Boston hoteliers enjoyed one of the strongest markets in the country before the coronavirus pandemic struck. But the city recorded a 71.3% decline in revenue per available room in 2020, the worst of the 25 largest U.S. markets, according to STR. The area is littered with life sciences development, and hoteliers say they are bullish that those projects will bolster hotel room demand. But most of those projects have far-off delivery dates, and there is little evidence of a correlation between lab development and hotel demand, industry experts told Bisnow. 
Prior to the pandemic, the Boston-Cambridge lodging market was expected to see a 6.6% supply increase by 2021, a 20-year high, according to Pinnacle Advisory Group research. The market today includes 24,429 total rooms, 14% of which is that lab epicenter in Cambridge. The Boston-Cambridge hotel market grew…  Read the full story here. | | |
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The Innovators: Zone 3 |  | | In this series, Bisnow highlights people and companies pushing the commercial real estate industry forward in myriad ways. Click here to read Q&As with all the innovators Bisnow has interviewed so far. Zone 3 is a collaboration between local developer Graffito SP and Harvard University's Allston Initiatives, a team tasked with local development and placemaking opportunities. The group has been around since 2015, but it acted quickly last spring to bring new business avenues to its local partners facing economic uncertainty. The team turned empty storefronts on Harvard-owned property into window shopping showcases for local retailers. A Zone 3-run restaurant incubator became a launchpad for eateries including a pizza shop, a rising chef's café and a Jamaican food truck. Western Avenue hosted and broadcast events free of charge in lieu of potential rent-paying users. The Zone 3 program was launched to spur economic activity along the quiet Western Avenue corridor in Allston, but when the coronavirus pandemic struck last spring, its powerful backer used it to try helping unique retail, restaurant and event space opportunities for local businesses to flourish. Beneficiaries of Zone 3's… Read Full Story |
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Covid-19 Drove Women Out Of The Workforce. Can CRE Bring Them Back In? | In 2012, then-26-year-old Natalie Wainwright was an unemployed single mom living in Las Vegas. Desperate, she managed to find a receptionist job with Cushman & Wakefield Commerce from a Craigslist ad. With little money to spend and a big impression to make, Wainwright went to Goodwill for a designer suit to wear to her new job. “I did the best I could to look the part that I wanted to be because I knew that I couldn't support my children on $12 an hour,” she said. “I knew that this was an opportunity. I just knew that I was onto something and this could change me and my kid's life and get us out of the situation that we were in.” Wainwright worked tirelessly, she said, and eventually caught the attention of a team of brokers, who hired her as their sole administrator. She borrowed money from her father to get her broker’s license and spent years as a broker at Cushman & Wakefield. Nearly a decade later, Wainwright is a vice president at LogicCRE, an active broker in the Las Vegas office market and a leader among women in real estate nationwide. Wainwright’s story is far from unique in commercial real estate: one of a woman who would otherwise never think of a career in the industry before landing an entry-level job. Without those jobs, which don’t necessarily require deep experience or specialization, the potential for women to have better representation at the highest levels for the industry is severely diminished. Read the full story here. | |  | | |
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The Pandemic And Racist Attacks Are Devastating America's Chinatowns |  | | The coronavirus pandemic and a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans have significantly impacted the economies and cultural fabric of Chinatowns around the country, and are gravely harming the vitality of some of them, though rallying efforts are underway.  While racism is nothing new for Asian Americans, who have historically been the victims of the racialization of disease in the U.S., the length and intensity of this pandemic has fueled an economic disaster that is increasingly posing an existential threat to Asian American Pacific Islander neighborhoods.  Occurring parallel to a pandemic that has claimed 582,296 lives in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the pandemic itself has disproportionately impacted Asian Americans in San Francisco, with the demographic accounting for 13.7% of the cases but also 52% of the deaths as of May 2020, according to the Asian American Research Center on Health.  A wave of hate has accompanied the public health crisis. A 2020-2021 National Report from Stop AAPI Hate found that of 3,795 incidents of discrimination reported to the organization between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021, Chinese are the largest ethnic group, targeted in 42.2% of the total incidents, and that businesses are the primary place where those attacks occur, 35.4% of the time. “Because of the racist sentiment and fear of Covid, Chinatown got impacted much before everywhere else,” Oakland-based Chinese American Community Foundation Vice Chair David Lei said. Overt anti-Asian racism isn’t new. One of the earliest examples of America's systemic anti-Asian racism, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, created a federal law blocking the further immigration of Chinese workers, many of whom had come to California during the Gold Rush to work on projects such as the… Read Full Story |
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As Amazon Gobbles Up Warehouse Space, NYC’s Suburbs Keep Giving It Tax Breaks | NEW YORK CITY — Multiple tax incentive deals for suburban e-commerce facilities in New York in recent months are raising questions as to how much taxes local counties should forgo in order to lure the warehouses to their jurisdictions. Local officials argue the tax breaks are a small price to pay to lure well-capitalized employers that will make use of dead space. But critics claim companies like Amazon, run by the world's wealthiest man, don't need tax breaks to develop warehouses they would likely build anyway. Read the full story here. | |  | | |
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