We’ve had occasion to drive through the area south of downtown a couple of times recently; once, with the boys, we had a little extra time before church, so we went for a ride. The second was after a dinner with my wife downtown. Both times, as we went through the area near the university, I reviewed all the new construction–for years, developers have been in the news seeking blight designations for older but still viable properties so they could get tax abatements to construct dazzling new apartment buildings for students. “You know who’s hurting? These guys who have just taken huge mortgages for what are now empty buildings.”
I said it last week; the Wall Street Journal gets there this week: Covid-19 Outbreaks Spell Trouble for Student-Housing Owners.
One might think that you might be able to pick up those new apartment buildings relatively inexpensively in a year or so. I’m not sure if you’d want to, though, as the whole university thing is going to change in the next couple of years as well and might not have the large resident populations that they have in the past.
