This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
n+1 magazine has a fascinating Interview with a Hedge Fund Manager. Topics of conversation include the sub-prime mortgage crisis. I gotta admit that I didn’t understand some of this, but most of it was pretty interesting. (via snarkmarket)
Letter to the editor, New York Times, June 23, 1993:
If landlords could double or triple the rent on vacant apartments, it would be a compelling incentive for them to try to drive current tenants out by any means necessary. (During the East Village’s gentrification in the 1980’s, my landlords neglected or cut off heat and hot water, called us late at night to tell us to leave, let crack addicts stay in warehoused apartments and rented storefronts to drug dealers.)
Under luxury decontrol, what would stop them from renting only to tenants who make more than $100,000 a year to get apartments permanently deregulated? Warehousing would burgeon as landlords kept apartments vacant for months waiting for a sucker to pay top market rent.
New York Times, September 29, 1991:
She began asking $132,000 for her studio in 1988 and has since lowered the asking price to $115,00, but has not had a bid.
Another owner in the Christadora House bought her 1,100-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment for $270,000 in 1986 has been trying to sell it for 14 months. She first asked $305,000 and has lowered her price to $260,000. Her only offer so far, which she rejected six months ago, was for $220,000.
Two blocks away, on 11th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B, the owner of a two-bedroom co-op on the top floor of a renovated five-story tenement has received a bigger blow. He paid $186,000 for it a year ago and has been trying to sell it for four months at $89,000. So far, no takers.
The story about how drummer and web designer Mark Robohm completely renovated his Chelsea studio for only $11,600 is both inspirational and hilarious.
Ms. Doucette found Mr. Robohm’s office chair on Park Avenue. Before taking it, she called him up to describe it. “I asked her what the name was and she said, ‘Herman Miller,’” Mr. Robohm said. “I was like, ‘Grab that chair and run for your life.’”
The audio slideshow is worth a look as well.
Now you can buy a house modeled after one of Martha Stewart’s three houses. People love these houses so much that sales are bucking the downturn in new home sales. Says a representative for the company building the homes: “It’s our version of the iPhone. It illustrates the power of something different with a brand tied to it.”
John Maeda describes the process of designing the cover for the most recent issue of Key, the NY Times occasional real estate magazine.
Stamen delivers another lovely project: Trulia Hindsight. It’s an animated map of the US which shows new home construction over a period of years “with an eye towards exposing patterns of expansion and development”. As you might expect, the growth of a city like Las Vegas is interesting to watch. More on the project from Stamen and on the Trulia Hindsight blog.
Undiscovered bedrooms, the typical dream of the New Yorker. I always thought the undiscovered room dream story was apocryphal until Meg, unaware of the story at the time, dreamt of finding another room in our apartment a few months ago.
Rollercoaster version of the graph of US home prices adjusted for inflation…you basically ride the curve of the graph. Brilliant…I want to ride all the graphs I come across! (via is it real or is it magnetbox)
The McMansion page on Wikipedia is surprisingly detailed. Other terms for a McMansion include Faux Chateau, Frankenhouse, Starter Castle, and Parachute Home. The Lawyer Foyer refers to “the two-story entry space typically found on many McMansions which is meant to be visually overwhelming but which contributes little to the useful space of the house”.
LeBron James’ new house: 35,440 sq ft, 2200 sq ft master suite (with 2-story walk-in closet), theater, casino, barber shop, bowling alley, and a limestone bust of LeBron wearing a headband.
Roommate Wanted: Share My West Village Pad. “Ideally, you do not have ‘a lot’ of friends (i.e., any). But if you do, they cannot visit the apartment at any time.”
This has had a profound effect on how we interact with people. We realize now that the cocoons of our cars kept us well insulated from the people around us. Our genuine interactions were with family and coworkers, the only people who saw us stripped of the metal that clothed and protected us. Our neighbors, we discovered, were virtually strangers. Now, we stand face-to-face with people in our building’s elevators, at our corner hangouts, and on the sidewalks. We chitchat and pet our neighbors’ dogs. We exchange ‘good mornings’ with the people we pass everyday on our way to work. We’ve developed friendships with several proprietors and servers at our favorite restaurants.
(via a.whole)
Blast from the past: MRWong’s Soup’Partments, the world’s tallest virtual building.
Suroweicki explans why ever-rising housing prices may be deceiving. “If you control for inflation and quality…real home prices barely budged between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-nineties. The idea that housing prices have nowhere to go but up is, in other words, a statistical illusion.”
Letters to George W. Bush from German citizens attempting to affirm their rights to moon land they have purchased for $19.99 an acre. “If you intend to use my area within the bounds of your intention, to build a moon base or something else on, over, or under the surface of this moon area, you have to contact me personally. This must be absolutely, to clear up under which special conditions I will leave the rights of use to you or the United States of America.”
Graph of American house values from 1890 to the present. You can’t miss the sheer cliff starting in 1997. Houses have also gotten bigger over time. It would be interesting to see the same graph in price/square feet. (via ben hyde)
A West Village family built a porch and garden on top of their six floor apartment building. The photos are surreal. “The depth [of the soil] was kept consistent because Mr. Puchkoff had the foresight to collect two dozen chopsticks from Sushi on Hudson, a Japanese restaurant in the neighborhood, and mark them at seven inches.”
James Surowiecki fills us in on a new investment opportunity, housing futures. “If housing futures work the way they’re supposed to, they will shift risk from those who are less able to bear it (individual homeowners with hefty mortgages) to those who are more willing to (speculators looking for a big upside on their investments). In the process, they will effectively provide a form of house-price insurance.”
Modernist prefab houses are all the rage these days. “Designed by architects, constructed in factories and trucked to their sites, these houses had the look the couple wanted, at a lower price.” The Dwell House had a lot to do with current interest is modern prefab housing.
Manhattan’s Chinatown didn’t bounce back after 9/11 and the city’s Chinese are moving elsewhere in the city to find cheaper rents. (via dg)
1880s Brooklyn brownstone has swastika patterns as part of the wood flooring. “We turned to the landlord guy and said, ‘You haven’t fixed this?!?!’ He suggested that we could just put furniture over them. All four, in every room. And then he told us that there had been a number of Jews who’d looked at the place and ‘seemed really bothered by it.’”
Stay Connected