Ran into a situation today that I am sure we will be witnessing more
frequently.

I know a young couple who operate a very decent little sales and
service shop in a middle sized city north of Seattle on Puget Sound.
It's a family business that has supported them and their kids for the
last several years, but when I ran into them today they
mentioned they had decided to close up shop.

Interesting, and sad, is the reason why:

The local marina is expanding at their location. That should be good
news, except for the fact that as part of the expansion a "public/
private partnership" is building a fancy new condominium complex. A
huge new mooring basin has been dredged and developed, but guess what?
Those slips aren't available long term to the general public (i.e. the
taxpayers who funded the development of this public land), they are
being given to the condo development company as a reward for
developing the condo village at the site, and any time that a condo
resident wants to purchase one of the slips (from the development
company, of course), any tenant that is merely renting the slip will
be subject to eviction.

How this concerns my friends and their boat shop: They are currently
occupying a fairly old building that fronts a road running along the
perimeter of the marina. They have a small office and retail area, and
several service bays.

"Our lease is up pretty soon, and the Port is going to tear down this
building," they said. "We've been offered the same square footage in
one of the new commercial buildings that will be part of the
condominium complex, but there's going to be a difference in rent.
Right now, we pay about $25,000 per year to rent this space, but after
they force us to move next year the rent would go up to $14,000 a
month. That's a total of $168,000 per year in rent, or $143,000 more
than we're paying now. We can't see any reason to keep the doors open
with that sort of increase in overhead."

Obviously my friends did what anybody else would do in the same
situation- took a careful look at how much they're able to put in
their pockets each year with the current overhead, subtracted $143,000
from that number to reflect the future overhead, and looked at the
amount left over and asked, "why bother"?

Congrats to the greedy arse port authorities and the high dollar condo
developers. They have completely overlooked that fact that most of the
infrastructure for boating consists of small and medium size family
businesses. Those software millionaires living the fat life in the
waterfront condo McMansions have a rude awakening in store......even
if they buy the slips out from under the public and moor their gold
plated boats, their very presence will have raised real estate values
to the point where nobody will be able to remain in business to
service or maintain them.

Coming before all that very long to the waterfront near you...
Pretty sad.