Spiritual Forum

(Business 2.0) – There has been an impressive amount of construction in the United States over the last three centuries: All told, we've built more than 300 billion square feet of homes, offices, factories, and other structures. But according to new studies from the Brookings Institution and Virginia Tech urban planning professor Robert Lang, we're about to pick up the pace--it will take just 25 years to erect the next 200 billion square feet, which we'll need to accommodate 70 million more people and to replace homes and offices erased by everything from disasters like Hurricane Katrina to plain old obsolescence.

If you think the real estate boom of the past decade was bounteous, peek a little further over the horizon: Researchers estimate that the massive buildout will constitute a $25 trillion development market by 2030, more than twice the size of the entire U.S. economy today. According to Lang, the bulk of that money will flow into 10 major metro regions he has christened "megapolitans." On the following pages, we've assembled exclusive growth forecasts for each of these regions and--based on interviews with dozens of regional planners, developers, and investors--identified the savviest angles to play in the near and long term.