workers were taking "all the good jobs". During the housing bubble of 1996-2006 here in Florida, the construction work was increasingly done by Brazilians, Mexicans, and Haitians who were not that common prior to the boom.

[Detroitnerd]

In New Orleans after the floods, the locals were complaining that out-of-area construction workers were taking "all the good jobs". During the housing bubble of 1996-2006 here in Florida, the construction work was increasingly done by Brazilians, Mexicans, and Haitians who were not that common prior to the boom.

Well, makes sense. Anyplace where the Carpenters union isn't that strong, contractors would want to bring in people to do the work for less. Maybe that's the goal, then, have carpenters, construction workers and millwrights turned back into the army of itinerant laborers they were in my grandpappy's age.

Thanks, free market.

[wolverine]

No, construction labor isn't transient. My father was a construction worker. I come from a long line of construction workers. They haven't been all that transient since the 1910s.

Besides, I'm talking about firms, not workers, and the skills and scope of vision they have. The more specifically you fund tear-downs and build-outs to the exclusion of other projects, the less they even consider rehabs, which aren't funded much and are less profitable.

Firms yes, but workers will come from anywhere. It's common I'll find workers from downstate Illinois or Ohio, and not unusual we have folks working on projects and coming from Nevada. You claimed lack of skill set in an earlier post, but it's much easier to bring in workers from elsewhere with alot of experience and get the job done faster than expensive training. That is....unless the contract calls for local labor which is common but can be surprisingly difficult to find.