Archinect - News

Wall Street is cashing in on post-2008 housing crisis

2019-05-31T20:19:00-04:00

Blackstone Group is cashing in on its bet on the suburban rental class. The private-equity firm late Tuesday sold more than $1 billion of shares of Invitation Homes Inc., the giant single-family home landlord it launched following the financial crisis in a wager that many Americans would be willing to rent the suburban lifestyle they could no longer afford to own.

In the two years since private-equity firm Blackstone Group launched its suburban home management service, Invitation Homes, the company's stock has gone up by over 26%.

During that same time, homeownership has fallen to its lowest levels since the mid-1990s, rents have edged upward in the nation's biggest metro areas, and an increasing number of Americans have become long-term tenants of Wall Street-based investment firms.

Simply put: Owning rental housing is a booming business that, increasingly, is seeing profits flow into fewer and fewer hands. The phenomenon is due in large part to Obama-era policies enacted at the height of the Great Recession, when credit was scarce, demand was low, and the government moved to incentivize private investors into buying up flailing suburban properties. Nearly a decade later, following years of under-building in the housing sector, those policies and investments have begun bring in juicy dividends for the investment firms and their shareholder...

What residents have to say about living in WeWork's housing community on Wall Street

2017-11-07T15:56:00-05:00

“It’s a great place to be if you’re just moving to the city, and you want to meet people, or you need a place for a couple months before you find your real apartment.”

Bloomberg writer Ellen Huet books a room in WeWork's communal housing project, WeLive, on Wall Street in New York. Huet talks with both current and former WeLive residents, who share different opinions about living in the building. In regards to WeLive's slow growth, the article also brings up other business options that WeWork is currently exploring, including plans to open a 36-story tower in Seattle by 2020. WeWork also recently appointed Bjarke Ingels to design their new WeGrow private elementary school.

Also, Archinect previously wrote about privacy in co-living. You can read the feature here: Strange bedfellows: exploring shades of privacy in co-living

ARExA to renovate WeWork's first co-living project on Wall Street

2015-10-21T18:28:00-04:00

The tower, owned by Rudin Management, currently has 260,000 square feet of floorspace that counts towards zoning, and of that, 133,000 square feet will become residential, resulting in 205 new apartments. The remaining 127,000 square feet will stay commercial. [...] 110 Wall Street will be WeWork’s first foray into residential development [...] The inclusion of Class B dwelling units, which denote transient housing, likely signals living options will range from communal to private.

According to CurbedNY, ARExA will head design on the renovation of WeWork's first residential project under its co-living offshoot, WeLive. Completion date is currently slated for March 2017.

WeWork is also hiring multiple positions in New York at this very moment. Check out their listings here:

WeWork: openings for Interior Design Lead; Project Architect; Building Information Specialist

UPDATE: an earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to FXFOWLE as the designer for the renovation, referring to an earlier version of the same news posted to CurbedNY.

More on WeWork and its residential foray, WeLive:

More details emerge about WeWork's residential endeavor WeLive
WeWork moves into residential development with WeLive
Working out of the Box: Miguel McKelvey, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at WeWork