Mondo condos

Atlanta is, as I have been predicting for awhile now, in the midst of a massive condo glut. Over 3,000 units are under construction, while thousands more have already been completed but not yet sold. Then there are the thousands more still that some poor sap has owned for a few years but can't sell because nobody wants to buy a used condo when they can get a brand new one custom outfitted to their specifications for just a few thousand dollars more. Local realtors are calling it a crisis, and yet the developers just keep on breaking ground, building, and littering the Buckhead landscape with ugly towers.

Miami began a condo glut like this a few years ago, and it has seriously hurt their real estate market and the entire state of Florida's economy. Why isn't Atlanta trying harder to promote responsible development? Sure, people are moving back into the city in droves, but they are by and large not choosing to movie into spires of glass and steel and instead are revitalizing old charming neighborhoods. What good does a swath of largely empty condo towers do anyone, particularly since I'm guessing those same developers would fight tooth and nail to avoid having their units classified as affordable housing that can be subsidizes for "undesirables."

Cities like Boston that have a legitimate housing shortage could benefit from these types of large scale projects, but Atlanta has not shown that it has the market to fill its existing condo units, let alone the ones on the way. We don't need the intense drain on the city's economy that thousands of empty condo units would create, but we're certainly going to get it. Perhaps if state or city officials had taken a more active role in shaping these kinds of development projects we would have approached the arrival of the condo craze much more responsibly.