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Instead of a house with a picket fence and a front yard, many urbanites have opted to rent in newly developed apartment buildings or to buy condominiums in denser, walkable suburban communities, where apartments tend to be bigger and offer more outdoor space than comparable units in the city. — The New York Times
Sydney Franklin of The New York Times highlights the growing demand for dense—but not too dense—urban developments located in secondary cities by those fleeing New York City as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Franklin highlights a collection of recently completed low- to mid-rise... View full entry
A transformational shift in perspective is taking shape in California, where the state's transportation agency, Caltrans, is in the midst of alterings its project impact analysis metrics by abandoning LOS in lieu of VMT. Why is this important? Level of Service (LOS), on the... View full entry
The U.S. is at the beginning of a tidal wave of homes hitting the market on the scale of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. This time it won’t be driven by overbuilding, easy credit or irrational exuberance, but by an inevitable fact of life: the passing of the baby boomer generation. — The Wall Street Journal
A report in The Wall Street Journal highlights the coming vacancy crisis set to impact America's retirement communities and exurbs as members of the Baby Boomer generation age out of independent living with fewer members of younger generations left—or willing—to take their... View full entry
Municipalities, in the interest of preserving open space, could once be counted on to take over troubled courses. But subsidizing golf has become a toxic political issue in most places. — chicagobusiness.com
Are the days of America's golf clubs numbered? Reading the news, it doesn't look too good. A recent Crain's report chronicling the ailing state of suburban Chicago golf clubs points out that while business was booming for the region's country clubs just a decade ago, the game has fallen flat in... View full entry
Many baby boomers poured millions into these spacious homes, planning to live out their golden years in houses with all the bells and whistles.
Now, many boomers are discovering that these large, high-maintenance houses no longer fit their needs as they grow older, but younger people aren’t buying them.
— wsj.com
The Wall Street Journal reports that wealthy baby boomers in America's far-flung retirement suburbs are having trouble selling their McMansions. The problem? The homes are too big, too expensive, and too far away from everything else. Another issue: Too many multi-million dollar homes are... View full entry
Author William H. Frey, senior fellow for the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brooking Institute, writes, "These trends are consistent with previous census releases for counties and metropolitan areas that point to a greater dispersion of the U.S. population as the economy and housing... View full entry
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.
— Wall Street Journal
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... View full entry
In 2015, 18 percent of all existing housing units on Long Island were multifamily. While that is less than half the percentage in New York metropolitan suburbs over all, change is apparent across the island...12,500 condominium and rental units within half a mile of train stations had been approved over the last 11 years, 7,000 of which have been built. Another 10,000 units could be approved in five to six years. — NYT
Marcelle Sussman Fischler reports in from the suburbs around New York City, where luxury, amenity-rich, mixed-used TOD is offering up an urbanized suburbia. Meanwhile in the Denver region, an innovative public-private financing tool Denver Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Fund, is attempting to... View full entry
This isn't your grandfather's urbanization: population figures in major U.S. cities, which on the whole are on the uptick after declining in the 1960s, are adding residents not to their already built urban cores but rather in the form greenfield sprawl, which makes use of farmland and lightly... View full entry
Rem Koolhaas, in an infamous essay from 1995, goes straight to the point: ‘the style of choice (of suburbia) is postmodern, and will always remain so’. — Failed Architecture
'In the post-war period most of the middle class of northern Italy looked straightforwardly towards the future and refused to be ‘contaminated’ by tradition. The best experimental designs by Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, Carlo Scarpa and Gianni Avon were inspired by the strong need for... View full entry
