While substantial progress has been made in fighting Northern California’s massive Carr and Mendocino Complexwildfires, there are more than 13,000 homes in areas where the fires are still active, according to a Zillow analysis. State officials have declared 2,000 homes are in immediate danger.
Combined, the fires have scorched more than 630,000 acres, an area almost as large as the state of Rhode Island. Four people have died, almost 1,400 homes have been destroyed and another 200 significantly damaged. Zillow’s broad look at these regions and found that more than 13,000 homes exist in census tracts that currently contain active fire activity.
Homes in the still-active area of the Mendocino Complex Fire[1] have a median value of $217,500, slightly less than the national median in July ($218,000) and far less than the in the state of California as a whole ($541,800). With a median value of $316,000, those homes at risk in the vicinity of the Carr Fire are typically worth more than both the national median and the median in Shasta County, where the fire is largely located.
In each of the counties directly affected by these fires, home value growth appears to be slowing – the annual pace of growth was slower in July than in June, similar to the broader national trend. Unlike the nation as a whole, however – and unlike last summer’s wildfires that raged through California’s Napa Valley – inventory of homes available for sale in the impacted counties has been on the rise.
In each of the past four months in Shasta County, the number of homes available for sale has increased on an annual basis for the last four months. Mendocino County has followed a similar trend, with inventory up 36 percent in July compared to a year ago. In Lake County, inventory growth has slowed in recent months, but it was still up by more than 20 percent year-over-year in July. Lastly, after months of inventory declines, often at double digit annual rates, inventory in Colusa County is flat from last year. For those displaced by the wildfires, this may offer some small hope that they will be able to find another home for sale nearby.
As the fires rage on, and this devastating season continues, it’s still much too soon to assess the true number and values of homes destroyed. These communities could take years to fully rebuild, and given the whims of Mother Nature, the situation could get worse before it gets better. But compared to recent years, the current real estate climate may offer more reasons for optimism among those struggling with the fires’ widespread impact.
Tiny homes might be small, but they’re still a pretty big investment. Now you can reap the benefits of owning a tiny home without actually owning one.
A new program from Escape Homes, maker of well-appointed tiny homes, is making it easier for people to profit from tiny homes by lending out free portable micro homes to people around the country in return for a cut of the rental proceeds.
Escape’s Rental Program is first and foremost a business opportunity. And one that comes with a few parameters: Partners (the people whose land the home sits on) must be within 100 miles of the largest 50 cities in the U.S. or near a high-traffic destination; Escape gets 60 percent of every rental; there’s no personal use of the tiny home, and partners are responsible for maintenance, utilities, and so on.
It’s not the first time Escape has come up with an innovative business model for its tiny homes. Last year, the company opened its first tiny home village in the Midwest. The Rental Program takes their vision one step further, ensuring that their tiny homes find their way to locations where might not otherwise be accessible.
And while we always love seeing the new campers on the market—like Volkswagen’s new Grand California—one of the best parts about the Düsseldorf show is the debut of concept campers. Ambitious, innovative, and yet-to-be-produced, concept campers show where the industry is headed. And at this year’s show, it’s clear that the future of campers is looking a lot more green.
It’s ironic that so many adventurers spend time outdoors by using gas-guzzling, giant RVs that are detrimental to the environment. Even small camper trailers reduce the efficiency and range of your vehicle, meaning that you’ll use more gas just because you’re towing a camper.
Germany-based camper manufacturer Dethleffs has been working on this problem. Last year, the company debuted the e.Home Type C, a motorhome powered by head-to-toe solar panels affixed to the camper’s exterior. This year Dethleffs is shaking up the industry with the E.Home Coco, a small trailer that’s 100% electric. The camper uses a floor-mounted lithium battery, rooftop solar panels, and a dual-motor axle instead of a regular ‘ol tow package.
Why would a trailer need to be electric, you ask? It’s not as if it has an engine. Dethleffs says that adding electric motive power will decrease the towing demands of the camper and make handling better while driving. This makes sense because the 80-kWh battery pack sends power to the electrified axle, essentially making the camper spin its own wheels and cutting down the tow load on your vehicle.
