Without knowing the particular financial situation of each business (apartments, duplexes and housing in general) this is going to be a **** show. Online option is attractive from a housing standpoint, pay tuition and forgo paying 700+ a month+utilities on an apartment? Bet your sweet maroon butt people are gonna be thinking that. And to me, this points to a greater problem, its kinda like the MBS situation in 07-08, those people thought nothing will ever happen and the party would go on forever, we all know it didn't. The same thing happened in Rockdale, there were plenty of opportunities to diversify away from Alcoa, but no one wanted to do that, they were slightly saved by Luminant until they too shut their units down, along with several others across the state.
Its human nature to just take the easy way of riding it until you cant, or its no longer there. But browsing this board, and talking to residents in both Bryan and College Station (proud of me Sinclair?
) it seems like residents have brought this up, however slim of a possibility, that the University may not exist or at least not at the capacity it always has, but the city governments kinda didn't do anything with the question, correct me if I'm wrong. So once housing takes a hit, so will everything else, and it will be a domino effect. Now I don't fault anyone for increasing their appetite for always wanting more involvement with the university, its a great money maker and for the most part I'm willing to bet its guaranteed money. But never asking "what if?", that seems to be the question lots of people missed, and the reason people are shaking in their boots, leveraged to the hilt and desperately needing lease agreements signed. Before all of this happened, I suspect, but am not positive, that my girlfriends apartment started accepting HUD tenants in decent numbers. Nothing against them as people or tenants, but this could point to a greater problem that they were needing to fill their rent roll with more "guaranteed money" since they couldn't readily lease units due to over saturation and even cannibalization of the market.
Or I could be full of ****, but here lately I have been thinking about this a lot more and its a very sobering thought how quickly things can turn.