Urbanexus Update - Issue #18
Please scroll down for my weekly complilation of information and opinion about real estate and community development.
Real estate markets
Seattle tops the nation in tower cranes
Toronto has the most construction cranes and Seattle has the most in the USA.
Top-Selling Master-Planned Communities
RCLCO surveyed MPCs throughout the country to establish the 20 top-selling communities for the first half of 2018.
Housing starts — seekingalpha.com
Housing construction fell in June 2018, and housing permits, an indicator of future activity, also fell.
US new home market underperforming by 4.2%
An analysis suggest that lack of supply has shaved 256,000 home sales off the potential annual pace.
Best cities for first time home buyers
A ranking of the best areas for first-time home buyers.
Visualizing rent in North American cities — www.visualcapitalist.com
Rental markets have heated up all over the U.S. and Canada.
The new geography of neighborhoods in the USA
Working with the Urban Land Institute, RCLCO has updated an analytical framework for classifying neighborhoods within metropolitan areas
Community development
Development around rail stations could help resolve a housing crisis — www.seattletimes.com
Transit stations offer opportunities to create walkable mixed-use communities with significant new housing and reduced dependence on automobiles.
Shack "villages" for the homeless
Tiny houses, which are really 120 square foot shacks without bathrooms, kitchens or heat, are controversial partly because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development doesn’t consider them shelter. But Seattle — along with other cities across the country — is turning to them as a cheaper way to get homeless people off the streets.
Privately financing housing for the homeless — www.latimes.com
A nine-unit apartment rising in South Los Angeles is a test case for a new way to build housing for the homeless without any taxpayer-supported construction.
San Franciscans to vote on tax to help homeless
San Francisco voters will decide in November whether to tax large businesses to pay for homeless and housing services, an issue that set off a battle.
A critique of CVS stores — www.dallasnews.com
CVS commits urban malpractice with generic store designs that poison neighborhoods.
Real estate enterprises
Compensation of REIT executives
Average pay for U.S. REIT CEOs has risen by 11% to $5.6M over the past five years. But which of the captains of the U.S. listed real estate sector are earning their keep, and which are overpaid?
A construction lending powerhouse
Bank of the Ozarks has ascended to the top of the construction lending world in recent years, and it has no intentions of slowing down.
Colony Capital scrambles to recover
The company attributed its struggles to a combination of underperforming assets that NorthStar brought into the new company and disappointing returns on its investments in healthcare real estate and senior housing.
Real estate startup focusing on Amazon HQ2
CityBldr, an app that uses a machine-learning algorithm to find clusters of single-family homes zoned for multifamily and sell them for higher prices, is committing to open a third office wherever Amazon HQ2 lands.
The top 100 real estate investors
IPE Real Assets’ top 100 ranking of the world’s largest real estate investors have more than $1.23 trillion in real estate assets.
Construction financing in L.A — www.gspartners.com
A creative financing structure for ground-up development of 51 rental units over 3,350 square feet of ground-floor retail in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles.
Environment
Little experiments on the cheap
Brilliant small-scale, but significant, steps toward resiliency/sustainability.
Around the world
Twenty most-populated urban areas in 2100
The list of the world's 20 most-populated metropolitan regions will look a lot different in 2100 than it does today.