Phoenix mayor moved into 4-story neo-Victorian townhouse, symbol for density and transit

From Phoenix Business Journal writer Mike Sunnicks: "Chateau on Central, the 21-unit upscale, Victorian-style brownstone development, first condo was sold to outgoing Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon.  The brownstone includes four levels, basements and commercial-grade elevators. "Gordon said Chateau’s unique architecture, central Phoenix location on the Metro light rail, and live-work floor plans appealed to him.  'I wanted a place that kind of reflected what I stood for,' said Gordon, who backed light rail and downtown and central Phoenix development to create more density. 'It’s also unique in its style.'"  Full article here.

From AP wire:  "Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon signed a lease-purchase deal and has already moved in."  Full article here.

Vancouver, Part 3 of 3: Rowhouses increase housing supply but at lower cost and risk

From Globe & Mail writer Frances Bula: "Monique Choptuik knew what she didn’t want when she and her husband went looking for a place to live last year.  Not another single-family house, but not an apartment either.  'And I didn’t want strata [i.e. condo],' says Ms. Choptuik. "So she started looking at townhouses and rowhouses.  There was only one she found that wasn’t [strata]: one of a group of three houses at the corner of 33rd and Cambie.  'Now, when I work in my little garden at the side, people stop all the time,' she says.  'They’re curious about our place and they wish the city had more of them.'

"So, in fact, do city planners and housing advocates and people struggling to find more housing options in this expensive city.  Between 2008 and 2011, only 40 freehold row houses were built in all of Metro Vancouver.  In the same period, Toronto, already a city rich with historic row houses, added another 11,277 to its stock.

"'We were a city of single-family housing that suddenly jumped into building condo towers and we missed a stage. There’s a huge gap in the market for next-generation ground-level housing,' says Olga Ilich, the former B.C. Liberal MLA who is chairing a City of Vancouver task force on affordable housing.

"While most cities with any claim to livable density – New York, Toronto, Montreal, Philadelphia, Boston – are characterized by attractive stretches of freehold row housing, Vancouver has remarkably little of that form.

"The province finally put through a small legislative amendment – it got royal assent this week – that removes a legal hurdle that had blocked freehold row housing in Vancouver.  The legislation will now allow covenants to be registered on land titles requiring owners to maintain their party wall – something the City of Vancouver’s legal department was insistent on having before allowing freehold row houses, even though other municipalities were more permissive.

"(The Cambie row houses circumvented that complication when developer Art Cowie, now deceased, came up with the peculiar measure of building separate walls for the row houses, with a one-inch gap between them.)

"Unlike the high-rise condo projects, which take a lot of time, money and big developers to pull off, row-house projects are typically done by smaller builders, Ms. Ilich says.  Once those small builders get an easily replicable model, they can build as many units as any condo developer and with lower costs and risk.

"Some developers dismiss row houses (both strata and freehold) as inefficient and unprofitable compared to condo towers.  Even the developers building row houses mostly insist that the freehold row house appeals only to a small niche market of people.  That’s even though many say their freehold row houses sell for more per square foot than a similar townhouse that’s in a strata.

"Despite those obstacles, developers say they’ve been surprised by how this form of housing provokes an emotional response in buyers and a tendency to hang on to them.  Townhouses throughout the region tend to be listed less often and sell faster than other forms, says Geoff Duyker at Mosaic Homes, a company that specializes in building what look like very traditional row homes."  Full article here.

Vancouver, Part 2 of 3: Towers ok, rowhouses are "exactly what we need", slow but steady change

From Scout Magazine writer Ellen Johnston: "I actually like towers.  I love the canyons of downtown Vancouver, the lights high in the night sky, and the fact that so there are so many people living there who use public parks and the seawall as their main sources of outdoor recreation.  But is this the only model for densification in the city of Vancouver?  No!  This isn’t even Manhattan’s model, as the densest borough of the densest city in North America.  Many of its neighbourhoods, like Greenwich Village exist on a much more human scale. "Density can be achieved through a variety of means, to suit a variety of neighbourhoods.  For example, Vancouver lacks, but sorely needs, more rowhouses.  And no, I don’t mean rowhouses that are actually part of a condo complex.  I mean fee-simple, owned by one person (not a developer) rowhouses.  This type of construction populates many of the great neighbourhoods of the world, from the Plateau in Montreal, to Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia to Camden Town in London.  Our city’s bylaws have largely made it impossible to build these types of dwellings, but they are exactly what we need, because they provide a compromise between density and individuality."

