[mhays]

Our old booms used to be pretty epic in my mind...greater Downtown would grow by maybe 5,000,000 sf of office and 5,000 housing units, and that would seem like a big change. I mean the early 80s (lower numbers), the late 80s, the late 90s, and the late 00s. Then this one came along...by my inaccurate count, the greater Downtown figure since mid-2010 would be 16,000,000 sf of offices and 31,000 housing units, and buildings keep breaking ground. Plus hotels, rail lines, a bypass tunnel, a convention center, the mostly rebuilt arena that just started, and so on.

One point it's driven home is the astonishing amount of housing that's needed for a four-square-mile area to be busy and consistently urban. We're not there yet.