In a real life example used by Dethleffs, this means that if you’re normally towing 2,000 pounds, the electrified E.Home Coco would reduce that tow weight to about 220 pounds. Instead of needing a huge truck to pull a trailer, you could use a smaller—even an electric—vehicle. While the Tesla Model X is an all-electric vehicle that can tow around 3,500 pounds, most other electric cars just don’t have the capacity. With the tech behind the E.Home Coco, that becomes possible.
Once at camp, the advantages of an electric trailer pile on. Thanks to its electric powertrain, the camper uses its own power to park into a camping spot, no towing needed. Just control the camper using an app and park it wherever you’d like, no matter how tight the space. And the E.Home Coco’s big battery and solar panels can run lots of the things you need a camp, like heating, cooling, and cook tops. Back at home, Dethleffs says the camper’s battery pack could be used as a home energy storage system.
Of course, all of this is still in the research stage, and Dethleffs says roading testing will start in 2019 to confirm how the electric camper influences range and efficiency. But in an industry that’s all about getting outside and enjoying our natural environment, it’s inspiring to see a camper that could live up to environmentally-friendly standards of true sustainability.
One sunny afternoon about a year ago, I rendezvoused with two old friends for a beer. Each of us arrived on a CitiBike from our respective neighborhoods. We convened at a newly opened outdoor bar—really, just a line of picnic tables—in front of the swank hotel near the Old Fulton Street entrance to Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Afterward, I biked home along the Brooklyn waterfront with one of my friends. As we parted ways on the edge of Red Hook, we commented on how different this version of New York City is, how much more good-natured it is than the one that existed when we first lived here back in the 1980s. The New York City of the 21st century, I thought, is not half bad.
This observation, born of sunshine, endorphins, and beer, is a loaded one. It’s an admission—rare for me—that the New York City we live in, with its inexorable gentrification, soulless condo towers, stultifying chain store incursions, and dearth of rough edges, might, in some way be preferable to that city of legend, the one in which parks belonged to drug dealers; bikes could not be shared, only stolen; and the water’s edge was something you accessed by shimmying through a hole in a fence.
Of course, that old New York City, all disinvestment and squalor, still exists. Read, for example, the recent report by the Center for an Urban Future about New York City’s aging public parks, which are starved of funds for both capital improvements and maintenance. “A significant share of the city’s public parks are several decades old, years behind on basic maintenance, and increasingly at risk of infrastructure failures,” the report asserts.
Even marquee destinations like Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, underwritten by an Alliance that takes in over $10 million a year from a variety of sources, including private donations, doesn’t have the money to address persistent problems. “We have incredible flooding. … Our drains are old and broken and need to be fixed. It’s debilitating, and we can’t keep up,” Prospect Park Alliance President Sue Donoghue notes in the report. The situation is infinitely worse for parks that can’t draw on deep-pocketed benefactors.
Compare these struggling parks to the 21st-century nirvanas that have transformed what was once a working waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens into a coastline—a destination for volleyball players, sunbathers, roller skaters, strollers, and more. These parks are well-equipped, pristine, and thriving. Much of this is due to the fact that the new parks rely on alternative sources of funding, often tied directly or indirectly to real estate development.
The commingling of public and private interests is a common thread linking the three major park openings along the East River that have made 2018 a banner year for the recreational waterfront. In early June, there was the debut of Domino Park, occupying a quarter mile of the Brooklyn waterfront and part of a massive development that is itself just one component of the wholesale reinvention of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. A couple of weeks later, the second phase of an 11-acre park that’s part of the jumbo Hunter’s Point South development was inaugurated in Queens. And finally, in early July, Brooklyn Bridge Park launched Pier 3, the last of the landscaped piers on which most of the 1.3-mile park’s activities take place.
What these parks represent is a comprehensive reimagining of a once-neglected waterfront. What’s begun to emerge is a distinct place, different in texture than the city directly inland (or upland, as the people who make these places like to say). Much of New York is still dominated by buildings and design ideas from centuries past, but the transformation of the waterfront is largely a 21st-century enterprise, one that’s taken on a life of its own since 2007, when former Mayor Michael Bloomberg released PlaNYC 2030, a vision for a greener city that cast waterfront development as a moral imperative. While Mayor Bill de Blasio has embraced the vision to the extent that it offers opportunities for his affordable housing agenda, the waterfront that’s emerging—the pleasurable city where conspicuous affluence underwrites the common good is—for better or worse, Bloombergian.
