Justin Fox has a very good post on the broken state of the commercial real estate, pointing to empty spaces on Broadway and in Newcastle, Australia. I could easily add my own street, Avenue B, which has an inordinate number of empty storefronts, or could point to Centre Point, in London, a skyscraper which stood empty from its completion, in 1966, until 1979.

Justin is absolutely right about the corrosive effect of bank rents on New York rental rates: all landlords want the kind of rents that only banks can afford, but of course not all landlords can have a bank as a renter. But the bigger picture is that commercial real estate in general often stays empty for extremely long periods of time — something which harms neighborhoods and lets huge amounts of economic value go to waste.