In a message dated 11/12/2007 5:14:18 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Paying $5 million for the 43rd Street lot is great for the seller and the real estate agents, but what will the buyer have to build there to cover the costs of the land, building the improvements, and making a profit? Maybe the inability to make a project work without cramming in units indicates that it is economically untenable, a bad investment, and that the price for the land is too high. What we're seeing with the hotel project, and what you're suggesting in your analogy is, in essence, that the neighbors of a site has to sacrifice and forgo their quality of life in order to bail out a developer who could not otherwise make "the numbers" work. Interesting arguments, Lew & Karen. Does this mean that someone who got caught in the recent price escalation debacle and bought a triplex of 2-bedroom units in UC for $500,000, and is facing mortgage payments upwards of $2,700 per month (that's $900 per unit just to keep the bank happy, before other costs set in) can get SHCA endorsement in front of the Zoning Board to cut it into 3 1-BRs and 3 efficiencies so it will generate more revenues? Or, maybe make a rooming house out of it. Spending that kind of money for a West Philly multi-family twin was a bad decision and the person who made it shouldn't expect a bail-out from the neighbors. Of course, you're not implying that the brilliant minds in the Real Estate Dept at Penn bought a piece of property for more than they could actually justify, and now feel they have to "make 'the numbers' work." Why, if someone who actually earned the money he or she spent did something like this, they'd be broke. And if someone who was employed by a real developer (as opposed to the amateurs Penn apparently uses) did this, he or she would be out looking for a job. All of which goes to show that you shouldn't ask Stephen Hawking his views on the election in Pakistan. Or, if you do, that you shouldn't assume his answers are better than anybody else's. I'm very confident taking my dog to the Penn Vet hospital, going myself to HUP, or getting some occasional help from people I know at Wharton. But this doesn't mean I endow the Craig Carnoroli's, Glenn Bryan's, or John Washburn's (a janitor in the Moore School building) of that venerable institution with any superior wisdom when it comes to creating a better world for the rest of us. Al Krigman Left of Ivan Grozny ************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
