In the writing of Richard Joseph Spinelli, a turn week is the short stretch between one group moving out and the next moving in, and he treats it as the week that sets a company’s reputation for the year ahead. Terms like that one carry much of his argument, and this glossary defines them the way his pieces use them.
The glossary holds twenty two entries. Some are trade words he uses in a particular sense, such as renewal, group lease and ordinary wear; a group lease, as the Lantern explained to Ohio State students1, usually leaves each signer liable for all of the rent and any damage. Some are his own coinages or near coinages, such as maintenance radius, bench of trades and one inventory. Others describe the physical stock he works in, including cellar, leaders and gutters, and lath and plaster. These are practical words: federal building guidance notes2 that a few inches of rain on a roof can shed thousands of gallons, water that soaks toward a cellar unless leaders carry it away. Each entry says which pieces use the term, what he means by it, and how his use differs from the ordinary one.
A term measured against the market
A few terms point outward to conditions he does not measure himself. Demand pool is one. When he writes that a concentrated portfolio draws all its renters from one pool, he is describing both a strength and an exposure. City data show why the strength has held in New York: the housing agency’s release on the 2023 vacancy survey3 put the rental vacancy rate at 1.4 percent in 2023, lower than in any survey since 1968. The exposure depends on the campus. A Brookings analysis of the enrollment cliff4 found closure risk concentrated among small, low endowment colleges, while still forecasting steep drops in the number of seniors graduating in states such as New York. Fordham has so far pulled the other way, since the Fordham Ram reported in 20225 that the classes entering in 2021 and 2022 were bigger than any it had admitted before.
Each entry keeps to his usage. For the general meaning of a subject, such as how student leases or older building systems work in general, the entries link to richardjspinelli.com, which carries the fuller treatment.