Sapere Aude
Tag: realestate
If closed floor plans are considered such a nuisance these days, why did they prevail for almost 100 years in single-family working- and middle-class suburban housing? The answer: closed floor plans make a lot of sense, from both an environmental and a living perspective.
against large rooms (she’s wrong)
New York City has a tradition of selling property for only $1. This token transaction amount, as we mentioned in a previous post, is often used as a development incentive for potential buyers, who need to show they have plans and the funds to execute their vision. Now, thanks to the $1 LOTS project, we can see all of the city-owned lots of land sold to developers for $1 since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in January 2014.
the system compared 1.6M pairs of photos taken 7 years apart to test several hypotheses about the causes of urban revitalization. Density of highly educated residents, proximity to central business districts and other physically attractive neighborhoods, and the initial safety score assigned by the system all correlate strongly with improvements in physical condition. Raw income levels, housing prices or neighborhoods’ ethnic makeup do not to predict change.
Here’s where New York City’s getting whiter (in green on the map). The red areas are the 25 sub-boroughs with declining white populations—none of which were in the gentrifying neighborhoods identified by the Furman Center. The population of white residents increased in every gentrifying neighborhood from 2000 to 2015. 8 gentrifying neighborhoods logged the biggest increases, topped by Bedford-Stuyvesant, at 1235%.
There is a deeper reason why I am excited about Opendoor, and it too is related to how the company’s approach differs from Zillow’s and Redfin’s. While Zillow makes it easier to look for new houses, and Redfin promises to save sellers a few bucks, making it trivial to sell a house has the potential to fundamentally impact our economy at a time we desperately need exactly that. Many, including myself, have written about how globalization and technology are upending the job market; one particular challenge is that often new jobs are created in different geographic areas than where job seekers are located.
To that end the potential for Opendoor to dramatically increase liquidity in the housing market by buying direct from sellers is not just a business opportunity, but one with the potential to increase dynamism in the job market. Granted, it will take a long time for Opendoor to move into the towns where this sort of service is most needed, but the idea is very much a move in the right direction.
helping you distinguish the meh from the truly horrible houses.
When a new restaurant starts to take patrons from an old restaurant we generally don’t think that the old restaurant–the long-term resident–has the right to prevent the new restaurant from opening. The same is true, by and large, for new technologies and ways of doing business. Yet when it comes to residential land we give the old residents a veto on the new.
The sad thing is that the people most yakking about their “property” are also the ones who want to impose their misguided rules on others.
Even active spaces aren’t uniformly bustling throughout the day. New York City has upwards of 24K restaurants—among them, some up-all-night delis and take-out joints, but also some that only open for dinner, sitting shuttered all morning and afternoon. There may be chefs in the back, chopping vegetables and prepping for the evening rush, but the dining area is empty.
Preston Pesek, the founder of the co-working startup Spacious, wondered if he could use those tables during the lulls. Pesek, who has a background working with architects, developers, and commercial real estate firms, aimed to turn the sparse front-of-house into an on-demand co-working space.
2018-01-04:
In 6 hours the dinner rush will just be starting at Saxon + Parole. The bar will be humming, servers will flit between tables, the kitchen will be dishing out entrees including the Impossible Burger. But, right now the restaurant is humming with a different type of energy; writers, startup employees and more using Saxon + Parole as a co-working space.
Repeal all historic preservation laws. It’s 1 thing to require safety permits but no construction project should require a historic preservation permit. Here are 3 reasons: First, it’s often the case that buildings of little historical worth are preserved by rules and regulations that are used as a pretext to slow competitors, maintain monopoly rents, and keep neighborhoods in a kind of aesthetic stasis that benefits a small number of people at the expense of many others. Second, a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestors ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies. Ironically, if today’s rules for historical preservation had been in place in the past the buildings that some now want to preserve would never have been built at all. The opportunity cost of preservation is future greatness.
All of this seemed very far away on a Sunday night this winter, in the basement of a renovated 4-story brownstone in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building, Kennedy’s new home, is run by the co-living startup Common, which offers what it calls “flexible, community-driven housing.” Co-living has also been billed as “dorms for grown-ups,” a description that Common resists. But the company has set out to restore a certain subset of young, urban professionals to the paradise they lost when they left college campuses—a furnished place to live, unlimited coffee and toilet paper, a sense of belonging.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 