bq. “This is what I did with my nightclubs and hotels and I intend to do with people’s homes” [says Ian Schrager]. Imagine that: coming home and finding a shrieking gay Cuban bouncer with a clipboard on the door; three peroxided trust-fund brats with added silicone bits, all talking at once, locked in the bathroom; and a family from Idaho in town to see The Producers asleep in your bedroom… They boast that [a key decorative element is] an extrapolation from New York City street graffiti. So, after they clean up the street and move out the kids who do the graffiti, they offer you chic designer graffiti instead. No one seems to have noticed the irony of this or, indeed, seen the writing on the wall.

— A. A. Gill, taken aback by designer glass condo towers in NYC, writing in Vanity Fair

Here’s a first for me: bought a pair of pants recently. (Being at the thin end of America’s ever-widening size spectrum makes this a considerable challenge; indeed, this was from one of the few chains which carry my size.) In the fitting room, I thought “these are definitely too wide” but otherwise thought them fine. Once home, brought out the measuring tape and — sure enough — the tape says they’re 3″ wider than the label!

I’d heard last year that a certain large apparel chain had begun inching up men’s pant sizes (34″ was really 34 1/2″), but that chain had already excised my size years ago. Oh well; instead of hopping to New York to buy clothes, I guess I’ll have to try London and Hong Kong.

The future looks bleak and lonely for Marshall Field & Co., according to “the Trib’s”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0607230300jul23,1,4982727.story?coll=chi-business-hed Sandra Jones:

bq. Federated, for the most part, isn’t using the mothballed brand names in any substantial way. And the retailer has expressed no interest in selling or licensing them. But it doesn’t want competitors to gain access to the names, either. It’s a common tactic, and one that has become more widespread, particularly in the technology industry, as American business consolidates.

[xpost: “Gristmill”:http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/6/21/20825/2413%5D

Contrary to popular belief, most developers don’t bulldoze Bambi solely to satisfy their innate avarice. Instead, they pave the Earth at the bidding of their clients — by which I mean lenders and investors, not homebuyers, office tenants, or other such “end users.” Regardless of how exciting and cool a development proposal is, it just won’t happen if some faceless banker doesn’t advance a big pile of cash.

As rapacious national banks swallow smaller, local competitors by the dozen, these lending decisions have increasingly fallen to bankers blindly applying generic guidelines. The result: a paint-by-numbers landscape of interchangeable (but financially safe) subdivisions, strip malls, and office parks. Any developer who dared to innovate (say, by developing on “a brownfield site”:http://www.realestatejournal.com/propertyreport/newsandtrends/20060418-haughney.html)would have to do so on his own dime — and sure enough, many pioneering examples of New Urbanism have been backed by “nontraditional” investors like “old-money families”:http://www.mashpeecommons.com, large corporations (like “Microsoft”:http://www.issaquahhighlands.com/MultiuseProject.html, “Disney”:http://www.celebrationfl.com, “EDS”:http://www.legacyinplano.com/community/town_center.aspx, and “Ebsco”:http://www.mtlaurel.com/our_vision.cfm), and even charitable foundations. Despite growing interest in “socially responsible investing”:http://www.socialinvest.org, few investors have thought of how to clean up the picture in the building industry — source of, “say some”:http://www.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek06/0203/0203globalwarming.cfm, half of America’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, Philip Langdon of “New Urban News”:http://newurbannews.com/InvestpoolJune06.html reports on a new generation of private-equity investment funds have started up to match socially responsible real estate investors and leading-edge developers. Green developer extraordinaire “Jonathan Rose”:http://www.rose-network.com, of New York, sees his new “$100 million fund”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/business/businessspecial2/17leeds.html?pagewanted=2 as an investor alternative to “buying stocks in REITs [Real Estate Investment Trusts, publicly traded corporations whose primary business is real estate] which are based on sprawl.” Perhaps the most promising is the $100 million Green Living Fund, based in Santa Cruz and launched by Kacey Fitzpatrick:

bq. Fitzpatrick, cofounder and vice president of sustainability at the Green Living Fund, said her pool is the result of a desire “to promote the right kind of development.” She observes: “Our goal is to promote the creation of vibrant, pedestrian-oriented, walkable communities with a mix of uses and a mix of housing types and incomes. Transit is a key piece of what we are doing.” The fund will use “the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] standards for “Neighborhood Development”:http://www.usgbc.org/leed/nd as the criteria for our initial assessment of a location,” she says. Buildings will have to qualify for at least a LEED-Silver designation.

Whereas Rose hopes to raise funds from private and nonprofit investors, Fitzpatrick (an architect by training who hopes to make a bigger impact) hopes to gain substantial funding from public pension funds. If these funds successfully quantify the financial benefits of investing in green development, they could attract more investment, thereby mainstreaming now-unconventional forms of development.

I often liken the process of changing the way America builds cities to turning around a giant ship; many will be frustrated with the slow pace, but taking a trillion-dollar industry optimized to efficiently turn forests and fields into sprawl at the rate of five acres a minute means a lot of change. If investors — the ones paying for the bulldozers — catch on, we can count on those bulldozers being used far more gently in the future.

“Wal Mart Watch”:http://walmartwatch.com/battlemart recently posted Battle-Mart, where “you’ll find the resources to draw a line in the sand and defend your community.” Sections include a BattlePlan, updates on strategies from around the country, and a blog by anti-Wal crusader Al Norman.

