A Change is in the Works

To my loyal readers, thanks.  This is the 143rd  post for Cogito Urbanus, and for the most part I have enjoyed the writing and the research, they go hand in hand (and I never missed a Friday). And it’s actually quite fun. But, as any blogger will tell you, it’s always there, day to day, annoying and demanding. And the simple fact is this: writing two blogs a week (the other is on writing GO HERE), trying to get a 1,000 words a day down in my novels, and still run a design and urban planning shop is, well, a bit much ( ask my CFO).

So something has to change. It’s very obvious that the development world will go on doing its “thing” with or without me, so I’m cutting back. This blog will now be written when I have something brilliant to say, or not say, as the case may be. I am concentrating my efforts on two new books that are due out this spring and summer. One, a historical novel called Wars Amongst Lovers, and two, a new Sharon O’Mara thriller called Diamonds For Death. My goals are simple: sell, sell, and sell; write, write, and write. By the way, if you go to my writing blog, you will notice that all my books are free until Saturday night for your ereader/Nook/Kobo etc. Jump on board. Let’s build momentum together.

Keep in mind these Cogito Urbanus  prophecies:

• New home demand will outstrip supply very quickly and, due to the severe lack of forward planning and entitlements, will skyrocket in price. (huge demand + cheap money = higher prices).
•  The lack/reduction of federal spending will free up capital for private sector development - a very good thing.
• The greatest market for development (as a sector) will be senior housing. This will be an across the board menu of active adult urban, active adult resort, housing with medical support, short and long term care, and memory. Many will be infill projects.
• Interest rates must rise back to their norm and this will be sooner than you think.
•  And inflation (due to cheap money) will have dramatic impacts on supplies, land, housing and rents, be careful what you ask for.

 So Long Farewell - for now!

So my friends, it has been enjoyable and fun. Occasionally drop by, check out my latest postings, how often, remains to be seen. And I would love to hear from you.

So Stay Tuned . . . . . . . .

La Defense and the Future of Grand Urban Plazas

On Wednesday, May 2, the Wall Street Journal posted an article about the business center of Paris, yes there is one for those visitors who have not gone over the hill and down from the Arc de Triomphe (GO HERE). This business complex called La Defense, sits on the city’s western edge and includes a collection of glass enclosed uber-buildings that flank its grand plaza. As stated in Wikipedia, it is where “statements of corporate ambition can be made,” hyperbole intended. It might sound better in French.

Central Plaza

This complex is now faced with three new towers that will dramatically affect the view, as well as the perception, of Paris; even the proposers are worried about how their clients and customers will see their attempts at make a signature statement about who they are in this historic city. And the residents of Paris are taking to the battlements to ensure that they will be heard. It’s all so Parisian.

I was never a fan of this urban complex. It is over blown and has none of the charm of the rest of the city just over the hill. It is about 400 acres with 3.5 million SF of office space, more than 150,000 employees and 20,000 permanent residents. There is retail (of some kind), hotels, and smatterings of monuments and sculpture. What really takes the visitor’s breath away is the central plaza, all 3.3 million square feet of flagstone and sidewalks. These huge plates of stone laid in an undulating grid pattern, when I was there, rocked and tilted as you walked the plaza, quite unsettling I assure you.

La Grande Arche (finished in 1989 and a homage to the original Arc de Triomphe), is the central structure and in line with the Champs-Elysees. The arch has a grand stair under its arch that at most times, has hundreds of people sitting about, many, I’m sure, trying to understand the space. Under this massive structure are rail links and metro stations; just remember that the Louvre is just a few Metro stops away. It contains government offices.

I’ve used some images from Wikipedia and other sources, my photos are slides (shows you my tech at the time I was there, lost the images from the second visit – apologies). The contrasts are spectacularly unreal, walk through Tuileries, grab a seat on the Metro, and then rise into La Defense, you would think you not only changed centuries but planets as well.

The New Towers are on the 'Photoshopped' Right

Successful urban plazas are difficult at best, time may heal them or perspectives and scales change as buildings grow and tastes alter. The biggest challenge is economics and approvals. Either can kill the effort. These new buildings, the Phare Tower with 70 floors and the Hermitage Plaza Towers (2 and Russian backed) at 86 floors (and a tad shorter than the Eiffel Tower), will be some of the tallest buildings in Europe. The need to build taller is worldwide, so just get on the band wagon and go for it.

Stay Tuned . . . .

The Way It Was

We continually dream of the good old day days. When the sky was blue and the spare the air days were few (I do love the smell of wood smoke in the evening, it’s the smell of history), traffic jams, Twinkies, and no head rests and seat belts (yes Virginia, even no air bags). Our cities had lower profiles, but the politicians had bigger egos – think Mayor Daley (the first) and Robert Moses (New Yorker planner and builder). But in the 1960s things began to radically change. The Great Society was now in full throat, HUD was now a political force – not just a Paul Newman movie, redevelopment was crushing and grinding its way through cities, saving us from ourselves. Freeways were beginning to slice up the urban cores, trolley cars were disappearing and the streets turned over to the more flexible bus. And jet travel now allowed us to get to Paris from New York in less than six hours – a trip, not eighty years earlier, that might have taken six weeks. Change, don’t you love it.

