To buy or rent?  To invest in condominiums or apartments?

The buzz is that the condo market is slowing down.  Thus, the hot question is whether to go condo or apartment, a key one for both developers and potential home buyers alike.  First, a couple of facts:

- Condo sales in the U.S. set a tenth consecutive sales record last year (896,000 units), 9.3% better than 2004.*
- Condos for the first time ever at the end of last year sold for more ($223,500 average) than single-families

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The success story behind Memphis’ Beale Street

How does one turn a boarded up main street into the iconic historical, cultural and musical destination that is Beale Street today?  It took an immensely forward-thinking young developer, John Elkington, that understood the history well enough to invest in its future.  The following is based on his interview with Smart City Radio.

Brief history. In the 1920s and 30s Beale Street was an entertainment mecca for African-Americans and one of the

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‘The Most Inventive Towns in America’

Cities have the economic might to revitalize itself with job growth, and that comes from companies with new high-growth services and products.  The Wall Street Journal’s The Most Inventive Towns in America** looks at which cities are taking the lead in attracting these business growth catalysts based on patents.

First, the most inventive towns overall, in order: San Jose CA, Sunnyvale CA, Austin TX, Palo Alto CA (pictured), Fremont CA, San Diego CA,

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Defining ‘attainable/ affordable’ ‘hard/soft’ lofts

Sometimes brands become so associated with their past that there futures are limited by it, such as Polaroid and Kodak, which have long been synonymous with instant pictures and film processing. Both have quickly become obsolete in the digital transition.  Brand experts often suggest starting with a new name altogether.  Affordable housing is one of those.

The term affordable housing has come to be associated with government-subsidized or

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City taking charge to attract investors...

Most cities wait like hopeful dancers at a school ball. Others get up and ask or just start dancing, like West Palm Beach, St. Louis, and Everett, Washington, profiled in its local newspaper, The city plots the next stage of its downtown renaissance.

The map shows strategic investment areas that the City of Everett (within the Seattle metropolitan area) is proposing for its downtown plan.  Incentives include promoting greater residential densities

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Another ‘Why can’t more affordable housing look this good?’

If you want a model example of how to blend a new building in with a landmark house (1907) in a historic (and very fun) neighborhood (Capitol Hill, Seattle), be affordable, transit-oriented and a green building as well, then the Pantages Apartments are a good place to start.  It’s featured in the American Institute for Architects’ new Affordable Housing Design Advisor website.

49 dwellings (45 in the new building, 4 in the

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Why can’t more affordable housing look this good?

Yes, this is affordable housing!  It’s one development that visually stood out from the Smart Growth Illustrated set of case studies highlighted yesterday.

In Aspen, Colorado, the wealthy bid up the prices of homes in the city (average home price of $1.7 million - that’s not a typo!), resulting in traffic jams and air pollution from the commuting employees who couldn’t afford to live there.  It’s so bad that it’s nationally known as the

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If you want to better understand what makes a place successful and you can’t visit it, the very least you can do is find some imagery on it (this website being no exception!) That’s the purpose of the EPA’s Smart Growth Illustrated research.  They provide visuals for 20 case studies by category, but here are the 14 that apply to this website’s target market:

Mix Land Uses
Eighth and Pearl, Boulder, CO - A benchmark for attainable, mixed-use, urban infill. (Lower image)

Take Advantage

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Car sharing’s popularity continues to rise

Ok, so maybe this image of a pedestrian-only street, sleek streetcar and Smart car sharing is the future rather than the present in the U.S. (it happens to be a current image in Germany), but maybe not so far down the road.  Progressive efforts like in Arlington County, Northern Virginia, helps.

Two years ago, I highlighted the car sharing program that Arlington County was piloting.  So, how’s it doing?  Some of the results:

- Car sharing

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Continuing yesterday’s entry using Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel as a historical model in determining where to invest in real estate…

First, how did large populations become technologically-rich societies? If Europe and China were the world superpowers in the 1400s, why didn’t China ‘conquer’ the Americas ‘first’?

