French photographer and graphic designer François Prost has a new photo series out that I thought I would share with you today. It’s called “Paris Syndrome” and I discovered it via CityLab.
What the series does is visually compare Paris to a housing estate in Hangzhou, China called Tianducheng, which was designed to be a replica of Paris. Tianducheng even has its own Eiffel Tower, though this Chinese version is only 108m tall and the French original is 324m.
If you have been following the headlines over the past year, you’re probably aware that Atlantic City — the “Gambling Capital of the East Coast” — is in trouble. This year alone, 4 casinos shut their doors – including Revel, which only opened in 2012.
To be perfectly honest with you, gambling isn’t my thing. I’ve only been to Atlantic City once, and it was really just so that I could say I had been (it was when I used to live in Philadelphia). But I know that many people derive a lot of entertainment value out of gambling.
However, I worry when cities starting believing that a casino can fix all of their city building and economic development challenges. They are not a silver bullet. And many would argue that they cause far more harm than potential benefit. The negative socioeconomic impacts have been well documented.
In the case of Atlantic City, I suppose you could say that casinos “worked” – for awhile. But that’s because Atlantic City had a monopoly on gambling. In 1978 the city opened the first legal casino in the eastern United States. And that led to a boom in casinos and
If you had to pick an epicentre for the housing bust of 2008, I’d say that Las Vegas would be a pretty safe bet.
Las Vegas home prices doubled between 2002 and 2006 (the peak), and then fell 62% through to 2012! According to RealtyTrac, Las Vegas saw the highest rate of foreclosure (in 2009) compared to any other major city in the US. 1 out of every 13 properties was in foreclosure. That’s pretty incredible.
Now, hindsight is always 20/20, but from the beginning I had a hard time understanding Las Vegas from a real estate standpoint. You have a city that’s running out of water and who’s major economic drivers are tourism, gambling and conventions. Not only are these industries highly cyclical, but they don’t create a lot of high paying local jobs.
So for home prices to double in the span of 4 years, it must mean that there’s a lot of investor activity in the market. But how much is a lot? As one example, the 678 unit Meridian Private Residences, which was a condo conversion done by