Rebuilding the World Trade Center will be foolish
But first, another comment on decentralization:
"Further evidence of the need to decentralize the markets is that the Chicago markets are trading today."
Yes, and they _could_ have continued trading on Tuesday. (I'm not saying they should have. Traders would have been distracted by events to the east, and worried about attacks on the Sears Tower and nearby areas.)
Trading at the NASDAQ could have been resumed at nearly any time. It's shutdown was only partly due to the actual physical damage. I surmise, from watching Dick Grasso and Wick Whatever (of the NASDAQ) that the NASDAQ is being kept shut down so as not to gain some kind of trading advantage over the still-paralyzed NYSE. Too bad, as markets are our most efficient economic engines. And the terrorists have had their actions "force magnified" by the foolish shutdown of the entire aviation system and by the unprecedented (in many, many decades) shutdown of critical financial markets.
The Pentagon is also an example of foolish overconcentration. Even when it was built, around 1940, it reflected overconcentration.
I hope they decide to only rebuild a _facade_ and to actually house the workers in the affected areas in some of the hundreds of other office buildings in the D.C. area.
(I lived for most of the 1960s in Northern Virginia. After I left in 1970 for college, they ran the new "METRO" subway out to where I lived, and out to many outlying areas in Virginia and Maryland. In fact, the government owns a vast amount of developable land at places like Fort Belvoir, where a stop for the METRO is already in place...just several stops beyond the Pentagon, so all of the commuters travelling out from D.C. to the Pentagon could work at Belvoir instead. This is an ideal "reverse commute," of course. Just an example of what should happen.)
However, I expect the U.S. Government will pour billions of dollars into "restoring America's confidence" by subsidizing the rebuilding of the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
(Rebuilding the WTC will be highy foolish. Compelling targets for future terrorists, and those displaced recently will have had _years_ to either find new offices or to leave NYC completely. Then when 10 million square feet of space gets dumped back on the market, a replay of the 1970s real estate recession in Manhattan.)
--Tim May |
