Agree. I could see this being a “do your business or get off the toilet” moment. One option is repurposing that real estate to better purposes, like residential

Agree. I could see this being a “do your business or get off the toilet” moment. One option is repurposing that real estate to better purposes, like residential or industrial depending on location. It would take significant amounts of investment, but that’s actually the market working as intended. I am aware of attempts to repurpose such properties, cheaply, to residential have generally sucked. That just indicates better, costlier options will need to be explored. High rises and high density living actually exist many places. Does not yet sound like a hair on fire/bailouts level problem. We would need to see some Ts instead of Bs for that. Then there’s the reality of the US economy still responding to the changes following the pandemic. Literally all modern markets have not experienced anything like this since the last pandemic was 1918. That was a very different time in international and national trade. The market is a hugely decentralized grouping of economies. Each economy itself composed of millions to billions of individuals making individual decisions with finite resources. That’s precisely the genius of the system. No single person or policy maker could take on and make all the most optimized decisions for all the people in the global market.