To revive neighborhoods by the power of Airbnb, Uber & air taxi?

[Joanne Basecki]

I am 15 min by Uber in straight line from Chicago Theater and Prudential Plaza. Even more importantly I am on the deviding line btw RE priced at millions and RE where builders will not build due to crime rate. What an opportunity for the airbnb folks! Not just personal opportunity but opportunity to revive neighborhoods nearly overnight and cash in on it! 15 min by Uber soon to be 2 min by air taxi, in a short few years when the landscape will be drastically different... and we will watch the air taxi window some amazing new parks..... 

And we could be right in the middle of it. Land is nearly free there right now. All it takes is to place prefabs for airbnb (luxury service and accommodations for turists) with super safe entries via garage and via roof garden as soon as the air taxi will start to land on those... Prefabs for Chicago will be approved and ready for sale in 6 mo. The system to be copied in other large cities, quick and easy cookie cutter. We could continue on with the roof Starbucks and become a brand... Anyone in? I am hoping for a team to go for it.

[Ryan Blake]

@Joanne Basecki Air taxi? A google search just brought up a bunch of private jet sharing sites.

[Joanne Basecki]

Let's create new millionaires (:

[Joanne Basecki]

Uber claims to become and Air Uber in 5 years or sooner. It will be a new era before we know it.

[Wayne Brooks]

The hood, is the hood.....no transportation method is going to change that.

[Jay Hinrichs]

your confusing air taxi likes its for residental purposes. air taxi  Like Jet Smarter  is for private jet travel.

we are a LONG way from the Jetson's.. until you change the crime and stuff in an area and change the schools

that needs to happen.

[Joanne Basecki]

@Ryan Blake Just google " uber air taxi" or "from drones to autonomous cars and flying taxis, TechCrunch's Tel Aviv 2018 conference had it all" or "Uber just unveiled a prototype of its futuristic air taxi" all interesting articles with time frame for deployment btw 2020 and 2023.  BTW I am not talking about the very worst "hoods" but places such as Humboldt Park (sp?) and the rest of the landscape would undergo a gradual change. (Gradual of today as explained by Ray Kurzweil (:)....

[Mark Sullivan]

@Joanne Basecki I had a similar notion 30 years ago.  A guy named Paul Moller was planning to build - in essence - a flying car.  (He's still trying, fwiw.)  My thinking was to buy the cheap real estate now, that would then get expensive once folks wanted to live there thanks to sky commuting.  The logic I used was that in DC, where I lived, a standard commute was 45 minutes to an hour.  So I figured sky commuters would be willing to fly 30 minutes from DC to get to their residence, and assumed a 15 minute trip to wherever they needed to take off from (this was all pre-9/11 of course).  That 30 minute radius, at cruising speed, was 150 miles... meaning over 50,000 square miles in which this hypothetical commuter could live.  It's not that I might have picked the wrong 'soon-to-be-valuable' real estate... the situation was that no real estate would ever get expensive.  Sky commuting would create such an abundance that the commute would cease to be a factor in price.

My later thought, in the early 2000s, was that Marriott should stand up an air service using Moller's any-day-now flying car, as they had both the real estate for landing pads (parking lots or rooftops) and the clients who want to go to those locations.  This is actually more in line with your idea.  

Fast forward to today, and we have a slightly different situation with Uber Air Taxis.  There are a lot of really high hurdles for them to overcome, and those hurdles will be higher because everybody hates Uber as a corporation.  Airspace over densely populated areas is very tightly controlled today, at air traffic volumes that are less than a percent of what air taxi services would create.  

Let's set aside the hurdles, though, and narrow it down to your specific example.  There are two considerations I can think of...

First, when air taxis become a reality, Uber (or whoever) won't be able to make money in a two minute hop.  Or rather, they would, but they'd be charging an exorbitant amount.  It's a given that it would cost more than the same trip via a ground car, even if ground transportation doesn't gain its own improvements (which it will - autonomous networked vehicles will make the ground trip safer, faster, and cheaper than present ground transit, and that is *much* closer to a broad implementation than air taxis).  So a 2-minute air hop will be a luxury for most people, or maybe more of an indulgence, like a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant.  Something most people do once in a while, but not all the time.  Not frequently enough to influence their choice in real estate or AirBnBs.

Secondly, and this goes back to my first paragraph... anybody willing to make a 2-minute hop in an air taxi is easily going to be willing to make a 3- or 4- minute hop in one, because the difference in those two prices will be nominal.  Which means your prefab AirBnBs (at over 100K a pop) will be competing with Marriott (who is unquestionably going to do something similar) and anyone with a spare bedroom and a backyard big enough to land an air taxi looking to make some side cash.  

The upshot of this is that air taxis as you envision them are going to allow your competitors to execute your proposed business plan with properties they've already bought and paid for.  

I'm a big fan of Ray Kurzweil myself, and I think air taxis would be disruptive enough that we can't really see around that corner; certainly not well enough to invest that amount of money in one of thousands of possible outcomes.

[Marco Morales]

 I would not make RE investments based on an "air taxi" pipe dream.