From the Current Issue

Farmland in the age of climate change: Investors have been betting the farm, but then Mother Nature turned fickle

by Mike Consol

First, consider the maxim, “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore,” indicating scarcity and barriers to entry, the kind of buzz words and phrases investors find especially appealing. Then consider the human family can survive without office buildings and data centers and any number of assets and asset classes, albeit not as prosperously as it would like, but it cannot survive without fertile land that produces food. Add to that the forecast that farmers need to increase food production about 50 percent by 2050 to sate a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by that date, and one would think farmland would be a sure bet for a gainful position in the investment portfolio. Billionaires including ...

From the Current Issue

Knocking down abandoned buildings has many benefits for Detroit

by Mark Skidmore, Dusan Paredes Araya and Camila Alvayay Torrejon

Few cities have experienced a sharper economic change of fortune than Detroit. It was one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation between 1900 and 1950. In the nearly 75 years since then, it has lost more than 60 percent of its population, becoming the defining example of a postindustrial city in decline. Chronic population loss creates a significant mismatch in the ...