Hunter’s Point South Albert Vecerka
Hunter’s Point South Bill Tatham
Hunter’s Point South David Lloyd
Take, for example, Hunter’s Point South. Once home to gasworks and other heavy industry, it was first targeted for redevelopment in 1983 by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the state of New York. Later the site became a focal point for one of the Bloomberg administration’s big dreams: a bid for New York City to host the 2012 Olympics. The site then known as Queens West was to be the Olympic Village, as rendered by Morphosis, with quarters for 16,000 athletes and support staff; after the games were over, it would have housed 18,000 New Yorkers. When London instead snagged the games, Bloomberg decided the site, purchased by the city in 2009, would be the place to put thousands of apartments for New Yorkers earning between $60,000 and $145,000—his administration’s answer to Stuyvesant Town.
Now under the auspices of the city’s Economic Development Corporation and nearly built out, Hunter’s Point South will soon have 5,000 units of housing, mostly rentals, 60 percent of which should be available at less than market rate. It also has schools, a library (a much-delayed branch designed by Steven Holl), and a big, glorious waterfront park operated and maintained by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. The 11 acres of parkland, including the newly opened 5.5-acre section and adjacent infrastructure, cost $160 million. It was paid for by the EDC and the city’s Housing Preservation and Development agency, not the parks department.
I recently biked twice to the new park from Brooklyn, pedaling across the Pulaski Bridge and along Jackson Avenue in the older part of Long Island City. That thoroughfare’s once-sleepy commercial district was, on both my trips, intensely congested, its bike lanes rendered useless by double-parked cars and trucks. As I rode west, toward the waterfront high rises, that familiar New York intensity drained away. I was suddenly in a different town, one featuring widely spaced high-rise apartment towers and populated by joggers, walkers, parents, and nannies pushing baby carriages. No one in this version of New York City appeared to be in a hurry to go anywhere. I felt a gentle breeze off the river and noticed locals lounging on swooping wooden chairs; the vibe was that of a sleepy resort town that happened to be directly opposite the UN. Depending on your frame of mind, it was either heaven or the setting for an episode of Black Mirror.
Of course, I’ve been to Hunter’s Point South before. I had previously visited Gantry Plaza State Park, the northernmost and earliest section of waterfront park completed in 1998 and designed by landscape architect Thomas Balsley, who also designed the new Hunter’s Point South parks, along with the firm Weintraub & di Domenico. It was a phenomenal place back then, sensual and strange, with industrial leftovers—the big cranes that once moved rail cars onto barges—as its symbols.
When the late Herbert Muschamp, the New York Times architecture critic, reviewed Gantry Plaza in 1998, he noted: “The curse that reduced New York’s landscape architects to creating Disney versions of Central Park has been at least temporarily lifted.” The contemporary example I call to mind would be the Battery Park City Esplanade, completed in 1996, which was both formal and historicist—trying its best to look like it had always been there.
When Gantry Plaza opened, only one of 11 projected residential towers in the area had been completed; the park felt more like an novelty than a harbinger, a spot for an exotic day trip rather than the focal point of a community. I’m not sure that anyone quite understood that this oddball patch of greenery, accompanied by an isolated 42-story apartment building, would eventually expand to cover 30 acres of waterfront, and that miles of the East River would be redeveloped in similar fashion. It wasn’t until late 2009, when the EDC presented its plan for the area that the vision became clear: a cluster of towers built out by non-profit developers such as Phipps Houses and commercial firms like Related Companies and TF Cornerstone; a number of public facilities like schools, and a verdant, gently meandering waterfront.
Balsley, now the managing principal of SWA/Balsley, also saw his Queens breakthrough as “an alternative to the Battery Park City model.” The Queens West Development Corporation, a state agency, initially hoped to enlarge the Long Island City site by filling in the East River, but environmental regulations (see the Westway lawsuit) forbade dumping more fill in the river. But the developer’s loss was the designers’ gain: “We’re going to actually celebrate this diverse kind of crazy shoreline that we were given,” Balsley remembers thinking. “We had four piers; we had these peninsulas going in and out. We leveraged that into the opportunity for an extraordinarily different kind of waterfront experience, one that allows people to wander in and out, go closer to the water, back from it, shifting perspectives … all that really comes with that kind of a diverse shoreline.”
