Archinect - News

San Jose will be home to the largest co-housing building in the world set to feature "vertical neighborhoods"

2019-06-10T16:24:00-04:00

The co-living startup Starcity plans to build an 800-unit, 18-story “dorm for adults” to help affordably house Silicon Valley’s booming workforce. Dishotsky, the co-founder/CEO of the co-housing start-up Starcity, is now working to fill America’s housing-strapped cities with a scaled-up version of his childhood idyll.

Said to be the an 18-story "dorm for adults" the co-living startup Starcity aims to "redefining the meaning of home." The co-founder and CEO Jon Dishotsky is an advocate for co-living due to his upbringing in suburban Palo Alto. If asked about his upbringing, Dishotsky will share the story of growing up in a co-housing compound thanks to his Stanford professor dad who would often host students during the years. With this upbringing Dishotsky believes this model of creating housing developments with this method of co-living will help "fill America's housing-strapped cities with scaled up versions of his childhood idyll."

A rendering of Starcity's proposed co-living complex, slated to be built in downtown San Jose. Image © Starcity

After launching in 2016, Dishotsky and his team have already broke ground on seven developments in Los Angeles and San Francisco. However, Starcity will be the largest. Aiming to attract renters with "Millennial-friendly amenities" individuals who decided to...

Car-less apartment renters pay 16% of their rent for parking that they don't use

2017-07-18T18:43:00-04:00

The average price of building a garage parking space (as much as $34,000 in 2012) is passed on to people whether they own a car or not, and distort the true demand for urban parking.

According to the 2011 National American Housing Survey data of the US census, about 16% of a housing unit’s monthly rental cost is attributable to the expense of building an urban parking spot. For the average renter that amounts to to $1,700 per year, or $142 per month.

Parking mandates increase housing prices by displacing area that could have gone to housing (thus shrinking supply), and makes each new unit more expensive to pay for more garage parking. A separate study in Los Angeles found the city’s parking minimums raised apartment prices by about $200 per month and price of a condo by about $43,000. Renters without cars end up subsidizing this arrangement to the tune of about $440 million annually in the US. While only 7% of US rental households lack cars, according to Census data, this burden falls most heavily on the urban poor since lower-income households can least afford to subsidize garage parking spaces.

Researchers find that it might be less wasteful to price and sell ...

VACANT NEW YORK maps Manhattan's shuttered storefronts

2016-09-02T13:23:00-04:00

This is high-rent blight. The vacancy problem is immediately visible but lacking in hard data. The intent of this project is to provide some background around commercial vacancies and use a map to give some insight into the extent of the issue, ideally doubling as a tool for community groups and policymakers to identify areas for intervention. It's an obvious problem without a clear set of causes or solutions, but there are several contributing factors [...]

Click here for the interactive VACANT NEW YORK map.

After allegations of racial discrimination and #AirbnbWhileBlack fallout, Airbnb looks inward

2016-06-03T13:11:00-04:00

[Airbnb] says it will spend the next several months reviewing how hosts and guests interact on the site and what it could do to ensure users are treated more fairly. [...] "The bottom line is that the design of platforms dictates the decisions that people make on them. Even if there’s implicit bias, [Airbnb has] an enormous amount of ability to change the extent of discrimination on the platform."

For more on the controversial P2P renting service:

£950 for a mouldy 'central' flat? Welcome to London.

2016-04-28T10:59:00-04:00

If you want evidence that London’s renters are being taken advantage of, look no further than a new social media campaign. Launched Monday, the #rantyourrent hashtag encourages London’s overcharged and poorly housed tenants to visually detail the bad conditions they’re expected to put up with in return for large sums of monthly rent. The results, detailed in a new Tumblr called Vent Your Rent, make for sobering viewing.

More articles on London and the housing crisis here:

The root of London's housing crisis lies beyond its borders

London's housing crisis is creating a chasm between the rich and poor

London's Bleak Housing

Barcelona plans shakedown scheme against unlicensed Airbnb apartments to curb tourism boom

2015-08-19T15:07:00-04:00

People caught running unlicensed apartments through websites will be offered the chance to have 80% of their fine canceled if they allow the city council to use the apartment as social accommodation for three years...When the three years are up the landlord [can] either pay off the fine through his or her own funds and reclaim possession of the apartment or continue offering the property as social accommodation until the council receives the equivalent of full payment of the fine.

