The Federal Housing Finance Agency recently published a working paper where they looked at within-city house price gradients for a selection of US cities over a 40 year period. The goal of the study was to address what they call a “persistent blind spot” in local house… Read More
Last week, Detroit hosted the 24th annual Congress for the New Urbanism. The theme was: The Transforming City. I wasn’t there, but I would have loved to attend. So many interesting things going on, but so little time. Attention is scarce. For those of you… Read More
About a year ago I wrote a post called, Lisbon is the new Berlin. The timing of the post happened to coincide with Monocle’s first ever Quality of Life Conference, which was held in the city. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye out for… Read More
When it comes to a real estate market, there are always the typical metrics: sale prices, rents, vacancy and so on. But I’m always interested when somebody looks at the market in a different way and comes up with other kinds of metrics. That’s why… Read More
Conor Maguire introduced me to an interesting site today called Airbnb vs. Berlin. The site does a deep dive into Berlin’s Airbnb market with the hope of answering the question: Is Airbnb contributing to a shortage in affordable housing? The site is very well done.… Read More
https://500px.com/embed.js This afternoon I was chatting with some friends about Toronto real estate (which is something that happens a lot in this city), and we started talking about “The Starbucks Effect.” Basically, we were talking about how this neighborhood just got a Starbucks and how… Read More
It’s great to be back in Philly. I have a real sense of nostalgia around this city. Last night my friends took me to a popup beer garden on South Street put on by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Before the popup garden, it was just… Read More
dupont survivor by Josemaria de Churtichaga on 500px I was on CBC radio this morning talking about the revitalization of Dovercourt Village and Geary Avenue in Toronto. The funny thing about this topic is that it’s one I actually held off writing about. I’ve been… Read More
Back in 2011, blogTO ran an article calling Geary Avenue one of the ugliest streets in Toronto. And it’s certainly up there. It’s an industrial street with a mixture of different building types (lots of autoshops), giant power lines running along the south side of… Read More
I’ve written about the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco before. It’s an infamous neighborhood in the center of the city that has for decades resisted gentrification (which was the topic of my post). But as the technology sector continues to urbanize, many fear that it’s… Read More