Why make an example out of Mall*Wart? “Charles Fishman”:http://www.fastcompany.com/online/77/walmart.html has a clear-headed exposé of the corporation’s impact on America’s macro-economy in, of all publications, _Fast Company_. Perhaps the most succinct sentence:

bq. Says Steve Dobbins, president of thread maker Carolina Mills: “We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world — yet we aren’t willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.”

The conventional wisdom doubts that space for really funky stores could ever be financed. Well, one interesting experiment in doing so appears to be under way in Toronto, where the the developers of the Distillery District, a brownfield complex near downtown, have filled their buildings with cool local artisans. Sure, many cities have Artspace projects for subsidized studios downtown, but the Distillery District “is an initiative of private entrepreneurs on privately owned land with no public support.” Seems to get good reviews, too.

The same model appears to work for the Urbanspace Property Group in the office market, as well — notably the Centre for Social Innovation shared space for small nonprofits, but also in their pioneering rehab of 401 Richmond and its activation of the King-Spadina area.

[posted at craigslist forums/housing]

“In 2004, 36% of properties sold were second homes, the bulk of them purchased as investments.”

a cautionary tale:
my uncle sunk a few $mil into apartments overlooking downtown LA during the late ’80s boom. since WW2, LA real estate had consistently returned great yields, and he’d racked up a fortune in small deals. the ’80s saw a tidal wave of money wash up on the beach: defense contracts rained from the sky, the bubble in Japan spun off billions that completely remade downtown, interest rates were way down, new tax laws encouraged speculative construction, thrifts were practically giving away cash, it was an up and coming neighborhood with strong population growth from immigration. it was a CAN’T LOSE proposition. everyone was doing it! and it had worked for so long!

fast forward to 1990. the aerospace industry was in freefall, the dozens of new skyscrapers and malls downtown were eerily dark at night, people were fleeing the city, racial tensions were about to boil over into the streets, and prices were down 30%–if you could find a buyer.

when the tax lawyers came in to process his estate, the entire thing was underwater. it all went back to the banks–well, sort of, since many of the banks had also drowned. prices were stuck in the gutter until the late ’90s.

just a warning.

A succinct summary of the brewing economic storm, from Paul Kasriel’s “15 November 2005”:http://www.northerntrust.com/library/econ_research/weekly/us/pc111505.pdf economic commentary:

* McMansions and SUVs ^1^ will not make us more productive in the future.
* Foreign creditors^2^ could start to question how we will be able to pay future interest and dividend payments without resorting to “printing” dollars.
* If foreign creditors should question our ability and willingness to repay them without resorting to the currency printing press, there could be a run on the dollar.
* A run on the dollar would lead to sharply higher U.S. interest rates.
* Sharply higher interest rates would do great harm to household finances and the housing market.
* A sharp decline in the housing market would result in a spike in mortgage defaults.
* A rise in mortgage defaults would cripple the banking system.^3^
* A crippled banking system would render Fed interest rate cuts less potent in reviving the economy.

My clarifications, drawn from statistics he presented:
# Household spending has been the basis of our economic growth in the past decade, with American consumers assuming record amounts of debt to keep up a spending spree: household deficits reached $531.5B in Q3 2005, vs a $108.7B surplus in Q3 1987; household liabilities relative to assets are up 29.8% in the same time.
# Foreign creditors, on a percentage basis, own three times more of U.S. capital stock now than in 1987, and five times more than in 1982.
# Mortgage assets comprise 62% of banks’ earning assets, more than twice the level of 1985.

Downtown office impresario John Buck says in an article by Alby Gallun in today’s Crain’s that his next wave of real estate investments will focus on turning around distressed condo projects in Chicago:

bq. “I feel there’s overbuilding,” Mr. Buck says. “If we’re right about that, then I think there will be more takeovers by the lending community, who we enjoy a good reputation with, and that’s really what our focus will be.”

See? Conservation is useful after all! As quoted in the WSJ: “President Bush took the unusual step yesterday of urging Americans not to buy gasoline if they don’t have to. ‘Americans should be prudent in their use of energy,” he said in brief Oval Office remarks. “Don’t buy gas if you don’t need it.’

My favorite scathing hurricane related editorials of recent days come courtesy of Joan Walsh and the War Room at Salon and, naturally, “the Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01thu1.html.

You know there’s a bubble when… people throw hugely expensive parties for no discernable reason other than “to build buzz.” A NYT dispatch by Abby Goodnough from Miami:

“The food’s got to be better, the lighting’s got to be better, the D.J.’s got to be really good. The new norm is the quarter-million-dollar party.” No expense is spared because the stakes are high: about 70,000 condo units are planned, under construction or newly finished in Miami proper, home to fewer than 400,000 people.

On the bright side, it’s nice to know that Aqua does exist in real life. I’ve never seen so much as a construction photo, only the same old renderings. (The article mentions that the townhouses are moving slowly; I suppose one could have figured that vacation-home buyers, who make up probably 70% of the market there, would prefer condos to townhouses.) As for the gates, the architect reports that it was the multifamily-fearing neighbors, not the style-conscious developer, who asked for them.

A closer look at the plan reveals a nice touch I hadn’t seen before: rotating the center block by about 15 degrees creates two wedges of space, to be planted with fruit trees (mango and citrus). Of course: fruit trees, like everything else, grow unassisted in Miami, and encourage interaction like no other planting, from fragrant flower to juicy harvest. They encourage almost too much interaction in public spaces — people climb up into the trees to grab fruit, breaking branches — but in a semi-private, well policed area they’re more likely to survive.