I assume they must have done some research to make an investment of that size.
The U.S. population is growing by about 2.5 million people each year. Of that, immigration contributes over one million people to the U.S. population annually.
Using the Census Bureau's medium projections, U.S. population will grow to 394 million by the year 2050.
The United States has one of the highest natural growth rates (0.7%) of any industrialized country in the world. For comparison, the United Kingdom's natural increase is one quarter the rate of the U.S. at 0.2%, while Germany's natural increase is 0.
Florida's population has grown from 1.9 million in 1940 to 15 million today. That is over a 600% increase in just 50 years.
Where do you think all these new people are going to live and work? We will need to build new housing to keep up with population growth.
Agreed. With intelligent planning, our little town of Dixon, CA is destined to be a thriving modern living/working community of 100,000 within the next ten years. The newer communities have a much better opportunity to grow and develop than those poorly planned, overly-built, traffic infested ones......
Interesting from Standard & Poor's.
Housing Boom, Oversupply of Housing Units Continue to Weaken REITs, says S&P Report
"The number of housing units, particularly apartment buildings, constructed has far exceeded the level of household formation over the past several years -- and the spread continues to widen. Standard & Poor's projects 2.04 million housing starts in 2005, with the formation of only 1.41 million new households. The spread of 630,000 excess units for this year is 4.2 times greater that it was just two years ago. And the average apartment building's vacancy rate more than doubled to 6.9 percent in 2003 from 3.1 percent in 2000. Traditionally, newly formed households have been renters rather than buyers, but with home affordability historically high, many new households have opted to skip renting altogether and many existing households are making the jump to home ownership."
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050915/nyth137.html?.v=25