The Restoration Economy

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4Why Our Trillion-Dollar-Plus Restoration Economy Has Been Kept a Secret

It’s a truism in our industry that over 50 percent of our budgets go to restoration. It’s probably been that way since the early nineties, but no one has formally measured it.

—Ed Sullivan, Editor of Building & Operations Management magazine (conversation via phone with author, 2000)

Despite restorative development’s ubiquity and impressive economic power, the fundamental transition from new development to restorative development has taken place almost entirely unnoticed. The presence of an invisible, trillion-dollar-plus sector of the world economy is especially incredible when we consider how many people earn their living churning out economic analyses. But this is, ...