How much office space does Houston have?

[Timoric]

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[strickn]

Yes, they do, although if you only look up the reports CoStar filed the same day for New York and Los Angeles, for instance, you will miss by just how much they lead (since separate reports are made for New York City, Long Island, Northern New Jersey, Westchester / Southern Connecticut, Los Angeles, Orange County, and Inland Empire (if I haven't missed any)).

 

The way to search for these on yahoo, google or bing, at least, is to type:

 

[keywords] site:costar.com

 

 

But since I've already looked them up, above are links for those I've mentioned.

 

And just as a cheat... they together still account for 18.24% of the whole nation's 'office supply.'

The Texas Triangle metros together now account for only 7.39%

(Chicagoans fill about four and a half percent).

If it's any consolation, we have 11% of the US' owner-occupied inventory, and NY-LA has only 15%, reflecting difference finance patterns.

[TexasGeneral]

I believe Washington D.C. is the largest office market in the country.

[strickn]

They recently eclipsed Chicagoland* despite having a population of 5.9 million compared to 9.8 million.  But that's only in office space, and it goes to show how much DC's workplace is a paperwork factory.  For instance, metro DC has even more office space than Chicago at the same time that it has almost a billion fewer square feet of industrial space;  less than half what comparably sized metro Houston** has. 

 

 

*464 million to 460 million square feet, respectively, according to Costar for last quarter

**515 million to 210 million square feet, respectively, according to Costar

[Houston19514]

I believe Washington D.C. is the largest office market in the country.

 

Nope.  NYC  is still quite a bit larger

[TowerSpotter]

Nope. NYC is still quite a bit larger

Agreed.

[strickn]

There are so many New Yorkers that Washington may now be largest per capita, though.

[strickn]

A Labor Day weekend look at labor:

 

Some US metros' Office per capita (in square feet)

2Q 2013 reports divided by Census Bureau July 2012 MSA population estimates

 

105  Greater Washington

  79  Greater Washington excluding 155 Msf of federally owned space circa 2003 (the latest overall total found)

  66  Delaware Valley

  65  Dallas-Plano-Irving

  64  Tristate NYC

  60  Bay Area CA

  59  Greater Boston-NH

  55  Greater Atlanta

  54  Mpls-Saint Paul

  51  Pittsburgh

  50  Birmingham

  50  Tulsa

  49  Orange County

  48  Chicagoland-Elgin-Gary-Kenosha

  48  Baltimore

  44  Greater Houston-Galveston

  43  Charlotte

  43  Los Angeles

  42  OKC

  41  Portland

  37  Phoenix

  25  Fort Worth-Arlington

  24  Tucson

  16  Inland Empire

[Houston19514]

^ Whose office square footage numbers are you using?

[Houston19514]

A Labor Day weekend look at labor:

 

Some US metros' Office per capita (in square feet)

2Q 2013 reports divided by Census Bureau July 2012 MSA population estimates

 

105  Greater Washington

  79  Greater Washington excluding 155 Msf of federally owned space circa 2003 (the latest overall total found)

  66  Delaware Valley

  65  Dallas-Plano-Irving

  64  Tristate NYC

  60  Bay Area CA

  59  Greater Boston-NH

  55  Greater Atlanta

  54  Mpls-Saint Paul

  51  Pittsburgh

  50  Birmingham

  50  Tulsa

  49  Orange County

  48  Chicagoland-Elgin-Gary-Kenosha

  48  Baltimore

  44  Greater Houston-Galveston

  43  Charlotte

  43  Los Angeles

  42  OKC

  41  Portland

  37  Phoenix

  25  Fort Worth-Arlington

  24  Tucson

  16  Inland Empire

 

Not sure what office space numbers you used, but I see some problems. 

 

-- For the Tulsa metro to have 55 square feet per capita would mean they have 47.5 Million + square feet of office space.  I don't know any one who that thinks Tulsa has that much office space.

 

-- Comparing metropolitan divisions (only in the case of DFW) with metropolitan areas is not comparing apples to apples.

 

Ft Worth-Arlington:  57,524,775 sq ft of office space

Dallas-Irving-Plano:  286 Million sq ft of office space

Total DFW:              343,524,775 sq ft of office space

2012 population:  6,700,991

DFW office space per capita:  51sq feet

 

[strickn]

http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Market-Trend-Tulsas-Office-Deliveries-Construction-and-Inventory/151183

 

Hou19514, You are correct insofar as the Tulsa metro has much scarcer Class A office space than we do [less than 6.2 Msf out of total 49, or one-eighth of the total, compared to fully forty percent Class A throughout Houston], but remember that it was the oil capital before offshore moved it to Houston, so it does get underestimated by common knowledge.

 

I also separated metropolitan divisions in the case of SoCal.  In these two cases there was big disparity between metropolitan moving parts, with warehouse and distribution space predominating in the Inland Empire and in Fort Worth-Arlington.  In the Tristate metropolitan divisions, or the Bay Area, I think that office was more evenly provisioned.

[Houston19514]

http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Market-Trend-Tulsas-Office-Deliveries-Construction-and-Inventory/151183

I also separated metropolitan divisions in the case of SoCal. In these two cases there was big disparity between metropolitan moving parts, with warehouse and distribution space predominating in the Inland Empire and in Fort Worth-Arlington. In the Tristate metropolitan divisions, or the Bay Area, I think that office was more evenly provisioned.

That is exactly the problem with separatjng out metro divisions. It leads to misleading numbers. Every metro area has zones with higher concentrations of office space than other areas. The census bureau tells us that comparing metro divisions with metro areas is not a good comparison.

