Building a Green New York

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Global City ◽  
Economic Recovery ◽  
Residential Property ◽  
Green Jobs ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
Energy Retrofit ◽  
Office Space ◽  
The City

This chapter discusses two energy retrofit initiatives: the city- and real estate-led PlaNYC policy for retrofitting Manhattan's commercial office space, and the Laborers (LIUNA)-sponsored Green Jobs/Green New York weatherization initiative covering residential property in the city and the state. In the highly competitive and mostly nonunion residential property sector, a familiar tension between affordability for working-class consumers and union concerns with labor standards emerged as the federal stimulus funds used to finance retrofitting work were scaled back. Despite the enormous potential of a green jobs strategy to address employment disparities, revive neighborhoods without gentrification, and launch economic recovery while mitigating ecological damage, labor's vision of a sustainable city seemingly cannot prevail when it confronts the entrenched power of real estate and finance in the global city.

The Building of the Lafayette Theatre

1974 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-129
Author(s):  
Robert Montilla
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Bar Association ◽  
The Military ◽  
The City

The Lafayette Theatre of New York was built and owned by Charles W. Sandford (1796–1878), a colorful and sometimes eccentric personality, whose careers in law, business, and the military, combined with a personal predilection for pomp and display, made him a prominent member of New York's society. As a businessman, Sandford made and lost “several fortunes” in the course of his eventful life in a variety of financial speculations that included investments in real estate, hardware, and theatres. Most of these ended disastrously for him, but his ventures accrued enough profit to allow him to live stylishly all his life, entertain every prominent guest of the city and, on his death in 1878, leave his family a “comfortable competency.” As a lawyer, Sandford handled several celebrated cases and, being generally considered “among the finest” members of his profession, was eventually named vice-president of the New York Bar Association. But it was in his career as a soldier that his love for horses, parades, and gilded uniforms was most manifest and which led Sandford to erect the first full-scale equestrian theatre in America.

Connectivity in the Multi-Layered City: Towards the Sustainable City

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Bob Brown
Keyword(s):  
Global City ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Recent Experience ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Financial Speculation ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
Development Practice

A new urban paradigm, the global city, emerged in the late 20th Century finding acceptance in discussions of urban development. Tied into a global network of exchange, it exists principally as a place of financial speculation and transaction. It is marked by a parallel economy of culture, which underpins a re-conceptualisation and spatial re-formation of the city. Despite its widespread currency, criticisms have challenged its economic sustainability. Further questions have contested its tendency to impose a singular, homogenized space prioritizing consumption while marginalising other concerns. Post-independence Riga's recent experience provides a platform from which to critique the global city paradigm, which the city embraced as it sought to embed itself in the West not only politically but culturally and economically as well. In opposition to this model's intrinsic singular emphasis and exclusionary tendencies, this text will explore the concept of palimpsest; this proposition understands the city as a multiplicity of layers, within which convergences and divergences offer a site from which to generate synergies. This will be framed in reference to recent discourse on the sustainable city and development practice. Recent design-led inquiry situated in the context of Riga will then provide a lens on palimpsest as an alternative form of praxis.

Sustainability and the City

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Melissa Checker
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Human Resources ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Environmental Benefits ◽  
Private Industry ◽  
The City

This chapter establishes the book’s key theoretical premises, including capitalist cycles of crisis and resolution (Marx), double-bind theory (Bateson), the spatial fix (Harvey), and capitalism and schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari). Using New York City as an example, it discusses how city leaders resolved economic crises through the continual exploitation of natural and human resources. The constant remaking of urban neighborhoods fueled the city’s economic engine, especially as the city shifted to a real estate-based economy. Towards the end of the twentieth century, this real estate imperative coincided with increased public concern about the dangers of climate change. The broad appeal of sustainability provided the perfect cover for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s neoliberal agenda to recreate New York as a luxury city. But just as Bloomberg’s emphasis on private industry intensified the gap between the city’s rich and poor it also unevenly distributed environmental benefits and burdens.

Combustible Hopes on the National Stage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Hamera
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Recovery ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This chapter argues for Detroit as an image and an actual place that spatializes and racializes the affective fallout of deindustrialization using three plays whose 2013 New York runs coincided with both the city’s impending bankruptcy and the United States’ anemic recovery from the Great Recession: Detroit by Lisa D’Amour, Detroit’67 by Dominique Morisseau, and Motown the Musical by Berry Gordy. Each play uses Detroit to explore the interpersonal consequences of opportunities and crises in racialized capitalism. Each offers audiences intimate visions of the Fordist bargain in its seeming heyday, particularly compelling in a period of lackluster economic recovery. In this chapter I introduce the formulations “re-siting” and “re-citing” to analyze the ways elements of Detroit’s incendiary history of interracial confrontations are redeployed to support images of a capitalist work ethic transcending or succumbing to racist violence, and to link the city to a seemingly race-neutral contemporary precarity.

