Well, you know, people ask me about this in terms of real estate, what's going to happen with the economy, as you know, with political elections, what is it going to go up or down a recession or continue in this? You know, We're in one of the longest expansion periods in a long time. And for me, on a national level, I don't see that there's going to be a lot of risk within real estate as a whole.
Based upon the interest rates, I think if the market does begin to slow, you know, the Fed is going to lower the prime. We wait. We may get down to two or even zero interest rates just to keep the economy going. So from that perspective, I think that real estate is still a solid play.
But if I'm looking for us. What we have determined internally is that there's too much political instability here where we are in Illinois. And so what you were saying in terms of like, can we can we avoid it? You know.
Illinois is having a decrease in population of 6 percent over the past 10 years, which is putting a greater burden on the people that are remaining. And we have the pension problems. And, you know, historically, you know, people say, well, you know, they just did a bunch of things to approve legislation which are basically sin taxes.
But my concern is the money is not actually going to pay off those pensions. It's just going to be used to spend in other areas, which is historically have happened in Illinois for the past 20, 30 years.
So why is it going to be different? So what we have done is we've stopped buying in Illinois. And for us, that's how we are mitigating or perhaps even transferring because we're looking at states that are more tax progressive and where we're seeing growth.
And so that is what we're trying to do is and that's why we've expanded throughout the Midwest. That's why we have the properties in Ohio. We're looking in Louisville or we're looking in Kentucky. We're looking in North Carolina. We're looking at Michigan.
We're looking at places that are trying to encourage economic development. So either through PACE the Opportunity Zones or the tax benefits for it so that we have greater stability and less risk.