"It’s time for the city of Vancouver’s black and white thinking on urban density to end.  We need to reform our zoning laws so that we can allow for slower growth infill.  It means that every time single family houses are torn down, we should be able to replace them instead with fee-simple rowhousing.  Without this slow but steady change, we will simply continue to be a city blinded on both sides, between those who want their neighbourhoods to stay exactly the same and the 'big bad' developers.  Full article here.

Vancouver, Part 1 of 3: Leaders say towers best for housing supply, green. Other considerations?

From Straight.com writer Daniel Wood: "From where former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan sits on this blustery April day, the past and the future are equally visible.  Across the mouth of False Creek from Kits Point rise the towers of the West End.  They are the legacy of Vancouver's 1960s developer-cum-mayor, Tom 'Terrific' Campbell, who called those who opposed his plans to densify the West End 'pinkos, commies, and hamburgers'. "Sullivan tells me he has just come to a shocking discovery.  Considering the fact that suburban sprawl — with its spacious, energy-consuming homes and requisite commuting — is a disaster for the planet, then, to Sullivan’s mind, Campbell was right.  Stacking people was right.  Towers are good.  And all the New Urbanist, low-rise, Jane Jacobs–loving, fuzzy-wuzzy antidevelopment forces were wrong when they brought a halt to the city’s concrete and steel densification in the early 1970s.

"Sullivan says: haven’t Vancouver’s critical housing issues — almost nonexistent rental opportunities, the near impossibility of middle-class home ownership, and ongoing suburban sprawl — all been produced by the Jacobs-inspired shortage of affordable places to live within the city?

"Joseph Jones is a 65-year-old retired librarian. He first got politically involved five years ago, when the NPA approved both a 23-storey tower and a simultaneous effort by then-mayor Sullivan to rezone Jones’s adjacent single-family Cedar Cottage district for row houses.  Jones saw the mayor’s attempt at instituting his EcoDensity plan as 'neighbourhood-busting'.  He got mad.  He also got 2,340 of his neighbours mad.  The tower was built, but the rezoning was stopped.

"He echoes the view of Jane Jacobs that densification, for all its urgency, must be organic. It must be done sensitively. New buildings should assume some of the character of the neighbourhood upon which they are imposed.

"Another critic of the kind of densification that Sullivan advocates and that Vision Vancouver is tending to support is Seattle architect Jason McLennan, CEO of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council and author of 'Density and Sustainability: Challenging the Wisdom of Exaggerated Height and Density'.  McLennan understands that under the admirable banner of greening Vancouver, residential towers can be seen by municipal politicians as an excellent way to also encourage transit use and — in time — increase affordability.

"But — and to McLennan, it’s an enormous 'but' — the price of such development is often the loss of neighbourhood.  McLennan says much better and more community-friendly density can be achieved—as occurs in cities like Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris, and Stockholm—with clusters of neighbourly, five-storey buildings."  Thorough, balanced, yet provocative article here.

A geopolitical scholar and another economist agree: scale matters and smaller is better

From NYTimes writer Frank Jacobs: "Unless you’re North Korean or Lou Dobbs, you probably don’t think about your country’s borders every day.  Yet those borders — or at least their scope — can have a profound effect on how you think about your country and its place in the world. "It was precisely this problem of geopolitical girth that exercised the mind of Leopold Kohr, a 20th-century Austrian academic whose work inspired both modern political anarchism and the Green movement.

"After brilliant studies in law and political science at universities in Innsbruck, London and Vienna, in 1937 he became a freelance correspondent from the frontlines of the Spanish civil war.  He experienced first-hand the short-lived anarchist experiments in governance, in Catalonia and elsewhere in republican Spain.

