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Parallel Universes
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Business New Haven
2/17/2003
By: BNH
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One person's boom is another person's bust.
The commercial real estate community and careful readers were reminded of that ancient adage February 13 when the New Haven Register ran a story headlined "City's Commercial Real Estate Market Hot in 2002."
The article's lead summed it up: "The city's commercial real estate market boomed in 2002."
Great story. Just one problem, though: It isn't true.
According to the year-end 2002 New Haven office market report recently released by respected commercial Realtors Traub & Co. (see story, page 26): "The New Haven office market ended the fourth quarter of 2002 in about the same way it finished each of the previous three quarters: stagnant." Another survey recently released by C.A. White had much the same conclusion.
There's quite a gulf between "hot" and "stagnant." To arrive at its happy conclusion, the Register cited a report from a different real-estate company, Insignia/ESG, which factored in the Ikea deal to lease the 180,000-square-foot Pirelli building on Long Wharf to conclude that leased commercial space in the Elm City grew by an astonishing 112 percent for the year.
Last time we checked (this morning, actually) the Pirelli building was still quite vacant.
(Indeed, the long-vacant Pirelli building has not been included in most office-market reports. Restoring it to the measured inventory would of course have a negative effect on the vacancy rate by adding so much empty space to the office rolls.)
In fairness, constructing an objective reality can be difficult in the real-estate business, in part because different companies work with varying definitions and boundaries to measure the "health" of the market. The fact that New Haven's office market was stagnant last year is actually pretty good news, meaning that we're holding our own in a very negative overall market environment.
Not positive enough for the Register, we guess. Readers since time immemorial have a love-hate relationship with their newspaper (which in New Haven seems to be more of a hate-hate relationship), and continually accuse the paper of being "too negative."
In this case, we find the Register guilty of a different sin: Being too positive.
Babbitt-like boosterism is okay if you're the chamber of commerce, but becomes a very different matter when it is the media that starts massaging facts to generate positive spin.
Media boosterism is dangerous for all sorts of reasons, but here are just two: It can contribute to a delusion that things are better than they in fact are; and can become an excuse to avoid doing the hard work needed to fix a problem or make a situation better.
Media outlets are sometimes placed under tremendous pressure to put a happy face on the news. Sometimes the pressure is self-inflicted by misguided publishers or bean-counters who need to convince themselves and the rest of the world that life is peachy, even in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary.
Newspapers like the Register are supposed to be in the fact business, leaving interpretation and spin to experts and the ultimate arbiters of reality: readers. When they enter the business of manufacturing alternatives to reality, the greatest victim, all too often, is Truth.
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