Predictions For 2025
Continuing the tradition of predictions and evaluation, here are the predictions for the year 2025. Before anyone takes these too seriously remember how the 2024 predictions turned out.
1. ) Venues continue to expand; especially of the eatertainment variety. Between downtown, Bridge St, and Creston six new eatertainment venues will open or be under development.
The Internet of Open Source and Information-Wants-To-Be-Free is dead. The playful Internet is dead. The sound of the internet has become a banshee's wail, amplified by the garbage factory of “AI” technology. This will compel more people to seek to return to IRL. This trends intersection with the housing crisis and the astonishing rise in single-person households will be a boon for urban third-spaces. It is either that outcome or a mental heath crisis of apocalyptic proportions. I'll put my money on human adaptation. Once people come to the brink they start thinking again.
Sub-prediction, which is barely a prediction: the soccer stadium breaks ground.
2.) For-sale home prices will increase barely above inflation as mortgage interest rates remain elevated and political circumstances become increasingly wild. Meanwhile rents (zORI) will continue to rise steadily, ending 2025 up more than 9%.
Climate migration will begin in earnest in 2025; it is obvious to any clear minded individual what is eventually going to become of the American Southwest. This migration will further increase the pressure in rental markets oversleeping with a healthy job market. Wealthier - and thus also likely older - people will try harder to remain in place (see intelligence's relationship to the brink, above). Americans have an extra-special relationship with the Sunk Cost Fallacy, but eventually the ship sinks [or burns].
3.) It will be the year of the Duplus (Duplex + ADU). At least 20 new ADUs will be permitted or under construction in association with a duplex, whether the duplex is new or existing.
While the total unit count will be not all that significant it will be a new high for small-scale in-fill development.
4.) Fewer new housing units will be created than in any year in the last 10 years [the lowest year 2020, permitted 570 units].
The pipeline of large projects, those which provide more than one hundred units, is nearly empty. Aside from Talbot's development at 648 Bridge NW who has shovels in the ground on a large residential project? None of the few large projects remaining in the pipeline [Factory Yards, 385 Leonard, 1340 Monroe Ave NW] will deliver units in 2025. Of the 1,215 housing units proposed via the planning commission agenda in 2023 only 29% moved forward or show any signs of life. Only 482 units were proposed via 2024 agenda items. No large projects in CC or TCC zones - which would not require Planning Commission review - are underway.
The loss of the McConnell and Sligh developerments are dearly felt.
5.) The state legislature will pass modest reform of the wage-n-tips law. Downtown and inner neighborhood restaurants will keep on keeping on, while restaurants in the big box ring will suffer the most and blame the wage reforms regardless of the extend of the reforms.
The actual cause of the failures will be a combination of labor shortages, a continued decline in alcoholic beverage sales, and managerial/owner incompetence [the primary cause of all business failures].
6.) No new high-rise developments are announced. There is no substantive movement related to either the West Site or amphitheater podium tower. The Three Towers office tower will break ground, but rumors will swirl about the fate of the other two towers (not due to break ground until 2026).
7.) The hottest corridor for new developments will be Plainfield (Creston). It will have the most [in count] projects announced of all the corridors.
It feels like the low-hanging fruit on Bridge St has been picked, as well as on Wealthy St. Without significant residential development, which has not happened, Division isn't going to take off. It is a tragedy how the cities mismanaged the Silverline project, it was a squandering of potential ROI.
8.) The site of the aquarium is not announced.
9.) The library lot project is silence.
In July of 2024 the next proposal to be revealed for the main libraries parking lot was as a new site for the Grand Rapids Childrens museum. Since that announcement there has been no further news or related agenda items.
10.) The Sligh project continues to appear in the news only in the context of financial drama and lawsuits.
The last thing we know from the Sligh project is that a judge dismissed the lawsuit against the developer; that was in October 2024. The developer is John Gibbs of Sturgeon Bay Partners. The most recent article still used present tense regarding the intent to develop "hundreds of apartments and retail space", however, it has now been years.
11.) Nothing continues to happen with the Keeler (56 Division Ave N) building.
This prediction will give me at least one guaranteed correct call. 🙂