"These brief flickers of an idealism that ran counter to an otherwise totalitarian age — crushed between the rock of Communism and the hard place of fascism — would continue to inspire Kohr’s writing and thinking.

"The guiding principle of Kohr’s work was, like that of his friend the economist E.F. Schumacher, 'Small is beautiful'.  His central work, The Breakdown of Nations, published first in Britain, in 1957, develops his theory of the optimal size of polities: smaller government should mean, first and foremost, a smaller area to govern.  In such smallness, greatness resides.

"'There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness.'  Size was the root of all evil: 'Whenever something is wrong, it is too big.'  The answer was 'not union, but division'.  In other words: 'too big to fail' is a contradiction in terms.  The real solution is to make countries (and companies) too small to fail."  Full post here.

To honor Everett Ortner, original brownstone promoter, don't just preserve them, build more

From NYTimes writer Dennis Hevesi: "Everett Ortner who, with his wife, Evelyn, was an early leader in the movement to restore the splendor of 19th-century Brooklyn brownstones after so many had been carved into rooming houses, died on May 22, at a hospital in Brooklyn.  He was 92 and lived in the four-story 1886 brownstone that he and his wife bought in 1963. "In 1968, five years after they had moved into their brownstone, on Berkeley Place in Park Slope, the Ortners helped found the Brownstone Revival Committee.  It has since become a citywide organization known as the Brownstone Revival Coalition.

"Back then, many middle-class residents in neighborhoods including Park Slope were moving to the suburbs.  The Ortners, who had paid $32,500 for their house, joined with several neighbors to change what was happening to the buildings.  What started as a wine-and-cheese party grew into a series of events where young couples, many from outside the borough, could experience the interior grandeur of the old homes.

"In 1974, Mr. Ortner organized the first 'Back to the City' conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, bringing together more than 250 representatives from 82 cities to promote the revitalization of brownstone neighborhoods.  The organization, which he led until 1983, sponsored 12 other annual conferences in cities across the country.

"'Never again, never again, never again will houses of this quality be built for the middle class of the city,' Mr. Ortner once said."  Full article here.

From NYTimes writer Elizabeth Harris a few days after Mr. Hevesi's article: "Their success was tremendous — perhaps, in some ways, more extravagantly so than they might have wanted. 'Everybody here seems to have so much money,' said Dr. Susan Stewart, a friend of the Ortners who has lived on their block since 1973. Of Mr. Ortner, she said, 'He preferred it when it was more of a mixture of people.'  Full article here.  (Photo credit: John Sotomayor.)

Guest Post by Steve Kendall: Great urban buildings are adaptable or “open”, and sustainable

[Thanks to Steve Kendall, founder of Infill Systems, for providing this guest post.]  Visit any great historic urban neighborhood and you will see stability and coherence, as well as gradual, fine-grained change.  The neighborhood's inhabitants relate to their buildings as we have for centuries: we alter, improve, and embellish them outside and in.  The townhouse fabric of Paris, Amsterdam, Boston, Philadelphia, or Alexandria are examples of such resilience, old but constantly renewed. Our new urban buildings often lack these qualities.  Why?  One answer is the advent of "functionalism".  Since the late 19th century, we have changed how we think about design.  We began to design buildings and spaces for specific uses, known as "functional" design, gradually creating rigid categories of buildings.  We forgot how to build "open" buildings designed around general goals like pleasant light and air, with a range of spaces like "parlor", "front room", and "attic", whose names don't prescribe just one activity.

Another equally-important answer is that we now tangle our buildings with utilities.  Pipes, wires, ducts, and conduits are entwined within walls and floors so inextricably that function or use is fixed.  This entanglement becomes apparent when we repair a bathroom, forcing us to rip out the ceiling below.  Even adding an electrical or data outlet requires removing drywall and finishes, making a mess, and spending too much time and money.

The solution to functionalism is clear: we should build beautiful, strong, energy-efficient shells, and then, in a second move, fit them out with everything needed to make them habitable.  This strategy takes the idea of urban infill and applies it to the buildings themselves, the "infill" or fit-out of interiors.

