How the Gordie Howe International Bridge came to be is a city and nation-building story worth telling. The Windsor-Detroit crossing is the busiest commercial border crossing in North America. It handles about one-third of the trade between Canada and the US, or about $1 billion per day, much of which passes over the Ambassador Bridge.

This is problematic for a few reasons.

One, there are concerns about capacity. Two, the bridge is, unfortunately, in the wrong place and doesn't offer direct highway-to-highway access. A truck coming off the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor has to pass through something like 17 traffic lights before reaching Highway 401. And third, and most importantly, the bridge is privately owned.

So, at some point, various people in government got together and said, "Hey, this bridge is pretty critical to our respective economies, it might be in our national interests to have a publicly owned bridge."

The federal government of Canada reportedly tried to buy the bridge in 2009, but the late Manuel Moroun wanted too much for it, and a deal was not struck. So then, in 2012, the Canadian and US governments approved the construction of a new bridge, now nearing completion and called the Gordie Howe International Bridge.

However, a second river crossing meant that Moroun would no longer have a monopoly, and so, an aggressive lobbying campaign was mounted. It was so effective that the bridge almost got canceled and funding for it became a "third rail" in Michigan politics. To save the project, the following deal was struck:

• Canada pays 100% of the ~C$6.4 billion cost to build the bridge.

I have never rented a self-storage unit. I have stored things at my parents' places during certain periods of my life, such as when I moved to the US for grad school, but as a general rule, I never seem to conclude that I have too much stuff and that I should maybe rent some storage. However, I do on occasion fantasize about having a garage or large "man cave" where I could store an assortment of exotic snowboards, bicycles, and other life essentials. I mean, who doesn't, right?

In any event, I seem to be in the minority, because self-storage is a growing real estate asset class:

Investors have dramatically increased their allocation to self-storage over the last several years [in the US]. A rush into the asset class occurred from 2020 to 2022, when transaction volume hit $50 billion, far exceeding the $35 billion spent during the entire seven‑year period from 2013 to 2020, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Transaction volumes are now normalized but remain well above their pre‑pandemic baseline.

Moreover:

It proved to be the best-performing sector in the NCREIF Property Index from 2005 to 2022, with returns since 2010 nearly double that of the overall index.

So what's driving this? Some of the explanations include a frozen housing market, millennials who haven't yet bought a garage and are starved for room, and small-scale entrepreneurs who use it as cheap warehouse space. According to some reports, this latter use case accounts for nearly a third of total demand. And this makes sense to me. But generally, I have tended to apply an egocentric bias to this asset class. My mind discounts it because I don't personally use it.

How the Gordie Howe International Bridge came to be is a city and nation-building story worth telling. The Windsor-Detroit crossing is the busiest commercial border crossing in North America. It handles about one-third of the trade between Canada and the US, or about $1 billion per day, much of which passes over the Ambassador Bridge.

This is problematic for a few reasons.

One, there are concerns about capacity. Two, the bridge is, unfortunately, in the wrong place and doesn't offer direct highway-to-highway access. A truck coming off the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor has to pass through something like 17 traffic lights before reaching Highway 401. And third, and most importantly, the bridge is privately owned.

So, at some point, various people in government got together and said, "Hey, this bridge is pretty critical to our respective economies, it might be in our national interests to have a publicly owned bridge."

The federal government of Canada reportedly tried to buy the bridge in 2009, but the late Manuel Moroun wanted too much for it, and a deal was not struck. So then, in 2012, the Canadian and US governments approved the construction of a new bridge, now nearing completion and called the Gordie Howe International Bridge.

However, a second river crossing meant that Moroun would no longer have a monopoly, and so, an aggressive lobbying campaign was mounted. It was so effective that the bridge almost got canceled and funding for it became a "third rail" in Michigan politics. To save the project, the following deal was struck:

• Canada pays 100% of the ~C$6.4 billion cost to build the bridge.

I have never rented a self-storage unit. I have stored things at my parents' places during certain periods of my life, such as when I moved to the US for grad school, but as a general rule, I never seem to conclude that I have too much stuff and that I should maybe rent some storage. However, I do on occasion fantasize about having a garage or large "man cave" where I could store an assortment of exotic snowboards, bicycles, and other life essentials. I mean, who doesn't, right?

In any event, I seem to be in the minority, because self-storage is a growing real estate asset class:

Investors have dramatically increased their allocation to self-storage over the last several years [in the US]. A rush into the asset class occurred from 2020 to 2022, when transaction volume hit $50 billion, far exceeding the $35 billion spent during the entire seven‑year period from 2013 to 2020, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Transaction volumes are now normalized but remain well above their pre‑pandemic baseline.

Moreover:

It proved to be the best-performing sector in the NCREIF Property Index from 2005 to 2022, with returns since 2010 nearly double that of the overall index.

So what's driving this? Some of the explanations include a frozen housing market, millennials who haven't yet bought a garage and are starved for room, and small-scale entrepreneurs who use it as cheap warehouse space. According to some reports, this latter use case accounts for nearly a third of total demand. And this makes sense to me. But generally, I have tended to apply an egocentric bias to this asset class. My mind discounts it because I don't personally use it.