Large-scale food production resulted in ever greater populations of people, which in turn required political and writing systems to manage it.  This in turn facilitated

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Where to invest? 13,000 years of history will tell you

There’s no better body of knowledge than history when identifying the right buildings, neighborhoods, cities and even countries to invest in, especially when your scope is 13,000 years.  That’s what biologist, physiologist, and biogeographer Jared Diamond provided in his mind-boggling Pulitzer Prize winner, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Not that anyone can condense 13,000 years into a 400-page into fleeting blog

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Ok, so it’s a little wacky, but...

For those who may be overwhelmed by the eccentric, wild and entirely unconventional theme, there’s still a lot to admire about New Islington, a new $460 million, 29-acre, 1400-home urban village redevelopment within central city Manchester, England.

One of its main objectives is to be a benchmark for environmentally sustainable development, to “influence the homebuilding industry and to encourage higher standards of innovation and energy efficiency.

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Personal healthy living in an urban retreat

Many of us wish we could live our yoga.  The founders of Sage Spa Living felt the same way, and invested in bringing it closer to reality with Stillwater, an urban residence in Helena, Montana.  From their press release, “The founders have the simple vision of changing the world, one guest at a time by inspiring personal health and promoting community stewardship.

While it does cater to the high-end, it provides a progressive model for

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CNN Money describes what they see as the next real estate boom, especially for younger people**, “You know all of the 150 or so souls in the village; you see them at the market where you pick up a box of locally-grown produce once a week. You see half of them in the morning as they board the commuter train for school or work in the city; the other half are the network warriors who work from home or, on warm days, use the free Wi-Fi in the village square.”

The article cites two studies

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Social online worlds a preview of our physical worlds?

Automakers build fully-working computer models of the cars they’re about to build, and the same applies for thousands of the products we buy.  The social networking phenomenon is growing like crazy, with MySpace alone at 68 million members.  At the same time, we’re delving deeply into a customer-driven economy.  It’s only a matter of time before the three intersect, and we’re already seeing a preview among the 10-20 million people

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Vision for a contemporary eco-village

There’s no shortage of rhetoric on building urban eco-villages, but not much gets pass that stage.  The proposal for New Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, California is one of the few that has.

Sonoma Marin Area Rapid Transit, a quasi-government agency formed in 1999 to establish a 75-mile commuter corridor (Cloverdale to San Francisco), took the lead with a 5.4-acre site they own at a Santa Rosa train station.  The sent out an RFP (request for proposal)

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Seeking the CoolTown adventure capitalist

One reason why more of us don’t walk down the street each day and exclaim, “Wow, I’d love to live/work in that building!”, is because we’re missing adventure capitalists when it comes to real estate.

Adventure capitalist - An entrepreneur who helps other entrepreneurs financially, and often plays an active role in the company’s operations. It’s a more defined role than a venture capitalist; someone who invests in a business venture, providing

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Establishing an investment network for CoolTown developments

There’s no better way to present the kinds of communities, buildings and venues that the creative class, cultural creatives, influentials, and free agents want than to actually build or revitalize them.  There is an emerging group of innovative developers in the CoolTown network that are willing to help cities and neighborhoods realize their vision to become compelling destinations, but the private sector finance industry has not

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Wildlife prefers urban life over the countryside?

Really?  So documents this Newsweek article (part of a series presented in the last entry), Wildlife: Cities Are the New Jungles…

“You can take any big city and find more species, more diverse habitats than in just about any national park or nature reserve,” biologist Josef Reichholf, Munich Germany’s Technical University.

It’s actually the lack of bio-diversity found in extensive mono-culture, chemically treated, single-crop farms that

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Newsweek International’s hottest cities

This week’s (July 3-10) Newsweek International focuses on cities, with no less than 13 full stories from the 10 fastest-growing cities to an essay by Richard Florida to how cities make a better wilderness than the countryside.

The cover story features the 10 ‘hottest cities’ above 750,000 people in each part of the world, that the United Nations recognizes as the fastest growing.  However, what the report fails to say is how sustainable the growth

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