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A recent, worrisome working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research reported on the tinder of the last conflagration...It was buyers from the top and middle top who account for the skyrocketing rate of default — and it wasn’t that they were buying bigger family homes that they couldn’t afford. It was that they were buying additional houses to flip for a profit — NY Magazine
Caitlin Flanagan looks at the gangbusters growth of "flipping" shows on HGTV and wonders if they are perhaps a signal of the next boom/bust cycle in US housing market. View full entry
Housing has instead become one of the primary drivers of global capitalism, through commodification and financialization, making its function as real estate more important than its use as lived, space. It is the result of spatial developments being market-driven. Madden and Marcuse: “housing is not produced and distributed for dwelling at all,” but “as a commodity to enrich the few.” — Failed Architecture
The German documentary City for Sale that came out last year and the recently released book In Defense of Housing are the perfect match for anyone who wants to learn about the broken nature of housing markets, the crisis currently happening in all big cities worldwide. City for Sale consists of... View full entry
Over the past couple days, there’s been a string of iconic modernist homes put on the market. Now, a pretty incredible Frank Lloyd Wright is for sale. 2206 Parklands Lane, close to downtown Minneapolis, is a 3-bedroom, 2-bath home built in 1960. It’s made primarily of brick, stone and wood and... View full entry
Built in 1970, ‘House II’ by Peter Eisenman is a major icon of structuralist architecture—and it’s now on the market for $850K. One of ten experimental houses Eisenman designed, only four of which were built, House II is heavily influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky. The house comprises... View full entry
The strategy reflects a consensus among some developers and planners that California’s vaunted car culture is inevitably going to run out of gas...[Andy] Cohen, co-chief executive of Gensler, predicts car ownership will peak around 2020 and then start to decline, with more Americans relying on some form of ride-sharing than their own vehicles by 2025. That means cars gradually would disappear from home garages, curbs and parking structures, freeing up acre upon acre of real estate for new uses. — Los Angeles Times
Some developers are already planning for a not-so-far-off future Los Angeles where more people primarily rely on ridesharing (including from autonomous vehicles) than driving their own car, particularly in the form of parking garages that can be redesigned for other uses like commercial spaces or... View full entry
Built in 1946 in Bedford, New York, the 1450 sq. ft. Booth House was Philip Johnson’s first constructed commission. In 1955, photographer Robert Damora and his wife, the architect Sirkka Damora, moved in, intending for it to serve as temporary housing until they could build a home of their own... View full entry
According to a listing on Zillow, Jose Oubrerie's visually complex, materially innovative Miller House is now on the market for $550,000. Each room is a study in unusual and exactingly executed detail; cabinets transition seamlessly into L-shaped shelving, while doors become hosts for... View full entry
This remarkable custom-built, privately commissioned modern house with its cantilevered design, walls of windows, hand-cut Tennessee limestone walls, rock gardens and rooftop terraces can actually be yours, right now, for $3.5 million. — 6sqft
It's safe to say local architect Dimitri Bulazel was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Fallingwater house when designing this Greenwich, Connecticut home in the 1970s.Like Wright's 1935 architectural masterpiece, it has a cantilevered design set in the woods and incorporates aspects of the... View full entry
For the first time in 20 years, Frank Lloyd Wright‘s “Tirranna” home in New Canaan, CT is on the market. The home was built just before his death on a 15-acre wooded estate, has been listed for $8M by the estate of its long-time owner, the late memorabilia mogul and philanthropist Ted Stanley. Though renovated, the horse-shaped home maintains its original architectural integrity. — 6sqft
The Wall Street Journal reports that the seven-year long boom in luxury apartment development is about to fizzle out. Since early 2010, U.S. apartment rents have risen more than 26%—a pace much faster than either inflation or income growth. This pattern began to slow last year, when rents rose... View full entry
Last year, they won the Turner Prize—the first architects to snag the coveted art prize. Now, you can own a piece of art-architecture history by buying Assemble’s Yardhouse, the structure that formerly sheltered their workspace in east London. And it costs just £150,000 (not including VAT)... View full entry
Housing must now be recognised as a human right, no different than the right to vote or express yourself freely. This means understanding that housing cannot be viewed first and foremost as an economic driver or a commodity to add to an investment portfolio; that forced eviction is not development; that land has more than monetary value; and that the private market must be regulated. — the Guardian
It also means housing homeless people rather than making them criminals for trying to stay alive, and it means recognising that everyone has the right to live in the city regardless of socio-economic status.Many of the world's major cities are gripped with housing crises. For more on this... View full entry
What’s extraordinary about a smart contract is that it gives blockchain the power to not only record property rights but enforce them. Once deployed, a dozen lines of computer code can fulfill the same role as the county records office, the courts and the police. You can have “the function of a trusted bureaucracy without the expense of putting together a trusted bureaucracy”, Waldman explains. — the Guardian
The homeowner posts a price for the rental. The renter sends the money through her smartphone. Inside the front door is a very small computer connected to the internet. The computer knows when the renter is allowed to enter and unlocks the door for her when she pushes a button on her phone.Smart... View full entry
Turkey’s president looks at northern Syria and sees what others don’t: a massive real estate project.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose army is attempting to clear 5,000 square kilometers in northern Syria of Islamic State, talks about building entire cities when his soldiers’ work is done. In regular addresses, he describes a future in which refugees return home to Turkish-built apartment blocks supplemented by Turkish-built schools and social facilities.
— Bloomberg
That may be the only way to get some of the nearly 3 million Syrians in Turkey to return home and begin reconstructing their country, he says.For more on the Syrian conflict, check out past coverage:A well, a windmill, a mirror: Sigil's real and symbolic interventions in SyriaWater Wars: the... View full entry
There is a city which is suffering a worse property bubble than Sydney, whose residents are more priced-out than Londoners, and where there is a greater divide between the housing haves and have-nots than even San Francisco.
That city is Vancouver, and in response to these mounting challenges, the west-coast Canadian metropolis recently imposed an extraordinary new tax on foreign buyers – whose impact is now being watched closely by other cities grappling with bloated property markets.
— theguardian.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Mayor of London launches probe into the impact of foreign investment in city's real estateAnother case of "poor door" for proposed Vancouver high-riseCan Vancouver break out of its 'boring-architecture' mold with these new ambitious skyscraper View full entry
