A warning sign City Hall should heed – Crain’s

Nice collection of the empirical evidence by Greg Hinz: "The weakness is in capital flows, the amount of money spent to buy or sometimes build new structures. Consider it a sort of leading indicator as to whether investors consider a given area worth the risk of plunking down their money in exchange for returns that can be many years away. According to a new report by real estate investment bank Eastdil Secured, office building capital flows here dropped a heart-pounding 87 percent in the first six months of the year compared to last year.... Similar research comes from RCA/CBRE.... A third source, Real Capital Analytics, has it down 32 percent over six months and 10.8 percent over the last year, compared to a 13.7 percent gain for North America as a whole in that year. One more data dump: Consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Land Institute produce an annual survey of emerging trends in real estate in the U.S. and Canada. As reported by my colleague Alby Gallun, the 2019 report ranked Chicago 49th of 79 cities in terms of potential asset growth. That's down from 42nd a year ago and 19th two years ago—not a good trend."