“If I meet one more anti-gentrification activist who moved to Seattle ten minutes ago, I shall scream.” –Dan Savage So it’s not just developers who are frustrated by the many paradoxical desires that we have of cities. We are concerned about housing affordability and we… Read More
Urban Capital just released Volume 6 of its annual publication called Site. (Sadly, I missed the party.) The cover, shown above, is a photo of Shayne Dark’s 90 foot public art installation at Tableau Condominiums. The piece is called NOVA and it’s located at the… Read More
I was recently asked: How do you go into a neighborhood, build new, and not erase and/or sterilize what makes that neighborhood interesting in the first place? Gentrification is a controversial topic in city building. Too often I think we ignore what happens when we… Read More
Introducing The Lofts at SoDoSoPa and The Residences at The Lofts at SoDoSoPa (South of Downtown South Park). The following South Park video is a great parody of every real estate marketing video you’ve ever seen. Real estate marketing can be so terrible. This video… Read More
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
BRANDON DONNELLY 