HAD ENOUGH?:

‘Burbs’ buildings gobbled up: Hub towers’ prices spur interest (Scott Van Voorhis, June 25, 2006, Boston Herald)

Faced with towering prices for Hub high-rises, real estate investors are turning to a tactic that just a few years ago might have had them committed to an asylum.

Buying up half-empty - and sometimes banged-up - suburban office buildings.

Such deals come amid a steady improvement in the long-sluggish local economy that has companies once again hiring - and starting to fill - office parks along Route 128 and Interstate 495.

With downtown Boston prices out of sight, some investors are scooping up suburban fixer-uppers in a bid to get ahead of what they are betting will be a return of the boom times.

Rebound in IT jobs: Another boom or not? (Mary Jacobs, 6/25/06, The Dallas Morning News)

Information Week recently ran a story headlined "More U.S. Workers Have IT Jobs Than Ever Before." Yet the headline of another article in the same publication offered a seemingly contradictory assessment: "Five Reasons We're Not in a Tech Boom."

What's the real story?

First, it's clear the tech job market is picking up.

For Good or Ill, Boom in Ethanol Reshapes Economy of Heartland (ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO, 6/25/06, NY Times)

Dozens of factories that turn corn into the gasoline substitute ethanol are sprouting up across the nation, from Tennessee to Kansas, and California, often in places hundreds of miles away from where corn is grown.

Once considered the green dream of the environmentally sensitive, ethanol has become the province of agricultural giants that have long pressed for its use as fuel, as well as newcomers seeking to cash in on a bonanza.

The modern-day gold rush is driven by a number of factors: generous government subsidies, surging demand for ethanol as a gasoline supplement, a potent blend of farm-state politics and the prospect of generating more than a 100 percent profit in less than two years.

The rush is taking place despite concerns that large-scale diversion of agricultural resources to fuel could result in price increases for food for people and livestock, as well as the transformation of vast preserved areas into farmland.

Even in the small town of Hereford, in the middle of the Texas Panhandle's cattle country and hundreds of miles from the agricultural heartland, two companies are rushing to build plants to turn corn into fuel.

As a result, Hereford has become a flashpoint in the ethanol boom that is helping to reshape part of rural America's economic base.

Despite continuing doubts about whether the fuel provides a genuine energy saving, at least 39 new ethanol plants are expected to be completed over the next 9 to 12 months, projects that will push the United States past Brazil as the world's largest ethanol producer.

The new plants will add 1.4 billion gallons a year, a 30 percent increase over current production of 4.6 billion gallons, according to Dan Basse, president of AgResources, an economic forecasting firm in Chicago. By 2008, analysts predict, ethanol output could reach 8 billion gallons a year.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 25, 2006 9:49 AM