Just as fixed utility lines under the street serve changing buildings, so a shell's main utility lines (e.g. for water or wire) will enable variable connections for different uses and floor plans.  Capable of adaptable layouts to suit occupants that change of over years and decades, the next wave of small, open buildings will once again enable the fine-grained, gradual, timeless evolution that characterizes our most beloved neighborhoods.

We should stop trying to forecast how occupants want to inhabit space.  Instead, we should invest in open buildings that restore the relationship in our urban neighborhoods between stability and variation, and between our buildings, ourselves, and our future selves.

Natl Trust Green Lab director: "urban grain" has more econ and social value, but needs patient $

From Atlantic writer Julia Levitt: "Liz Dunn is a champion for Main Street.  In 1997 she launched her development practice Dunn & Hobbes, which specializes in new-build urban infill projects and adaptive reuse.  Dunn extended her reach beyond Seattle three years ago when she became consulting director of the Preservation Green Lab, an initiative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.  She speaks frequently to audiences in the U.S. and abroad about the importance of nurturing "urban grain" with more sensitive approaches to urban infill." JL: The term 'urban grain' seems largely qualitative.  Are there certain aspects of urban grain that draw a predictable response?

LD: Yes, I think there is a set of attributes.  I think we could measure, for example, economic and social activity on blocks that have a larger number and variety of skinnier buildings, compared to blocks occupied by large, homogeneous buildings. Measuring how the pattern and mix of buildings impacts urban activity would provide a way to value organic, incremental development that would be more quantitative, which would in turn inform land use policies.

JL: What are your suggestions for creating policies and practices that would support surgical infill without over-regulating?

LD: My concern is that suburban-style developments are being dropped onto urban sites.  There are a number of issues at play here that have to do with the scale of global real estate finance and the skill sets of larger traditional developers, that don't lend themselves well to building surgically in a community context.

The scale and speed at which pools of real estate money want to be deployed is mismatched with local infill opportunities.  It's naïve to think that a huge fund that wants returns from deals in less than five years will engage in granular development that leads to better neighborhood economic performance over the long run.  What's needed is a locavore model for real estate investing, in which local patient money is connected with smaller opportunities in a given district.

JL: Edward Glaeser argues that redevelopment of low-density urban areas is necessary to supply housing at pace with demand to keep housing prices affordable.  What is the argument for urban grain?

LD: This question is far more complex than supply and demand.  We should measure the value of built form in terms of the intensity of human use that it fosters.  In cities like Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, some of the most economically and socially successful neighborhoods are the ones with a stock of older, three- to six-story buildings.  These neighborhoods have unbelievable street life and entrepreneurial business activity, and they also have density between 30 and 100 residential units per acre."  Full article here.

Density can be either "monolithic" or "approachable and humane", difference is scale

From PlaceShakers writer Susan Henderson: "A number of recent conversations regarding density and residential types has me thinking about building typology as one solution to visualizing and embracing density.  The Lincoln Institute has done a good job of making the touchy subject more approachable on their website and clarifying the difference between similar densities that ultimately prove more or less desirable in their final built form. "For example, compare the similar densities from San Francisco [below] and Boston [above]. The narrow buildings around Louisburg Square are human scaled and very approachable from the view of the pedestrian. In contrast, the monolithic buildings in San Francisco create a canyon at the street level and contribute very little to the effort to promote sustainable densities.  Instead of debating the number of units per acres, planners and city staff should consider addressing types of buildings."  Full post here.

Cincinnati's "diverse, well-built" small urban buildings meet demand trend. Is your city ready?

From Better! Cities & Towns writer Dan Parolek: "Cincinnati has a tremendous opportunity. In its urban neighborhoods it already has what other cities want and are trying to build: A variety of urban housing types, including some of the best collection of Missing Middle Housing in the country; a network of neighborhood main streets ready to be revitalized; a rich, diverse, and well-built collection of historic architecture; and, easily accessible open space networks created by the topography weaving throughout these neighborhoods. "One of the primary reasons for cities like Cincinnati to be optimistic has to do with the convergence of the two biggest population groups, the Millennials (Gen Y, ME generation) and the Boomers that are both creating a strong and growing demand for living in walkable urban places.  The Queen City is positioning itself to capture this demand, and putting a strategy in place to make these neighborhoods Complete Places with everything urban neighborhoods have to offer.  Is your city ready?"  Full article here.