When it came time to design the rest of the Hunter’s Point South parkland, a team that included Balsley, plus the architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, was organized by the engineering firm Arup. The first phase, five acres that opened in 2013, is all wonderfully unnatural and abstract; an oval-shaped field is the dominant feature, cradled on one side by a shade pavilion, which ascends skyward on V-shaped pillars. On a recent weekday morning, it was a happy mob scene, with scores of babies and caregivers participating in a sing-along, older kids playing soccer in the oval, and younger kids digging in the sand beneath the beach volleyball nets.
Meanwhile, the second phase of the project, which was designed to be more contemplative, was not especially crowded. The most interesting thing about this section, aside from its nearly natural beauty, is over an acre of newly established wetlands. Nearly every recent park along the water’s edge, including the Gowanus Canal’s Sponge Park and the manmade hills of Governors Island, is designed, in part, to mitigate damage from rising sea levels. They are what you might call soft flood control infrastructure, rather than hard infrastructure like a sea wall. Sure, the parks increase the value of the adjacent real estate, but they also protect that same real estate from storm surges.
In this case, the wetlands are also a sort of historic reproduction. Manfredi speculates that perhaps 200 years ago, the site was originally a salt marsh, like most areas along the East River (which is really a tidal estuary). But by the mid-20th century, the land on which the park’s second phase sits became a dumping ground for the dirt from the Midtown Tunnel. It’s perched higher than anything else in the vicinity—great for views—and any trace of its natural configuration had long ago been obliterated.
The new wetlands, carefully planted several months before the park opened with red switchgrass, smooth cordgrass, and bitter panicgrass, are protected from the East River’s strong currents by berms, constructed of loose stone known as rip rap. They’re a reimagining of what the Queens waterfront may have been like before the Europeans showed up. “We’re retaining some sense of wildness,” says Weiss, but it’s a civilized kind of wildness; for example, a concrete pathway follows the water’s edge atop the berm that shelters the wetlands.
In the interest of adding more wetlands to the project (as mandated by the Army Corps of Engineers), the team transformed a peninsula into an island, reachable by a bridge and separated from land by a salt marsh that fills with water during high tide. The island is a supremely isolated spot, a grassy area with an artwork (by Nobuho Nagasawa) that traces the phases of the moon, and looks out at the least isolated place imaginable, directly across the river.
“It’s not natural, but it is a new kind of constructive nature,” Weiss explains. “We love the idea that something is 100 percent constructed and 100 percent natural.”
While the newest piece of Hunter’s Point South feels convincingly like a coastal meadow that might have existed centuries ago, Domino Park, located on the Williamsburg waterfront, is more aggressively manmade. Positioned as the front yard of the 3.3 million-square-foot mixed-use complex on the site of the former Domino Sugar refinery, its six acres of activities are carefully apportioned, like chocolates in a Whitman’s Sampler.
Under a controversial 2005 rezoning intended to goose the residential makeover of industrial Brooklyn, high-rise buildings were encouraged along the East River in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, but the developers had to provide public access to the water. Most developers followed the letter of the law, providing the items on a checklist issued by City Planning: a certain percentage of space covered with planting, a certain ratio of linear seating to length of walkway. The results in Williamsburg have been less than stellar.
But Domino developer Two Trees, as a gesture of goodwill to an often-hostile neighborhood, invested $50 million in a larger and more elaborate park than the rules stipulated. Two Trees hired a full-time horticulturalist and small army of maintenance staff who can be seen everywhere, polishing and tidying.
Domino Park looks a lot like a substantial upgrade of the decade-old park near Ikea in Red Hook, which itself is a direct descendant of Gantry Plaza. That store was built on the site of a working shipyard; industrial remnants, like cranes and tools, were used by one of Balsley’s Gantry Plaza collaborators, Lee Weintraub, to create a bit of post-industrial allure.
