As the mayor of an old farming town bursting with new homes, factories and warehouses, Eric Orsborn spends his days thinking about water. The lifeblood for this growth is billions of gallons of water pumped from the ground, and his city, Buckeye, Ariz., is thirsty for more as builders push deeper into the desert fringes […]
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Democratic lawmakers in New York had scrambled this week to assemble a plan to tackle the state’s housing crisis: They said it included measures to protect tenants from eviction and cap rent increases, incentives to remodel empty offices into apartments and an extension of a tax break for developers to build affordable housing. But it […]
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For the last 18 years of his life, André Leon Talley — Vogue’s pioneering creative director — lived in a stately center-hall colonial in White Plains, N.Y. Mr. Talley died last year at age 73, after complications from Covid. The house is now for sale for $1.25 million. “The house is a masterpiece,” said the […]
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The allure of credit repair as a profession, and its susceptibility to dubious practices, was on display last May, when attorneys, investigators and data specialists from the F.T.C., accompanied by local law enforcement, showed up at the headquarters of Financial Education Services, in the upscale Detroit suburb Farmington Hills. The F.T.C. claimed F.E.S. was running […]
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Much has been written about “good enough” marriages, but what of “good enough” houses in “I guess we have to live somewhere” neighborhoods? This is the story of a family who began with low expectations and then fell in love. In 2016, Amanda and Alain de Beaufort were renting an apartment with a garden in […]
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The Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Catholic house of worship on West 14th Street, is a grandly inventive architectural oddity and the mother of all Hispanic storefront churches in New York City. Manhattan’s first church created for a Spanish-speaking congregation, it was cobbled together out of two adjacent rowhouses in 1902 and 1917. […]
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Plenty of luxury housing developments are built around glamorous perks: a manicured 18-hole golf course, a private beach club, even an exclusive on-site restaurant crowned with Michelin stars. Tucked in the coastal jungle of Western Mexico comes yet another hyper-luxurious real estate offering, this one banking on a novel perk: a pony named Karen. Karen […]
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This is when Lee-Egan’s story breaks with the entirety of the California past. Ever since the Gold Rush, an endless stream of newcomers have been settling down in this beautiful place, falling in love with it and dreaming about ways to keep out the newcomers behind them. So, while the California dream has long included […]
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A mix of extreme conditions has made the remote Cape Cod town’s housing market one of the most harrowing in New England. WHY WE’RE HERE We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. In this coastal New England town, a booming summer economy has local renters fearful of being priced out. By […]
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For years, the Hamptons were a hot summer destination for young, up-and-coming New Yorkers and the old and new moneyed alike. It was a place to see and be seen. Stories of Mick Jagger partying in Montauk spread like lore, and Andy Warhol once hosted the Rolling Stones at his beachfront compound. It wasn’t uncommon […]
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The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Thursday that states which seize and sell private property to recoup unpaid taxes violate the Constitution’s takings clause if they retain more than what the taxpayer owed. The case concerned a 94-year-old woman in Minnesota who had stopped paying property taxes on her condominium after moving into an assisted-living […]
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The rows of towering buildings crowding the banks of the Gan River are a testament to the real estate boom that transformed Nanchang in eastern China from a gritty manufacturing hub to a modern urban center. Now those skyscrapers are evidence of something very different: China’s real estate market in crisis, reeling after years of […]
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For decades, residents and seasonal visitors to the Hamptons and other towns on the East End of Long Island have braced for spending summer mornings and evenings in the “trade parade,” the congested procession of contractors, hospital staff and other workers who commute to the East End to work every day. Priced out of the […]
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The architect of Mayor Eric Adams’s housing plan is resigning, the mayor’s office confirmed on Wednesday, a key departure that underscores the administration’s struggles in dealing with the city’s intensifying affordability and homelessness crisis. The official, Jessica Katz, Mr. Adams’s chief housing officer, is leaving as the mayor struggles to respond to a housing crisis […]
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Millions of Americans embarked on home-improvement projects during the pandemic. Many of those projects annoyed their neighbors. But in SoHo, on the top floor of a co-op building filled with multimillion-dollar lofts, an apartment addition is the centerpiece of an only-in-New-York dispute, pitting a wealthy financier named Federico Pignatelli della Leonessa against Ray Dalio, the […]
