Category: wonen
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Cities Becoming a Luxury Good
Read on Bloomberg.com of 24 May 2016: In ‘Urban Living Becomes a Luxury Good’ of 24 May, Justin Fox of Bloomberg described how after the financial crisis Americans are flooding the city centres of the biggest cities. The suburbs are still there, but something fundamental has changed. Increase in employment in downtown areas of…
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Back-to-the-city movement
Read in ‘The New York Nobody Knows’ (2013) of William Helmreich: On 12 May 2016 Richard Florida wrote an article in Citylab on a new report of the NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy on gentrification in the Big Apple. The researchers divided 55 New York City neighborhoods into three categories: gentrifying,…
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Look east
Read in ‘Ghost Cities of China’ (2015) of Wade Shepard: People are complaining about the steeply rising housing prices in Amsterdam. They know it’s nothing compared to cities like London, New York City and even San Francisco, which are much worse. Do they know that housing prices in the Chinese cities are the highest…
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Social entrepreneurs
Read in The Guardian of 20 July 2015: In Amsterdam it’s bad. In San Francisco it’s even worse. Yesterday we made a walking tour with policymakers of the municipality of Amsterdam who want to promote local startup ecosystems. We crossed the eastern part of the inner city. How to attract new tech-jobs?, they asked.…
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Building green belts
Read in The Economist of 26 September 2015: Something’s badly wrong. On my way back from the UK, I read an article in this week’s edition of The Economist on the booming housing market in and around London. Despite stagnant incomes, Britons have taken on masses of cheap debt. All this demand has run…
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Connect
Read in The Argus of 24 September 2015: Samer Bagaeen, teaching planning at the University of Brighton, showed me the local newspaper. In The Argus of last Thursday there were at least three pages on new high-rise initiatives in Brighton, UK. In ‘Building upwards is the way to go to meet housing crisis –…
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Startup delta
Read in The Economist of 25 July 2015: > It’s called a ‘briefing’. Subject: Silicon Valley. In The Economist of 25 July the message was: “the tech boom may get bumpy, but it will not end in a repeat of the dotcom crash.” It was a description of how the Greater San Francisco region is…
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Highrise is coming
Read in Het Parool of 1 August 2015: So we spent a week in London. We booked an Airbnb in Hampstead Heath, London North. An excellent appartment, though rather small compared to Dutch standards. We met friends, all living in London now. Why did they chose for London? Because, they said, here are the…
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Rich Sydney
Read in NRC Handelsblad of 16 May 2015: Both correspondents of NRC Handelsblad in the Far East, Oscar Garschagen (China) and Melle Garschagen (Australia), wrote two articles on the real estate market in Sydney, Australia. Last year, Chinese investors spent 12 billion Australian dollars on real estate in the ‘country of land and rocks’,…
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Wall of Money
Read in NRC Handelsblad of 9 and 12 June 2015: Alarming news. Vacant real estate in the Netherlands since 2010 more than dubbeled. The total amount of square meters empty office space is now 9 million, of m2 empty retail space it’s 2,7 million. And it gets worse, even after the crisis. Why? Because…