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Friday, September 8, 2006
Will biotech brains = price gains?
I’ve been a bit dubious of claims that the arrival of the Scripps Research Institute and the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies will goose the region’s housing market.
Here’s my thinking: Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast are on pace to sell 22,000 existing single-family homes and condos this year, and several thousand more new homes. Yet for the near future, no one expects the biotech industry to lure more than a few hundred scientists a year — hardly enough to significantly sway the supply-and-demand equation.
But author and academic Richard Florida, writing in the October issue of Atlantic Monthly, argues that it’s brains that drive housing markets in the long run. Check out this chart that links educational levels and home values: Brainiac magnets San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston are at the top of the list in college grads and home-price gains. Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee are at the bottom.
When I talked to Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class, last year, he called wooing Scripps “a fabulous economic development move. It says to creative people, ‘West Palm Beach is a place for you. It’s not just a place for Rod Stewart to live with his latest girlfriend.’ “
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