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Comment by josephorjoe | Hacker News Reader

It isn't just houses. It's commercial real estate.

In NYC at least, almost all restaurants, bars, and retail stores absolutely depend on very high volume.

That volume is simply not coming back.

The tourists are not coming back anytime soon.

And the office workers are not all coming back ever. Many will continue to work from home and many more will work only 2-3 days a week in the office rather than 5. And many of those will pack lunch or get lunch delivered rather than go out to restaurants.

And a lot of locals are going to be very reluctant to eat in crowded restaurants where tables are 3-4 feet apart and everyone is constantly bumping into each other.

I believe there are going to be a lot of vacant stores and shops in nyc once the immediate crisis is over.

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And the banks themselves are overexposed due to what appears to be systematic cooking of the books on these loans. See this article published yesterday about one whistleblower’s fight to expose this:

https://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-wall-street...

To pull out just one of several frightening figures from that article, just one of the commercial backed securities they analyzed appeared to have over half its properties fudged to appear more profitable.

> several frightening figures

It's hard not to imagine some pretty frightening scenarios on how this might play out over the next 12-24 mos. The far-reaching unemployment this could cause (if/when lenders start calling these loans) has significant long term implications.

Maybe. The other possibility -- with people 3-4 feet apart -- is that demand will outstrip supply. You'll have far less capacity for people to eat, perhaps by much more than fewer diners.

Two things are sure: (1) Things are gonna get weirder (2) Landlords aren't going to do as well.

Landlords will probably do fine in a currency-printing world.

> That volume is simply not coming back.

I keep hearing versions of this. Such dire finality. Do you actually believe that in 1 or 2 years time bars in Times Square won't be as busy as ever? If yes I think you are radically underestimating New Yorkers.

Look at the Spanish flu after that 1919 you had the roaring 20's people did not change behaviour radically after that.

Entirely depends upon whether or not people feel safe in crowds.

More effective treatments, a vaccine, herd immunity, better testing and tracing, or some combination thereof could make people feel safe in crowds again.

But I do think there will be a large shift toward more "work from home" for office workers with fewer open office cube farms and more contained offices for individuals/small teams, so I would expect the lunch and afterwork crowds in Manhattan to thin out. It's not going to be fun going out to happy hour when you might get sick with a dangerous virus that could kill your parents if you visit them that weekend.

And 1-2 years is more than enough time for all of those bars in Times Square to go out of business. Someone will open new ones when a vaccine comes out, of course, but that could be a long time.

And if the schools do not reopen in the fall in the city but they do in the suburbs, a lot of families will leave. I might :(. Remote schooling has been a disaster.

New Yorkers don't go to times square, rich tourists do.

> depend on high volume

And they’re taxed accordingly. Governments are going to be facing huge revenue shortfalls, too, and they’re going to be coming after already squeezed taxpayers to make up for it.

>And a lot of locals are going to be very reluctant to eat in crowded restaurants where tables are 3-4 feet apart and everyone is constantly bumping into each other.

i don't see any issue here as long as everybody wears their rabbies ... err .. coronavirus vaccination and immunity certifying tags/armbands/bracelets. Those can even be automatically read upon entering businesses, offices, subway, etc.

The crisis in many respects is incorrectly blamed on the virus whereis it is mostly self-inflicted by lack of coherent response and is self-prolonged and made much more severe by the failure so far to launch any real counter-pandemic measures like for example massive testing and contact tracing.

Wrt. the stocks - the government has already made it pretty clear that they are propping those pure numbers up, real economy and people be damned, at least until the elections.

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