[Timoric]

_

[strickn]

Top US industrial market areas at midyear:

1,798,445,948 square feet in 62,094 buildings Greater L.A.

1,551,754,178 square feet in 45,629 buildings NY Tristate

1,146,064,622 square feet in 22,066 buildings Greater Chicagoland

1,015,889,237 square feet in 19,663 buildings Delaware Valley (Philly)

(986,835,007 square feet in 36,885 buildings Los Angeles County alone)

(806,806,921 square feet in 17,096 buildings Northern New Jersey alone)

780,024,632 square feet in 20,014 buildings Metroplex

652,373,381 square feet in 15,880 buildings North Georgia

581,220,887 square feet in 19,663 buildings Bay Area CA

558,954,625 square feet in 16,733 buildings Detroit

515,196,576 square feet in 16,618 buildings Houston-Galveston

(509,053,130 square feet in 12,590 buildings Inland Empire alone)

497,125,479 square feet in 11,793 buildings Greater Boston

476,790,108 square feet in 12,297 buildings Cleveland-Akron

 

Total flex and warehouse ("industrial") inventory in the US was pushing 21 billion square feet, so these are a really high proportion of the nation's total, right here.  Edit:  Either that, or they don't do a good job of tracking industrial space outside the major markets.  Hmm...

[strickn]

What I would prefer is that -- instead of building regional high speed rail from point to point around the Texan Triangle and expanding all our half-dozen international airports quite piecemeal -- we built three legs of rail that met in the middle at a shared airport city.  Then our urban zones would be like neighborhoods of a highly specialized metroplex, one with 1,492,162,294 square feet of flex and warehouse;  764 million square feet of office (second in the country) even before Houston's current campus boom comes online;  and 913 Msf of retail (also second in the nation).

 

[livincinco]

What I would prefer is that -- instead of building regional high speed rail from point to point around the Texan Triangle and expanding all our half-dozen international airports quite piecemeal -- we built three legs of rail that met in the middle at a shared airport city. Then our urban zones would be like neighborhoods of a highly specialized metroplex, one with 1,492,162,294 square feet of flex and warehouse; 764 million square feet of office (second in the country) even before Houston's current campus boom comes online; and 913 Msf of retail (also second in the nation).

That would work...in Sim City

[strickn]

DFW Airport added something to its metro neither city had before, and neither was too keen on giving up their petty rivalry for it, either.

This holds true today on a larger scale:  at that time it was one region and national hub status at stake;  now it's for three regions and global hub status at stake.

If Houston is a results-oriented city, it should consider that it stands to benefit from holding its economic cards less close to its chest.

The East and West Coast metros are too worn out to get their act together and follow suit.  Only Texas has the can-do attitude and the resources to make this move.

[livincinco]

If Houston is a results-oriented city, it should consider that it stands to benefit from holding its economic cards less close to its chest.

OK, I'll bite. What exactly is the benefit of abandoning the #4 and #11 airports in the United States (not to mention four others that are currently in the top 50) to build a larger airport from ground up 200 miles from any major city?

[Urbannizer]

New Chron article about the office market in Houston:

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/sarnoff/article/With-office-market-in-overdrive-is-there-a-stall-4794325.php

[Timoric]

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[strickn]

I get the information from the complexity scientists at the Santa Fe Institute (santafe.edu), so if y'all don't trust the holy faith (literal translation), y'all might look elsewhere.

 

When you lump together buildings, as this thread has done, not a lot happens except perhaps in the scale efficiency of providing utilities to them.  But when you lump together families into a larger labor pool, their total factor productivity rises or scales more quickly than in proportion.  It is easy to picture, for instance, if the boroughs of New York at once kept their populations but weren't connected in any way, that their workers would have less opportunity to make things work.  It is less easy to picture that the more integrated into a single labor pool all Texans become, the more it will enrich what we do in the future.

 

SFI scientists "empirically demonstrate that there is a systematic dependence of urban productivity on population size, resulting from the mismatch between the size dependence of wages and labor, so productivity increases by about 11% with each doubling in population."  

 

Houston plus DFW  (never mind Central Texas for the moment) doubles in population, yet I say only 1 in 20 workers would make that real adjustment.  If their GDP growth rate tracks double the national average this year like it did in 2012 then we see at least the following outputs in billions per year:

 

2011   821.7 = 420.4 + 401.3 separately (see Appendix Table 1, pdf p.26)

2012   861.2 = 440.6 + 420.6 separately

2013   902.4 = 461.7 + 440.7 separately

 

2011   826.2 together   ((sum*1.11) - sum) / 20

2012   865.9 together

2013   907.4 together

 

If one in five of us, instead of one in twenty, managed to make good on opportunity, then we'd be generating $20 billion more, not just $5 billion more, than we will this year.

 

It means if you linked Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth as effectively as Dallas and Fort Worth are linked, you do a lot of good for people --  I think the multiplier justifies helping out Central Texas as well.  There has to be some skin in the game for them;  when the daily link does not involve the way the rest of the world gets to them, they won't go and meet in the middle as much.  So propose a shared aero-core.  Yet when we cluster these five largest cities with some skin in the game - even if they only ever integrate 1/20^th of the way toward making like the five boroughs - the problem shifts from feasibility to one of revenue capture.

 

You in?

[strickn]

335 Msf of retail, Timoric.  So yes, our purple and yellow-orange SimCity zones surpass a billion.

[strickn]

Medical office is just office space, but hospitals are separate.  Not totally sure about laboratory.