The below graphs are taken from a recent (June 2019) report by Knight Frank on “prime” residential pricing across the world. They define “prime” as generally being the top 5% of each market by value. What these graphs show are the spread between the average… Read More
This recent NY Times article — which makes the case that the current protests in Hong Kong are at least partially a result of inequality — has a pair of interesting diagrams that speak to the city’s tight housing market. The first compares average living… Read More
There’s now evidence to suggest that the political crisis in Hong Kong may be having an impact on capital flows. Bloomberg, as well as others, reported today that wealth managers in Asia have been receiving a heightened number of requests to transfer assets out of… Read More
This recent NY Times article about crowd estimates for Hong Kong’s annual pro-democracy protest is a good follow-up to my post about the number of people who, allegedly, showed up to last month’s NBA Championship parade here in Toronto. For years, Hong Kong has been… Read More
Architect I.M. Pei died this week in New York City. He was 102. Being a centenarian is noteworthy enough. He was born in Hong Kong in 1917. I would love to join that club. Imagine how much change he experienced throughout his life. But, of… Read More
Photographer Michael Wolf died at his home in Hong Kong this week. He was 64. Even if you don’t recognize the name, I am sure that many of you have seen his work. Perhaps his most famous project was “Architecture of Density”, which had him… Read More
A reader of this blog, who is based in Hong Kong, recently emailed me these photos: They are of a direct mailer that he received in his mailbox for a project here in Toronto. He sent them to me because he thought it was an… Read More
In Edward Glaeser’s book, Triumph of the City, he argues that the average temperature in January is the single best variable to predict which U.S. cities have grown the most over the last century. Indeed, from July 2015 to July 2016, 10 of the 15… Read More
Matt Daniels over at The Pudding recently visualized the world’s population in this spiky 3D map. You need to take a look. Better on desktop. The data is from 2015, but you can also compare it to and show the change from 1990. Here is… Read More
I like this article and photo essay in the Guardian talking about “Hong Kong’s fight to save its neon shimmer.” Neon lights have been a ubiquitous feature of the Hong Kong nightscape since about the middle of the 20th century. They were an outcropping of increasing… Read More
