The incredible disappearing Starwood CRE investor
The $10 billion fund from Starwood Capital Group has been trying to preserve its available cash and credit by limiting investor redemptions. In the first quarter, the fund was hit with $1.3 billion in...
Why is California behind Texas and other states in curbing homelessness?
Homelessness is surging nationwide. Homelessness rates rose an astonishing 15 percent on average in major cities last year. It seems like the rest of the U.S. is waking up to what California has been...
Major U.S. Supreme Court decisions coming down the track MAJOR UPDATE
June 28, 2024 Update: The Supreme Court in an unprecedented victory for multifamily and other businesses, has today reversed its 40-year-old decision in Chevron v. Natural Resource Defense Council. This law governed how courts...
Opportunity Zones: A path forward
Opportunity Zones (OZs) have emerged as a significant tool in driving investment into underdeveloped areas, offering a compelling case for their continuation and expansion. Since their inception in 2017, OZs have attracted nearly $100...
The state of affordable housing
Housing affordability has emerged as a key issue in this year’s U.S. presidential election. Both Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump have talked about what they would do to increase the supply of...
Post fires, California policymakers commit to dysfunctional insurance regulations
Things are going from bad to worse in California’s property insurance market, raising the specter of a public bailout of the state’s insurer of last resort and more private insurance companies fleeing the state.
On...
Rent control still the wrong solution to housing woes
Restricting the price of housing kills incentives to supply places to live.
Rent control is having something of a moment: In Los Angeles, tenants are invoking a law that imposes limits on apartments built on...
Aging boomers rekindle senior housing market
Senior housing has been one of the biggest disappointments for commercial real estate investors. Now thanks to millions of aging baby boomers, that may be about to change.
The oldest boomers turn 80 in less...
INFOGRAPHIC: Disparate impact of high interest rates
Disparate impact of high interest rates has adversely impacted millions of low- and middle-income families—and housing providers. More often high interest rates depress stock and housing prices, and other asset values— impacting all income...
Why housing costs remain a major hurdle for lowering inflation
Housing inflation continues to be a stubborn impediment to the consumer price index (CPI) falling back to the Federal Reserve’s target.
Despite broader economic inflation cooling significantly from pandemic peaks, the shelter inflation index has...
INFOGRAPHIC: Interest rates slow apartment development
Rising interest rates, tighter lending and flattening rents in parts of the country have left property companies from California to Florida waiting for financing that may not come soon.
+500 days (up 45% from 2019)...
Why Johnny can’t build
We were once a nation of builders—from the toll roads and canals of the early nineteenth century and the railroads of the second half of that busy century, to the construction of power, energy,...
The housing theory of childless cat ladies
Would a YIMBY building boom rejuvenate urban family life or produce sterile, megacity hellscapes?
Housing Boom = Baby Bust?
America’s low birth rate is in the news again, thanks largely to Vice Presidential candidate Sen. J.D....
Monopolies, elections and power, oh my
Technology is engineered toward empowering individuals, not government. Therein lies the problem.
From the Gutenberg press to automobiles to a networked world enabling people to work remotely, history’s greatest innovations—in some way great or small—liberate...
Office to apartments
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Hybrid work is likely here to stay. This shift isn’t just changing lifestyles—it’s also affecting commercial spaces. Office vacancy rates post-COVID shot up almost overnight, and they remain near 20 percent nationwide, the...