Domino, too, celebrates industrial archeology. The entire park, in fact, is built on a raised platform that was originally part of the refinery, according to Lisa Switkin, senior principal at James Corner Field Operations, the landscape firm best known for its work on the High Line. “Barges and things would pull up to the edge and unload materials—in this case, the raw sugar,” Switkin tells me. “It had a bulkhead platform edge, so this site has been like that for 160 years-plus.”
And while there are planted areas framed by weathered steel barriers, and active recreation areas—a very popular water feature for kids, a bocce court, a smallish dog run—much of the park is dominated by artifacts of the sugar industry recast as objets d’art. Screw conveyors and sugar tanks are treated as sculptures, while a pair of gantry cranes and a phalanx of steel columns form an elevated walkway. A playground, by artist Mark Reigelman, pays homage to Domino by “taking children through a fun-filled representation of the sugar refining process.” The refinery building itself still stands, looming over the park, and is being converted into office space.
How all of this looks and feels—whether it’s clever or profane—depends a lot on how you feel about the deindustrialization of the waterfront.
To its credit, Two Trees tried to address one of the biggest problems with the 2005 rezoning. The rules didn’t require the waterfront access areas to be connected to one another. While regulations call for “a continuous walkway” along the shoreline of each development site, there’s no requirement that the walkway of one development link to the next. What’s evolved, then, is a patchwork of enclaves. The most basic thing you want from any waterfront is to walk unencumbered along it, but that will never happen in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Domino Park does abut the existing city park at the foot of Grand Street, and Two Trees has extended River Street, formerly a dead end, through the site. Still, there’s a limit to what the developers can do about the fact that their lovely park exists in isolation.
Brooklyn Bridge Park Max Touhey
Brooklyn Bridge Park Max Touhey
Brooklyn Bridge Park Max Touhey
Considering the glaring flaws in the Williamsburg waterfront scheme, the product of a wholesale transformation done via zoning rather than planning, it’s unfair that the park that takes the most abuse from politically-minded critics is the one that gets it right. Brooklyn Bridge Park is the Bloombergian reuse of a 1.3-mile string of piers built by the Port Authority in the 1950s that, by 1989, when development plans for the waterfront began to percolate, were used primarily for storage. It offers access to the water, extraordinary vistas of Lower Manhattan, and provides a nice, off-road conduit for bikers, walkers, and runners. It’s not all that big—85 acres compared to Prospect Park’s 585 or Central Park’s 843—but its length (compounded by the walkways around each pier) and the spectacular setting give it grandeur.
The park was designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, who started work in 2004. Pier 3, which opened in July, is the last of six piers to be converted to recreational use. “Each one of these piers is the size of Bryant Park,” notes A. Paul Seck, a principal at MVVA who’s been engaged with the park since day one. Each is about five acres in area and, as Brooklyn Bridge Park president Eric Landau points out, they alternate between active and passive uses; Pier 3 is passive, with gently undulating green. “This is our Long Meadow,” says Landau. “This is our Great Lawn.”
Like the designers of Domino, the MVVA team tried hard to reuse what they encountered on the site, but the end result is more subtle. “We found out that we had miles and miles and miles of these two-by-six joists,” says Seck. He’s talking about wood salvaged from a couple of storage buildings that the design team dreamed of converting into something else, a hotel maybe. Instead they demolished the buildings and recycled the materials. “It was longleaf yellow pine, which was mainly used for the masts and for the boats in the harbor,” Seck explains. “But it had a strength to it that was like the tensile strength of steel. We were able to reuse all of that wood for the benches.”
Similarly, they turned granite from the demolition of the Roosevelt Island Bridge into tiered seating for Pier 1 and reused extra tall light poles that the Port Authority had originally installed on the future park’s piers in the 1950s. “They were actually made in Brooklyn,” says Seck. “We took those down, and we reinstalled them back in.”
The result is a park that is thoroughly designed without being too self-conscious. Its industrial gestures tend to be forward looking. For example, a newly constructed buildingcontaining a boathouse, maintenance facility, and public restrooms near Pier 5 was designed by the firm ARO as a rugged steel grid. It’s industrial in spirit, but utterly without nostalgia. On Pier 2, there are stenciled icons, designed by the firm Open, that use simple pictograms indicating the different available activities, such as people jumping or skating. They’re clear and representational, cute but not too cute. The overall aesthetic feels genuinely like the MVVA team created it in response to the site and the moment.