Global-City-Formation, Immobilienwirtschaft und Transnationalisierung

2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christof Parnreiter
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Global City ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Real Estate Markets ◽  
Foreign Companies ◽  
City Formation ◽  
Office Space ◽  
The City

Global-City-formation and the making of a new “corporate geography“: The case of Mexico City. The paper argues that global-city-formation is a key driving force in the transformation of urban landscapes and in the globalization of real estate markets. Taking Mexico City as a case study it is shown that the growing presence of a) foreign companies and b) advanced producer sector firms increases demand for office space, in particular in the high end spectrum of the market. This demand is met by the production of a new CBD in western parts of the city. Mexico City’s corporate geography is, thus, characterized by two CBD, with the new one housing the majority of firms that entered the Mexican market in the last 15 years. The paper also argues that the new corporate geography is marked by processes of de- and transnationalization, becoming thus step by step detached from the urban fabric.

scholarly journals Water, Water Everywhere: Destiny, Politics and Commodification on New York’s Water Edge

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Ana Morcillo Pallares
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Water Edge ◽  
The City

<p>In 1973, in the midst of an economic downturn, New York City´s waterfront was envisioned as an enterprise for an urban renewal. This paper reflects on the interplay among a set of actors which was key in launching a more open, accessible, diverse and thrilling city´s edge. The intersecting condition among corporate capitalism, real estate, political interests and talented design illustrates the waterfront as particularly instrumental in the representation of a desire city to live in. However, the case study of two relevant built projects, Battery Park City and Gantry Plaza State Park, showcases different results in the challenge of the city´s waterfront strategy giving over its innovation, privileging instead the rapid commodification of the architecture and the unbalance between public and private interests.</p>

“I Am Not Co-op!”: The Struggle over Middle-Class Housing in 1970s New York

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 864-885 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Holtzman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Rental Housing ◽  
Real Estate Market ◽  
Real Estate Industry ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
The Real Estate Market ◽  
The City

In 1970s New York, landlords and major real estate associations argued that New York could stem the exodus of middle-income residents by creating greater opportunities for homeownership in a city that had long been dominated overwhelmingly by renters. They proposed converting middle-income rental housing into cooperatives, a process that would also enable former landlords to profit handsomely. Tenants, however, widely rejected apartment ownership, preferring the security of rent-regulated housing. This article traces the ensuing struggles between tenants, the real estate industry, and city officials over the nature of moderate- and middle-income housing in New York. The eventual success of the real estate industry enabled cooperative conversions to expand dramatically in the 1980s, but only by bargaining with tenants and activists, offering tenants noneviction plans, and discounting prices. This process helped to transform the city by underwriting a momentous turnaround in the real estate market, while signaling a larger embrace of market deregulation.

Prologue

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Ann L. Buttenwieser
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Real Estate Market ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
The Real Estate Market ◽  
Community Board ◽  
The City ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter provides a background to an adventure that began with the author's love of the waterfront and her singular passion to build a floating pool and donate it to the city for use by recreationally underserved New Yorkers. It traces the author's discovery of the Progressive Era's nineteenth-century floating baths and her first nearly adversarial meeting with a community board to securing a barge to contain the pool. It also discusses the financing of the floating project, including its design and refitting of the vessel. The chapter reviews the story of the decline of and attempts to revitalize the New York and New Jersey waterfronts in the 1980s and 1990s. It cites the periodic rises in the real estate market and oil spill that had a direct negative impact on locating a barge to house the floating pool.

Foreigners as gentrifiers and tourists in a Mexican historic district

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (15) ◽  
pp. 3151-3168 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Navarrete Escobedo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Real Estate Markets ◽  
New Class ◽  
Direct Observations ◽  
Global North ◽  
San Miguel De Allende ◽  
Boutique Hotels ◽  
The City

Transnational gentrification has become a key element of urban and sociocultural transformations in several Latin American countries. New urban policies and transnational real estate markets adapt the city in order to respond to the expectations of transnational middle classes. This paper explores the case of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Methodologically, it adopts a qualitative approach and analyses two of the most important manifestations of transnational gentrification: lifestyle migration and luxury tourism. Historical files on protected buildings in San Miguel de Allende’s historic centre were used to observe functional alterations. This is supplemented with other statistical data (including the spatial pattern of Airbnb rentals) and direct observations of public spaces. I propose that transnational gentrification leads to a heritage-led transnationalisation of real estate, evidenced by luxury housing, boutique hotels, art galleries and other high culture spaces that cater to higher-income lifestyle migrants and tourists. As a result, the new class of owners and users changes the place’s identity, which has implications for lower-income groups’ right to the city. The process in San Miguel de Allende is analogous to processes in cities such as London, New York or Paris, where notions of heritage urbanism have also helped transnationalise local real estate markets. However, it also evinces other processes that are more difficult to appreciate in the Global North (growing rent gaps, real estate companies’ aggressive pursuit of gentrification and deep historical inequalities that are exacerbated by heritage-led gentrification).

Residential Property Values Improved by Landscaping with Trees

1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 162-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. M. Anderson ◽  
H. K. Cordell
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Property Tax ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Residential Property ◽  
Listing Service ◽  
Property Value ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Sales Price ◽  
Multiple Listing Service ◽  
The City

Abstract A 3 to 5% increase in the sales prices of-single-family houses in Athens, Georgia, was associated with the presence of trees in their landscaping, according to data from real estate records on over 800 house sales from 1978 to 1980. The average house sold for about $47,000 and had five front-yard trees visible in its Multiple Listing Service photographs. An average sales price increase of $1,700 to $2,100 was associated with the presence of these trees. This increase in property value represents an income of over $200,000 a year to the city in property tax revenues.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document