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There is a transcendent quality to the gardens of the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, which overtake us with the sense that we have arrived at a place where we would like — and very much need — to spend more time. Drawn into the complex textural mosaic of muted colors, we can exhale. Even when […]
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Like the tongue of a snake, Long Island’s eastern edge splits into two distinct tines. To the south lies the cluster of affluent villages known as the Hamptons. To the north is a bucolic strip of farmland that prides itself on its blue-collar roots. The lines are blurring in recent years, drawn anew by an […]
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On a recent May evening, Janet O’Brien served up Old-Fashioneds and tequilas on ice to friends at her Montauk home. The conversational menu featured what one might expect for a tony Hamptons cocktail hour: past and upcoming trips to Morocco, Manhattanites bragging about rarely stepping foot in Brooklyn and gossip about how much neighbors spent […]
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For decades, affordable housing in New York City has followed a seemingly simple rule: To make new development more palatable, half of new affordable apartments must first be offered to people already living in the area. The policy, put in place in 1988 by Mayor Ed Koch, was designed to benefit low-income communities. It has […]
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The tenement on East Seventh Street where I live was built in 1893, when a financial crisis in the United States had started to corrode a fabled, materialistic and short-lived time known as the Gilded Age, chronicled most recently in the HBO series of the same name. The building’s original owner, Sigmund B. Steinmann — […]
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The scenery can’t compare. So why are Hawaiians increasingly moving there? WHY WE’RE HERE We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. Drawn by the casino whirl and affordable housing, Hawaiians increasingly are migrating to Las Vegas. By Eliza Fawcett Photographs by Hana Asano Reporting from Las Vegas May 20, 2023 When […]
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The four-bedroom house that Ray and Beth Nygren had lived in for 20 years in Auburn, Wash., measured about 2,400 square feet. The two-bedroom apartment that awaited them in a nearby independent- and assisted-living complex was less than half that size. They were moving — “maybe a little reluctantly,” said their daughter, Bonnie Rae Nygren […]
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Nevertheless, in 2007, the Blackstone Group bought Mr. Zell’s firm — then known as Equity Office Properties Trust — for $39 billion. His own fortune was estimated at nearly $5 billion, and with holdings in residential properties, drug and department stores, and energy and electronics companies — a lifetime of acquisitions that made him one […]
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SAN FRANCISCO — Standing at the stoop of her childhood home — a slim but stately Victorian shaded by an evergreen pear tree — Lynette Mackey pulled up a photo of a family gathering from nearly 50 years ago. The men were all in suits, the women in skirts. Ms. Mackey, a teenager in red […]
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On a stormy day in the spring of 2021, the sea defenses on the beach below Lucy Ansbro’s cliff-top home in Thorpeness, England, washed away. Then, the end of her garden collapsed into the North Sea. As she watched the plants tumble over the edge, she feared that her house in this coastal village 110 […]
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RIO VERDE FOOTHILLS, Ariz. When interviewing people in their homes here, I didn’t have the heart to ask them if I could use the bathroom. There’s no water to spare, so some families flush only once a day. As for showers, they’re rationed and timed: “You get in, you soap up, you turn the water […]
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Ms. Dillon has been in the United Arab Emirates since 2013, but divorced her husband in 2019. In the first year of the pandemic, she said, the isolation was crushing, and caring for her two children — a daughter, 12, and a son, 13 — was challenging while juggling a social life and a full-time […]
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You see them on Instagram and in design magazines: those perfectly composed coffee tables that tie a living room together and hint at the fabulous taste of the homeowners. How do those tablescapes come together? How does someone decide which accessories to use? And how can you compose a similar one in your home — […]
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In his 1987 book, “Bourgeois Utopias,” the historian Robert Fishman pointed out that “suburbia was at once the most characteristic product of explosive urban expansion and a desperate protest against it.” Many policymakers and homeowners are, in effect, still living within that tension, in denial of the ways the modern suburb already reflects trends in […]
Read MoreAcross China, many local governments are on the brink of insolvency. Some cities have reduced pay for civil servants. Cuts to municipal health insurance have triggered street protests. Central government bailouts are a possibility to rescue cities from their deep budget problems, but China hasn’t turned to a source of revenue that would be an […]
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Across China, many local governments are on the brink of insolvency. Some cities have reduced pay for civil servants. Cuts to municipal health insurance have triggered street protests. Central government bailouts are a possibility to rescue cities from their deep budget problems, but China hasn’t turned to a source of revenue that would be an […]
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