Critics of Brooklyn Bridge Park, however, don’t generally go after its design. Instead, they take issue with the fact that its operations are funded by real estate development: a hotel, an adjacent condo building at the north end of the park, and three apartment buildings (including the adaptive reuse of a former Jehovah’s Witness warehouse) at the other end, plus rents the park charges to concessions like Ample Hills Creamery and Fornino Pizza.
The city funds the park’s capital projects, like the conversion of Pier 3 into a meadow, and provided $12.6 million last year. But the operating expenses, to the tune of $18.6 million in 2017, are supplied by ground lease rents on the development sites and something called PILOT payments, or “payment in lieu of taxes.” According to Landau, Brooklyn Bridge Park is “completely self-sustaining” thanks to the revenue generated by those developments, which cover “100 percent of the day-to-day operating costs.”
The Pika teardrop trailer from Timberleaf Trailers is a tiny take on a classic shape. Courtesy of Timberleaf Trailers
There are so many types of campers out there, from huge Class As to midsize camper vans. But one of the most iconic styles of campers is the teardrop. Despite falling out of fashion in the 1960s, the teardrop trailer is making a comeback thanks to its swooping shape, its light tow weight, and sensible design. Love campers and trailers? Come join our community group.
Curbed is dedicated to the camper beat, and we’ve tracked the best camper vans and trailers in previous stories. Today, however, we’re dedicated to helping you find the best teardrop on the market. Behold, five teardrop trailers you can order right now.
The Luna trailer is a modern take on the classic teardrop shape. Courtesy of inTechRV
Cost: The base price of the standard Luna is $16,537 with fully loaded options running over $19,000
Details: Available in three different trim packages—the regular Luna, the Luna Lite, and the new off-road capable Luna Rova—these teardrop-inspired trailers range in base weight from 1400 to 1800 pounds with a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) of 2,200 pounds. This means that many large sedans and small SUVs can pull the trailer.
A distinctive full tempered glass windshield provides views to the outdoors, while inside a fairly large—especially for a teardrop—bed can easily sleep two thanks to the seven-foot-long interior space. When not set up as a bed, two 30 by 82-inch futon sofa beds have backrests and cupholders so they can be used for lounging.
Cost: First launched in 2015, the Hütte Hut trailer starts at $63,900
Details: Using a yacht-like aesthetic and warm colors, the Hütte Hut trailer boasts double doors, expansive windows, bowed trusses, and a sun diffusing canopy that lets in plenty of light. A dry weight of 850 pounds means that it’s towable by most vehicles, and the trailer can sleep two.
You won’t be doing much else in the Hütte Hut besides sleeping or relaxing, but a Joubert Okume marine ply exterior, Baltic Birch wood floors and fixtures, and solid wood trusses make for an inviting space. Optional extras include interior window coverings, a battery system, additional floor storage, and LED lighting.
The Pika teardrop trailer from Timberleaf Trailers is a tiny take on a classic shape. Courtesy of Timberleaf Trailers
Cost: Pricing starts at $11,750
Details: The Pika is a about 1⁄3 smaller than a standard teardrop, making it perfect for one or two people.The length clocks in at just under 12 feet, and it’s the smallest of the trailers sold by Timberleaf. Even though it’s compact, you still get about 36 inches of headspace and a skylight that helps the interior feel larger.
The sleeping space also features LED reading lights, a multi-speed fan, dual USB ports, and cargo-net storage. The best part might be the dual-access door and two extra sliding windows; the Pika might be small on space but its thoughtful, airy design means that you won’t feel cramped.
The Little Guy Max trailer lets you stand tall despite the classic teardrop shape. Courtesy of Little Guy Trailers
Cost: MSRP of $33,000
Details: In the Little Guy Max camper, curved lines meet a modern trailer that boasts a spacious 6 feet 7 inches of interior height. Two different sleeping areas can sleep three people total, one person in a full size dinette that converts to a bed, and two people in a bedroom area that boasts a queen size mattress. While this wouldn’t work for large families, two adults and a kiddo would fit perfectly.
