Why Are There Unemployed Buildings?

John Quiggin wrote recently that in his opinion the existence of unemployment is "the central issue of macroeconomics." It's of course unsurprising but still striking that at a flagship economics conference the papers presented tend to shy away from tackling the real fundamentals. But the existence of unemployment is an important puzzle, and it's important to note that it's not just unemployed people. Downtown San Diego, for example, features a lot of unemployed storefronts these days. It's simple enough to say that this has something to do with the real estate boom of some years ago andits subsequent unwinding, but you ought to be able to feel the tug of the classical intuition that this can't really happen. There should be some non-zero price at which the storefronts lease. And yet there they stand vacant. And the idea that it's microeconomics all the way down and unemploye...