"Missing Middle" buildings are compact, walkable, lack parking, and are a complete paradigm shift

From Better! Cities & Towns writer Dan Parolek: "The mismatch between current US housing stock and shifting demographics, combined with the growing demand for walkable urban living, has been poignantly defined by recent research and publications by the likes of Christopher Nelson and Chris Leinberger and most recently by the Urban Land Institute’s publication, What’s Next: Real Estate in the New Economy. "Unfortunately, the solution is not as simple as adding more multi-family housing stock using the dated models/types of housing that we have been building.  Rather, we need a complete paradigm shift in the way that we design, locate, regulate, and develop homes.  Missing Middle housing types are a critical part of the solution and should be a part of every architect’s, planner’s, real estate agent’s, and developer’s arsenal.

"Well-designed, simple Missing Middle housing types achieve medium-density yields and provide high-quality, marketable options between the scales of single-family homes and mid-rise flats for walkable urban living.  They are classified as 'missing' because very few of these housing types have been built since the early 1940’s due to regulatory constraints, the shift to auto-dependent patterns of development, and the incentivization of single-family home ownership.

"The following are defining characteristics of Missing Middle housing: walkable context, medium density but lower perceived density, small footprint, smaller but well-designed units, off-street parking not driving the site plan, simple construction, community, and marketability." Full article here.

Rohous magazine highlights small buildings of various uses, "sharing best the world has to offer"

From BMore writer Julekha Dash: "Imagine a German architect colliding with Charm City’s design sensibilities.  That’s exactly what Daryl Landy did when naming his new iPad magazine Rohous.  Yes, the name is a take on Baltimore’s ubiquitous rowhouses. "The former director of Pigtown Main Street Street, who holds a masters degree in industrial design, says he has always been interested in home furnishings and architecture and living well in small spaces. Rohous highlights homes and businesses that contain less than 1,200 square feet.

"The magazine will feature small spaces around the world, not just in Smalltimore.  Rohous takes a look at smaller restaurants as well."  Full article here.

From Rohous website: "Each month we will invite you to immerse yourself into a world where living well comes in small packages. Good design, innovative architecture, awe-inspiring interiors and the efficient use of space will be the focal point of our publication.  Sharing the best the world has to offer, we will explore a variety of dwellings including houses, restaurants, apartments, boutiques, hotels and other unique spaces."

8-story, adapted LEED apt building is "symbol of Newark's greatness", praised by Mayor Booker

Some too-infrequent midrise love, from Star-Ledger writer David Giambusso: "After years of wrangling, Newark’s Richardson Lofts finally opened Thursday.  'I really want everybody to know how difficult this project was,' Mayor Cory Booker said at Thursday’s ribbon-cutting. 'It had to be resuscitated a few times.'

"The 67-unit apartment building, begun in 2008, retrofit a 1904 jewelry factory into what is billed to become a Platinum LEED certified structure.  RPM Development delivered 34 market rate apartments and 33 affordable units in the heart of Newark’s downtown.

"'In the 20th century buildings such as this were a symbol of Newark’s greatness,' said Adam Zipkin, Newark’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Development. 'Now in 2012 the building again becomes a symbol of Newark’s greatness.'"  Full article here.

In Fort Worth, TX "flexibility in mixed-use infill projects requires design for multiple uses"

From Urban Land writer Will Macht: "Large-scale infill developments outside the downtown core often can be insular and inward looking, akin to a suburban retail center.  It would have been easy to follow such an inward-oriented pattern on an 11-acre (4.5 ha) site assembled in the Fort Worth, Texas, cultural district.  But Museum Place, a 1.05 million-square-foot (103,000 sq m) development, is designed to knit 11 new structures into a finer-grained urban fabric of streets that once housed an active mix of shops, restaurants, and community services. "Including flexibility in mixed-use urban infill projects built in phases in challenging markets requires creative responses to building design for multiple uses, functional urban street layouts, and solutions allowing shared parking.  To create a framework for a mixture of uses that could be developed in phases, Dallas-based JHP Architecture/Urban Design reinforced the historic street pattern and restored it to its orthogonal form.

