In 1937, New York created taxi medallions as a way of dealing with the sheer volume of unlicensed cabs in the city. About 12,000 were initially sold. They cost $10. And you needed one, fastened to your car, in order to operate a taxi service.

In 2002, the price of a medallion had risen to about $200,000, though its value had been fairly stable since about 1995. Below is a graph from a recent NY Times investigation on taxi medallions. At their peak, in and around 2014, they were worth over $1 million.

The common narrative is that ride sharing services simply killed the value of medallions. They disrupted the taxi business. While it is certainly true that mobile apps have forever changed the way we navigate our cities, the above investigation by the NY Times has revealed something potentially more impactful:

The medallion bubble burst in late 2014. Uber and Lyft may have hastened the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for this article, including many lenders, said inflated prices and risky lending practices would have caused a collapse even if ride-hailing had never been invented.

At the market’s height, medallion buyers were typically earning about $5,000 a month and paying about $4,500 to their loans, according to an analysis by The Times of city data and loan documents. Many owners could make their payments only by refinancing when medallion values increased, which was unsustainable, some loan officers said.

So at the same time that Uber was being vilified in the media for destroying the taxi business, the industry itself was working to manipulate medallion prices and shill unaffordable debt onto new immigrants. An interesting read from the NY Times.

There's a lot of money at work right now trying to reinvent the way that homes are bought and sold. Perhaps the most popular trend is "instant buying" or algorithmic home buying. I have been writing about this for years, mostly because of Opendoor. But now there are lots of companies competing in this space. With this model, home sellers get the benefit of an almost immediate sale, though usually it's at a slightly lower price.

Redfin, on the other hand, is returning to something that it first tried out back in 2006: a buy now button on its online listings. It failed back then. But maybe it was simply too early. The feature allows unrepresented buyers -- that is, buyers without an agent -- to make online offers. Naturally, it's far from a single click process. But when accepted, the seller ends up paying about half the amount of commission.

According to the New York Times, the company started testing the feature in late March in the Boston area. Of the 120 homes listed on Redfin with a "start an offer" button, 5 ended up being purchased via an online bid. That's more than I would have expected. But Redfin positions these offers as being the stronger option because they save sellers money. There's also an option to tour the home on your own.

Given this initial response, the company is now working to roll out this feature nationally, market by market. Is this the future of home buying?

Hudson Yards officially opened today on the west side of Manhattan. More specifically, the eastern half of Hudson Yards opened. There's a second phase to come on the western yards. And the highly anticipated observation deck at 30 Hudson Yards -- the highest outdoor observation deck in the Western Hemisphere -- is also not quite ready. It is expected to open in early 2020.

Considered the largest mixed-use private real estate project in American history by square footage, Hudson Yards has been in the works for many decades and was previously part of New York's (failed) bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Dan Doctoroff, who is now the CEO of Sidewalk Labs, led the bid under the Bloomberg administration.

So today is a bit of a big deal.

To commemorate the opening, the architecture critic for the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, published this searing, but highly visual, piece about the project. I think it is fairly safe to assume that he isn't a huge fan (he doesn't seem to love developers either).

Here's an excerpt talking about Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel:

Purportedly inspired by ancient Indian stepwells (it’s about as much like them as Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great Adventure is like Chichen Itza) the object — I hesitate to call this a sculpture — is a 150-foot-high, $200 million, latticed, waste-basket-shaped stairway to nowhere, sheathed in a gaudy, copper-cladded steel.

It preens along the critical axis between the High Line and the newish No. 7 subway station at Hudson Yards, hoping to drum up Instagram views and foot traffic for the mall, casting egregious shadows over what passes for public open space, ruinously manspreading beside the Shed, the most novel work of architecture on site, and the only building the private developers didn’t build.

If any of you have formulated your own opinions about Hudson Yards, I would love to hear from you in the comments below. I'm looking forward to exploring the neighborhood in person sometime soon. If you're interested in learning more about the project, Curbed also just published, The ultimate guide to Hudson Yards.

Photo by Sandy Ching on Unsplash