By Brad Hunter | Forbes
I recently overheard a developer lament, “amenities used to be about getting people together; now it’s all about keeping people apart.” I couldn’t disagree more. It’s like what my daughter’s principal said: “we should never do social-distancing. We sometimes have to physically distance, but we have to keep people socially connected.”
Developers are now working out creative solutions to straddle this tricky line, and these solutions will be showing up in the marketplace in the near future.
Apartment developers are taking a fresh look at what they will build going forward, taking into account today’s new health concerns. Some are going back to the (literal) drawing board, re-working their planned layouts, and in other cases are just emphasizing the already-existing designs that are likely to work best in the years ahead. Still others are hesitant to change much of anything, citing the economic model that might not show financial justification for elevators with facial recognition technology in their particular style of building. The scale and type of changes that make sense will vary according to the type of building and the particular market audience.