"Rather than being built at the periphery and focused inward on a center court, the parking structures were integrated into the centers of blocks and wrapped with housing, retail space, and offices.  This is different from what is often the case in mixed-use projects: parking is often placed under buildings, driving the configuration of the uses above because the layout of columns and drive aisles cannot be changed.

"At One Museum Place, a mixed-use building, the architects and structural engineers created an optimal depth for a condominium unit by setting one column each at the exterior and at the corridor.  Cantilevered balconies on the facade project over the depth of the office floor plate below, a solution that permitted the design firm to pull the column back behind the glass on the retail level.  It also gave the developer the flexibility to respond to market changes by switching uses in the upper seven floors until late in the construction-document phase and beyond.

"Flexibility to deal with the weak economy is also built into the retail space. Should the space not lease as expected, its double-height spaces allow the addition of mezzanines to create live/work units, with ample light and air provided by tall windows. Or it could be configured to provide more office space to enlarge net rentable space, increase income, and reduce effective rent per square foot."  Full article here.

"Where there is no bench, doorsteps function as seat": stoop inspires street furniture

From the JDS / Julien De Smedt Architects website, : "In collaboration with Vestre, we are pleased to present Stoop, a public bench with multiple seating levels, allowing people to sit in a way that is less prescribed, more flexible and more social.  Stoop was recently featured on FastCoDesign about its 'literal attempt to formalize a type of space that’s been around for centuries'. "Looking at locations where there is no bench available and people still sit, doorsteps, handrails and stairs function as a seat.  Waiting in front of your friend’s house on a stoop in Brooklyn, posing with a tourist group on the Spanish Steps in Rome or having a picnic on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, we decided to incorporate the universal idea of using stairs as a sitting object, into our design of a bench."

Norwalk, CT townhouses demonstrate "smaller infill sites enhance economic and social health"

From the Norwalk (CT) Hour: "Compact, walkable housing developments in neighborhoods located near transit can increase a community's economic competitiveness, and reduce housing cost for its residents, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Smart Growth Guidelines for Sustainable Design & Development. "Three years ago, Westchester asset management company Seavest purchased four land parcels in a blighted area of Norwalk. Fairfield County builders Andrew LaSala and Steven Berko of Summerview Development Group were hired to develop and manage the project.

"Today, Summerview Development Group has built 31 of the one-, two- and three-bedroom townhouse apartments in a 63-unit townhouse style rental community known as Summerview Square. Construction is under way on the last phase of 32 units.

"'This has been a huge step towards development on the city's north side, an area that has been a question mark for years,' Mayor Richard Moccia said.  'Summerview Square demonstrates that smaller infill sites can enhance the economic and social health of a neighborhood,' said Liz Verna, president of the Home Builders Association of Connecticut.

"Roger Wechter lives in a two-family home on West Main Street and also owns a neighborhood business, Cross River Lock. He's pleased that Summerview 'architecturally fits in with the neighborhood,' and he said his business has also benefitted.  The colonial and Victorian-style buildings mimic the neighborhood's older two-family homes, including the front porches."  Full article here.

Baltimore's Greektown rowhouse neighborhood gets new rowhouses and reinvestment

From Baltimore Daily Record writer Melody Simmons: "Down the street from St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, two new clusters of luxury row houses are the latest addition in an ongoing revival of Greektown. "The first five units of a planned 121 homes opened last month at O'Donnell Square on S. Macon St.  Nearby on Dillon St., the 81-unit Athena Square development [pictured] is almost fully sold.  Both projects sit near Greektown's tidy brick-paved streets that hold rows of 98-year-old houses.

"'I think Greektown is so rooted in its culture and the type of community that it is,' said Evangelia Dimas, 31, a paralegal who was born and raised in the community and four years ago bought and renovated a row house there.