This 3D map compares NYC real estate prices by neighborhood

2015-08-17T12:24:00-04:00

We all have a pretty good idea which NYC neighborhoods command top dollar, but this incredible 3D map from NeighborhoodX really puts things into perspective by pinning the city’s 325 neighborhoods against one another in a visually jarring side-by-side comparison. Among the most expensive? In Brooklyn...

A little reminder that U.S. rent affordability is at its worst, according to Zillow

2015-08-14T20:40:00-04:00

Americans living in rentals spent almost a third of their incomes on housing in the second quarter, the highest share in recent history. Rental affordability has steadily worsened, according to a new report from Zillow, which tracked data going back to 1979...While mortgages remain relatively affordable, landlords have been able to increase rents because demand for apartments remains strong. The U.S. homeownership rate fell to the lowest level in almost five decades in the second quarter.

Play "Inside the rent", and become a virtual developer in NYC

2015-06-09T13:24:00-04:00

Different policy debates come into play throughout the game and the player is tasked with making choices that will affect the final rent – for instance build in high-cost neighborhoods, pay workers prevailing wages, expend public money to subsidize the building, or to give in and accept higher rents than desired.

The rent is too damn high, but so are a lot of other development costs. In this simulation game by NYC's Citizens Housing Planning Council, players go through the steps of planning a NYC rental in the current economic climate – complete with housing shortage and gentrifying neighborhoods.

After choosing a site, players must set targets for rent, construction wages, amenities, building size – and as they outfit their property, they see costs go up, and whether their target rent will actually yield a profit. Or (gasp!) whether they'll need to apply for government subsidies. According to the CHPC, the figures used in the game "are based on interviews with developers, appraisers, architects and underwriters, and are current as of 2015."

Play Inside the rent here, and see if you can fix the housing crisis. My $4,000 / mo 2BR in a new Harlem mid-size only exists thanks to government subsidies and minimum construction wages. If you're interested in other real estate development-based games, ...

Monterey Park City Council adopts tougher penalties for landlords of illegal boarding homes

2015-05-12T16:06:00-04:00

Landlords of illegal boarding homes could face $1,000 fines and six months in jail under tougher enforcement regulations adopted this week by the City Council...The city has staffed a volunteer in the code enforcement office and plans to add more of them. The council unanimously voted to update regulations to say it could prosecute landlords of illegal boarding homes with an infraction or misdemeanor charge and shut the 'public nuisance' down.

"These renters said in previous interviews that they try to stay out of the limelight and cannot afford other living arrangements as they work for below minimum wage and send a large chunk of their earnings back to family in China."

Activism targeting London's housing crisis bubbles to the surface

2015-03-27T13:38:00-04:00

Protestors against low-income housing demolition are not just fighting for their homes, but often for their ability to stay in London at all. The small amount of “affordable” housing being discussed as a replacement is really a figleaf.

So gentrification is just a myth after all?

2015-01-19T14:22:00-05:00

It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether. Fourteen years ago, Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard of the Brookings Institution wrote that gentrification “is a politically loaded concept that generally has not been useful in resolving growth and community change debates because its meaning is unclear.” That’s even truer today. Some U.S. cities do have serious affordability problems, but they’re not the problems critics of gentrification think they are.

What's your take on John Buntin's Slate piece?

America's most expensive rental markets in 2014

2015-01-07T13:21:00-05:00

Rents continue to outpace incomes. In fact, Zillow just released data showing U.S. renters spent a combined $441 billion on housing in 2014. Perhaps surprisingly, the New York-Northern New Jersey metro didn’t top the list. San Jose was the highest, with renters paying on average $1,807 per month. Meanwhile, the 20th most expensive metro for renters was Minneapolis-St. Paul, where the average monthly payment in 2014 was $927.

L.A. Ranks as One of the Most Expensive American Cities for Renters

2014-12-01T17:51:00-05:00

The median per capita income in Los Angeles is $27,900. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment—and, frankly, this sounds low to us—is said to be about $1,400. You can do the math. It's very difficult to keep a roof over your head in this town. Yet another analysis has confirmed this. The folks at Rent.com looked at median rent and median income in America's largest cities and concluded that L.A. is one of the five worst places in the nation for renters.