ED Now

Aaron N. Gruen of Gruen Gruen + Associates shares his 2024 Economic and Real Estate Outlook with ED Now.

Communities, developers, and real estate asset managers will continue to need to reimagine and reinvent shopping malls into mixed-use redevelopments. The availability of large amounts of land, building space, parking capacity, and typically superior access to roadway connections, provides the physical resources to transform malls from predominantly single-use spaces to a dramatically more varied mix of uses.

The housing affordability crisis is likely to continue for low-to-moderate income households and people of color, according to a recent annual report from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies. As the crisis has intensified, people and groups opposed to new housing developments in their neighborhoods have come under increasing levels of criticism. Such opposition is often characterized by the acronym NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard,” and the term NIMBYism. The San Francisco Bay Area has been plagued by a severe affordable housing shortage since the 1990s. In recent decades, anti-density activists have been elected to positions of power in Marin County, Palo Alto, and Cupertino, entrenching opposition to ...

IEDC’s recently released white paper What We’ve Learned From Covid-19 contains best practices for EDOs looking to build their resilience to pandemics and other disasters. The paper is one component of a larger project funded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration and the culmination of 18 months tracking the pandemic responses of eight communities.