"Dimas represents the old and the new in the neighborhood — which is what the community is striving to capture as it undergoes a renewal that so far totals about $20 million in new investment.

"The area's new housing — some of the few starts in Baltimore during the recession — is located close to the gentrified Brewer's Hill and the waterfront in Canton, and officials at builder Ryan Homes say they are using that geography to help sell the O'Donnell Square address.

"The McLean, Va.-based development company Kettler moved ahead to break ground on the O'Donnell Square townhouses last year.  Luke Radlinski, director of land investments for Kettler, said, 'We think that they can probably sell 30 to 35 homes per year.  What the neighborhood is seeing now is a lot of people moving into the neighborhood and/or the reinvestment in their homes by the Greek community.'" Full article here.

New York real estate maven Barbara Corcoran's best investment? A small mixed-use building

From Reuters writer Chris Taylor: "We talked to a few prominent market watchers about the best investments they ever made. What they picked, how they picked it, and what they ultimately learned from it."  After profiling a few other luminaries, Mr. Taylor closes with Barbara Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Group and subject of half the posts on Curbed NY, talking about the best investment she ever made, which she says is a small mixed-use building. "It was 1981, it was a townhouse on 10th St. in Greenwich Village, and I tried absolutely everything not to buy it. I was desperate to open a small brokerage office in the Village, because I felt the neighborhood was turning around and was going to explode.

"I hunted everywhere, couldn't find anything, and finally saw a 'For Sale' sign on this six-story building with 10 apartments. The broker refused to rent the ground floor to me, but said he would sell it to me for a little under a million bucks. I had never signed a mortgage in my life, but for some reason a bank loaned me 95 percent of the money.

"The other day I had it appraised at $7.7 million, and it still makes me a 20 percent profit, year after year. It's the little building from heaven. I've bought many buildings in Manhattan over the years, but no investment has done nearly as well as that first one."  Full article here.

Townhouse privacy, another solution: ground floor "porch" room with mirrored walls and swing

From New York magazine writer David Hay: "When the owners of this 1867 Greenwich Village townhouse decided to remodel its storefront, the property’s designation as a National Landmark meant its original seven-by-eight-foot street-level windows could not be eliminated. No matter what they did, passersby would be able to peek in. "When the space was occupied by a beauty salon, as it had been when the family moved in, that wasn’t a problem. But now, as the couple looked to expand their living space, they faced a challenge. For a solution, the avid art collectors, along with their architect, Galia Solomonoff, founder of Solomonoff Architecture Studio, approached an artist they all admired, Rirkrit Tiravanija.

"Tiravanija’s site-specific installation now fills that area. Closest to the windows is his inspired take on an enclosed front porch: an oversize swing and bench set made from shiny stainless steel. Mirrored sliding doors on the back side of the room allow the entire area to be cut off, offering privacy in the rear."  Full article here.  (Photo credit: David Joseph.)

Bronx and Brooklyn small-scale infill sculpted in Lego with astonishing realism and detail

From MOC Pages member Jonathan Lopes: "I am a long time fan of Lego bricks and also a sculptor and artist who works within the medium of Lego bricks.  I am based in Brooklyn, NY, but have traveled across the country displaying models and delivering custom artwork created from Lego bricks. I’ve worked on commissions – large and small – for private groups, non-profit organizations, galleries, book publishers, authors and retail shops as well as for Toys r Us and The Lego Group, itself. "Additionally, I build quite a bit for my own enjoyment. I typically build model train and town layouts - entirely out of Lego bricks. Using an earth-tone color palette, I try to build buildings and landscapes as realistically as possible.  My main source of inspiration is the neighborhoods in which I have lived in the Bronx and Brooklyn. There are some amazingly detailed tenement buildings in both boroughs that have withstood the test of time and the cities darker days."

MOC is short for "my own creation" among Lego fans, i.e. not an official set with instructions.  Below are just a few images of Jonathan's fantastic creations, including a 3-story walk-up, an entire neighborhood layout, and bonus Baltimore rowhouses.  Several galleries here.