On Zombies and Silliness
My review of E. Van Lowe’s Never Slow Dance With a Zombie is up today at Strange Horizons.
Blogging
I’ve neglected to mention that I’m now blogging over at Curbed.
Here’s one recent-ish post.
Rampant
My review of Diana Peterfreund’s Rampant is live today at Strange Horizons.
A few stories
A few stories on The Real Deal’s website yesterday:
City Council candidates speak against large-scale development
Related exec takes Columbia position funded by SL Green CEO
Boulevard of Dreams
My review of Constance Rosenblum’s Boulevard of Dreams appears in the September issue of The Real Deal.
In its heyday, everyone either lived there or wanted to. That’s how Constance Rosenblum describes the Grand Concourse in the Bronx — the 4.5-mile road that will celebrate its centennial this November.
The boulevard began with a French-born engineer named Louis Risse, whose vision for the thoroughfare was inspired by hunting expeditions in the neighborhood. Risse initially imagined the Grand Concourse as a 182-foot-wide road with lanes for cyclists, pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages and trolleys. Between the time Risse conceived of the Concourse and the time it opened on an inauspiciously stormy day in 1909, parts of the design had already been retooled to make way for automobiles.
That was far from the first shift in tenor for the road, which forms the backbone of “Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx,” a microhistory by the editor of the now-defunct New York Times City section.
In the September issue, I also have a piece on starchitects’ responses to the economic downturn.
On Commission
Another recent Real Deal story: a look at how one NYC real estate company is changing its commission structure.
Health care reform & real estate
For The Real Deal, today I took a quick look at how health care reform might change medical real estate, particularly in the NYC area.
TRD: August
In the August issue of The Real Deal, I have a story about how rental building maintenance costs have gone up as the economy has declined.
In a bad economy, the plight of the unemployed gets most of the attention. But as the ranks of New York City’s jobless increase, and more people downsize apartments or take on roommates to deal with the economic downturn, they also send their landlords’ utility and maintenance costs skyrocketing in rental buildings.
“Where you get lots of move-ins and move-outs, you worry about damage at the building,” said David Picket, president of the Gotham Organization, which operates more than 1.7 million square feet of residential and retail real estate in New York and other parts of the Northeast.
“Even in a good market, it’s a fine line,” he said. “When you boost rents up, which forces certain people to leave, you create certain costs for yourself that you don’t have if people stay in place.”
Read more here.
I also wrote a few of the pieces on the magazine’s Comings & Goings page, Urban Sanctuary, Sedona Realty join forces and Rose turns attention to Brooklyn market.
Second Avenue Subway
Last night I had a story up on The Real Deal’s site about what the delay in the construction of the Second Avenue subway could mean for the Upper East Side real estate market. Read more here.
In The Real Deal Online
I’ve been remiss about updating this site, so have a link to a story I wrote for The Real Deal’s website today, Going, going, not all gone at Hamptons auction:
Thirty-six bidders virtually raised their hands this weekend at an online auction for two Hamptons properties, with very different results. One property saw a “spirited” bidding war, with a final sale price more than $100,000 over the opening bid, said Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Enzo Morabito, who ran the auction. The other property’s bidders failed to meet the auction’s reserve price.
Auctions have become increasingly popular in New York real estate over the last several months. Auction providers claim that auctions get things moving in a stalled market. But others argue that auctions merely hurt local property values.
Morabito is of the former school of thought. “This kind of stuff usually starts something,” he said. “Anything that spotlights anything is better than silence. Hope is not a good marketing plan.”