From farmland to stately brownstones to battleground for million-dollar bidding wars, Brooklyn’s transformation has fundamentally altered the city’s geography—and the way New York now thinks of itself. It has also altered the lives of the residents who call the borough home. To understand those changes, we dispatched a team of reporters to find a place where Brooklyn’s past and future are next-door neighbors. — nymag.com

Carmel Place (formerly known as My Micro NY), the city’s much-talked-about first micro apartment complex, began accepting applications for its affordable studios back in September. And now, a press release from developer Monadnock has announced that listings for 12 of the market-rate units will go live today in anticipation of the February opening date. Along with the launch comes news of Ollie, “an innovative housing model that delivers an all-inclusive living experience.” — 6sqft

[The tower proposed for 340 Flatbush Ave Ext.] will rise 1,000 feet tall, claiming the title of New York City’s tallest building outside of Manhattan, and giving Brooklyn its first legitimate supertall skyscraper...The residential component will span 466,000 square feet, and be divided amongst 550 units, with approximately 90 floors in total. There will also be 140,000 square feet of commercial development... — New York Yimby

I would like to argue that a more potent threat to the ongoing political viability of historic preservation is the perception that the preservation industry has become a conservative, indeed revanchist force; that it is elitist and sometimes even racist in its abetment of gentrification.

How did this happen?

Historic preservation in New York, according to the favored creation myth, was born in the postwar era as a progressive grassroots movement... — Places Journal

good architecture can survive budgetary rigors — at Hunters Point South, for instance, where a pair of hulking towers designed by SHoP and Ismael Levya Architects expresses de Blasio’s urgency even though it’s a holdover from the era of the allegedly Nero-like Michael Bloomberg. [...]

SHoP’s new towers are not world-beating architecture, but they’re more than good enough to plug into an evolving network of ferries, parks, schools, shops, all of which foster more investment. — nymag.com

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. — newyorkyimby.com

JetBlue and MCR will build hotel rooms from the ground up next to the terminal and refurbish the interior of the building to become the property’s main entrance. [...]

It is to have 505 rooms, 40,000 square feet of meeting space, up to eight eateries and an observation deck. The old terminal will serve as the lobby, with the rest of the hotel set back from it in a new building. — crainsnewyork.com

Like humans, cities and neighborhoods have their own unique fingerprints. The maps were created by researchers at the center’s Urban Age program, who have been studying how the layout of rapidly urbanizing cities can affect their livability. — CityLab

The latest explosion of Manhattan development has fully and passionately embraced the phenomenon of the global starchitect. [...]

As it turned out, the future would be pure real estate ... The future was the privatisation of the sky and a transfer from corporate power to individual wealth, the visual manifestation of the 0.1 per cent. It was a catwalk of anorexic skinnyscrapers by the equivalents of haute-couture designers ... global names with which to sell real estate. — ft.com