Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie have turned to a familiar idea in their pledge to reform the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey: selling its real estate.

A report released over the weekend highlights a plan to sell off many of the agency’s sprawling property holdings, by far the most notable of which is the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.

That concept has long been pushed within the agency, and it has been implemented gradually over the past decade and a half. — wsj.com

One of my more bizarre travel experiences involved a client in China, who was very excited about our work. [...]

By the time we landed, I’d completed the first pass at a design for a three-story villa to be built atop his high-rise. Good thing I did. When I landed, I was whisked directly to a dinner, where I had to present the ideas I’d developed on the plane. By that time I’d been up for nearly two days. [...]

I wanted to die, but we did get the business. — nytimes.com

“Seattle was a better opportunity for me than China right now,” Mr. Wang said. “A lot of Chinese families are planning to move here.” — NYT

“It’s not rare for us to go and try to make sure that no one buys the house of someone who’s facing foreclosure,” says Rob Call, an organizer for Occupy Our Homes Atlanta (OOHA). In Georgia, houses are publicly auctioned every first Tuesday of the month on each county courthouse’s steps. "[...] these auctions were mostly vacant. No one was really trying to go after these homes, but then they were [suddenly] swamped with people bidding up houses with quick access to sizable cashier’s checks.” — nextcity.org

As New York City’s burgeoning tech economy continues to grow, startups face the same challenges for office space they would anywhere else—but have the added challenge of Manhattan-level price tags, vying for space with law firms, banks, and other well-financed tenants.

An absolute lack of space is not the issue, however. New York’s low 10 percent office vacancy rate may be second only to Washington, D.C.’s 9.6 percent, but an enormous amount of inventory is going up [...]. — urbanland.uli.org

Eating food that’s grown locally and sustainably is a fantastic and increasingly popular idea, but it’s also expensive. Producers tend to drown under marketing and distribution costs, and struggle to find retail channels for their products. To assume that urban farms can escape that trap because of their extreme proximity to consumers would be a mistake; getting food to consumers has proven a logistical nightmare for them as well. — citiscope.org

Global architecture and engineering firm HOK will acquire Kansas City's 360 Architecture.

On Tuesday, the St. Louis-based firm announced that it will acquire the sports architecture-focused firm for an undisclosed price. The merger, expected to close by the end of October, will allow HOK to set up a new sports and entertainment practice staffed with experienced and established talent. — bizjournals.com

Many in the art world were staggered by recent reports that the Italian curator Germano Celant is being paid €750,000 to organise a pavilion for the Milan Expo 2015. Celant’s fee, and the incredulity it provoked, raises questions about how much curators are typically paid for organising biennials and large-scale international exhibitions.

The Art Newspaper surveyed around 40 international curators and biennial organisers [...]. — theartnewspaper.com

Construction spending posted modest gains in April, driven by an uptick in home building and government construction that lifted total activity to the highest level since March 2009.

Spending rose 0.2 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $953.5 billion [...]. — nytimes.com

The owners of the tallest tower at the World Trade Center are cutting office rents just months before it opens because of slow leasing activity.

Only one private tenant has signed a lease at One World Trade Center in nearly three years: a one-floor deal with advertising firm Kids Creative that was signed last week. The 3.1-million-square-foot skyscraper, formerly named the Freedom Tower, is 55% leased. — online.wsj.com

Yet uniqueness is the goal of city branding, which during the past few years has grown into a global industry connected to tourism and the media-sports-and-entertainment complex. Originally a promotional scheme meant to lure new residents, city branding is now a slogan tied to a public relations campaign to make the places where we live into “destinations”. As always with branding, image is everything. — theguardian.com

“[...] data show the construction sector and many related industries are among the fastest growing private-company industries,” said Sageworks analyst Libby Bierman. “In the last year or so, the housing market really started to pick back up, which means more people employed real estate agents and construction firms for new or existing homes and buildings. [...] started to refresh the exteriors of residences and commercial real estate, using the services of professional landscapers.” — forbes.com

China’s economic boom has enriched many of the country’s largest real estate entrepreneurs.[...]

Yet China’s building surge in recent years has also helped overseas architects to prosper in the world’s most populous nation. One U.S. firm to find success is Altoon Partners of Los Angeles. Although relatively small compared with the largest global architecture firms, Altoon was “unfazed by the muscle of (its) competitors” when it entered the market, and has focused tightly on its strengths[...] — forbes.com

We’re supposedly in the midst of a design renaissance, where beyond the cliché Steve Jobs and Apple ecosystem example, we see a design-centric focus in everything from soap (Method) and thermostats (Nest) to email (Mailbox) and even baby food (Plum Organics).

And yet, there’s a dearth of designer founders. — wired.com

Shopping malls around the country are dropping like flies. Roughly a third have trouble keeping the lights on. And estimates from Green Street Advisors suggest 10 percent of indoor malls will go dark within a decade, due to changing consumer tastes.

But some malls are putting up a fight, even with one foot in the grave. — marketplace.org