A great friend, knowing my proclivity for all things urban, sent me a URL of a half-hour color newsreel he came upon. It is San Francisco in 1955 as it might be approached as both a tourist and resident. All the high points are here (and even more surprising they are all still here). This was the City before the 1960s, the Embarcadero Freeway was yet to be built (then knocked down by the 1989 earthquake), Playland at the Beach was still spinning (now housing and a Safeway), the cable cars were still climbing to the stars, and the same signs that today hang over Alitio’s at Fisherman’s Wharf were there then. Please click or post the URL in your browser (finish this piece first then pour a Irish coffee, sit back, and watch).

Alcatraz and Aquatic Park

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/05/1955-san-francisco-video-tour_n_1187728.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

Our cities are giant petri dishes where everything is thrown into the agar and heated up. We wait for the results, not sure what will really happen. High rises and skyscrapers, HUD (again), low income housing, transit, neo-traditional planning, vertical retail complexes, sustainability, LGBT issues, bicycle coalitions, the environment, the homeless, crime, poverty, immigration, marinas, high-speed rail, parks, the Occupy Movement, politicians and Donald Trump. Where to start, where to stop.

The history of cities is a story of piling on, like at the end of a football play (it is the playoffs, like the metaphor?) that continues long centuries on after the whistle blows. America is young; our piles are not that interesting . . . yet. But in Europe and China the piles are thick; in the Middle East they are legendary. James Michener’s The Source is a delightful and revealing saga of an Israeli tell, or pile of an urban football game. Layer after layer is peeled back revealing not just history but the character of a people, our ancestors, us.

In the left column I have posted a shot of Ephesus in the current country of Turkey. It was at one time Greek then Roman then forgotten. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, Mary the mother of Jesus had a home there (it is said), but during an earlier bout of global something, this seaport town was left high and dry some three miles inland. No port, no jobs, no way. For all intents it disappeared, it is now left to history and tourists (but I do have to say for an urbanist, as I walked those streets, I can still hear the sounds of the marketplace, the great theater, and I still see boats moored to the long stone quay).

I ask what will San Francisco and Chicago and Des Moines leave to our ancestors in two thousand years? What will grow in their dish of urban agar?

Stay Tuned . . . .

The Coming Sea Change

A sea change is a fundamental or significant transformation in life or business. In development it is where the form may be retained but the substance is replaced. Such as is the case with housing, we are moving from ownership to rental. Ownership has been shown to be fickle, unpredictable and unreliable. For home owners with ten years or more there is a collective breath-holding, a hope that values don’t drop. They have magic number in their equity and they watch the neighborhood comps like you might watch a stock in the stock market. “Please,” they hope, “don’t fall anymore.” Like a passenger on a boat taking on water, they pray to stay afloat.

Values are driven by the marketplace; it is the storm the home is tossed about on. The storm has taken many of its passengers, those left on board lift their eyes in trepidation. And the housing industry is watching. It’s in their collective genetics the need to build, to answer the marketplace. In the industry a home is call a product, no need to say more. For the last three years these builders have sat on the shore watching, they have seen the storm and the fear, they are now answering the passenger’s calls.

To rent is to remove a great anxiety from the shoulders of the home-seeker. Even the wealthy are shunning ownership; they are freeing their capital and releasing it from the guileful marketplace. While suburban foreclosed homes are now converting to rentals (horizontal rental complexes), it is in the cities and urban areas where remarkable events are changing the direction of the vertical landscape.

For years the development industry shunned the rental market. “No way am I building rentals, too much exposure, land prices are too high, can’t make it pencil. And besides who wants an 850 square foot apartment when you can own a 1,600 sf home for the same price. No, never. Never will build another rental, never.”

A sea change. . . . Land values have dropped through the floor in many markets, older office buildings can’t compete in the commercial lease market. Why pay $2.50 for Class C space, when you can get Class A space for the same price or significantly less. Commercial owners are under water, especially if they refinanced in the heady days of 2006. They, like the homeowner, are looking for life preservers and someone to help them out of their personal ocean of debt; they too are looking for a sea change. Many of their properties are in excellent locations, have good to great access to transit and are ripe for acquisition.

Cities recognize this as well; empty offices and commercial space do nothing for a community. Retail suffers, restaurants suffer, revenues drop. Conversion to apartments will help; they add vitality and density to urban centers and put butts on restaurant chairs. Whereas to sell out a condominium building might take years, rentals may fill faster. Neighborhoods are changed faster and for the better.

I also believe that the new rental market will be broader than last. It won’t be just inexpensive apartments under 1,000 sf; it will reach for the more affluent and offer 1,500 sf to 2,500 sf units (and maybe even larger). These complexes will cater to both the young professional and the empty nester and retiree. Better quality will be demanded, the industry will respond, they will have to.

Yes a sea change is in order. The ship is turning, but like a super tanker it is a slow and ponderous course change, but it will be a course hard to change.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest the first use of the term sea change is found, for your pleasure:

“Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell."

To the development community: Do you hear the ding-dong, bell?

Stay tuned . . . .