Available with light maple or dark walnut hardwood cabinetry, the Little Guy Max also has a decent-sized kitchen area with a microwave, two-burner stove, a fridge, sink, and a floor to ceiling pantry. Storage cubbies are tucked in smart spaces throughout the trailer, and the camper also comes with LED lighting and a stereo system.
Two TVs and a whole lot more come standard. Check it out.
Vintage Overland is a caravan company based in Grand Junction, Colorado. Courtesy of Vintage Overland
Cost: Prices range from $12,500 for the smaller versions to $16,500 for the largest
Details: Created by Britton Purser, a design-school graduate and former carpenter, the campers aim to combine “an appreciation for art and design and the romance of vintage travel.” Featuring a welded steel frame, anodized aluminum exterior, and an interior made from Baltic birch wood, Purser and his team pay homage to Danish design with a healthy does of Colorado charm.
The company has three models and two different sizes of teardrop campers, with the largest model boasting a queen memory foam mattress, bug screen, and a pull-out writing desk.
WeWork may be one of the most valuable startups and coworking operators in the world, but new research reveals investors tend to pay less for assets where WeWork occupies large amounts of space.
A new Cushman & Wakefield study found that eight buildings that traded hands since 2016 where WeWork occupied more than 40% of office space all sold with above-average cap rates — from 50 to over 100 basis points higher than average in most cases, The Real Deal reports.
Of the nine buildings to trade hands where WeWork occupied less than 40%, five traded at significantly lower cap rates than average.
While WeWork can boost a building’s visibility and cool factor, making it more enticing to investors, properties where WeWork absorbs large swatches of space often result in a lack of confidence in the coworking giant’s long-term prospects, Cushman Head of Americas Capital Research David Bitner told TRD.
Part of that could be due to memories of virtual and shared-office provider Regus’ bankruptcy during the 2001 recession, when aggressive spending on expansion left it overleveraged.
WeWork has been operating at a loss since its inception, ending 2017 at a $934M deficit as spending outstripped incoming revenue. The current coworking trend looks markedly different than it did at the turn of the millennium, but it has also not experienced a downturn.
That said, Bitner does not expect WeWork to repeat the downfall of Regus, which has since been bought by IWG (which is working toward a sale itself). Judging by SoftBank’s multibillion-dollar investment, he is not alone.
Meanwhile, WeWork continues to add more components to its business in an attempt to insulate itself should coworking take a dive. It now manages spaces entirely occupied by heavyweights such as IBM and Amazon in New York, and recently launched a headquarters design and management arm for companies not interested in coworking.
Optimists consider the diversification to be positive, but IWG CEO Mark Dixon wonders if WeWork is repeating Regus’ mistakes. The industry leader also remains as aggressive as ever in expanding its membership, striking deals with brokerages to steer office users toward its spaces.
If indeed its growth is too much, too soon, buildings that depend heavily on WeWork as a tenant will be exposed if the other shoe drops, which is why investors are demanding discounts on such properties.
A new law could stop rent hikes tied to capital improvements, and instead offer tax credits to landlords for making upgrades in their buildings.
State Sen. Michael Gianaris and state Assemblyman Brian Barnwell, both of whom represent Queens, say the legislation they are introducing will protect tenants, the New York Daily News reports.
Under the existing Major Capital Improvement Program, owners who put in new windows, boilers and roofs in rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments can raise the rent by up to 6% a year to cover the costs.
Barnwell told the Daily News that landlords have used it as tactic to push out renters.
“Under our legislation, landlords will not be able to increase tenants’ rents due to repairs/improvements the landlord should already have made,” he said.
Under the bill, if the Major Capital Improvements Program is repealed, people could try to get their rents back to pre-improvement levels. The program was introduced in the 1970s, but the lawmakers told the newspaper the bill is worded to limit rent reductions to a 10-year lookback period.
The Rent Stabilization Association, a landlord group, opposes the bill.
“It’s ridiculous,” spokesman Frank Ricci said, adding that the city’s housing supply is in good condition and 50% of the units are more than 75 years old. “The only way to preserve the existing housing is to keep putting money back in and rehabbing,” he said.
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