Tag: Real Estate and Housing (Residential)

How Pet Parrots Started a War Inside an NYC Apartment Building

Long before the complaints about shrieking parrots, many years before lawyers were hired and stern letters exchanged, and more than a decade before the Department of Justice literally turned the building into a federal case, the Rutherford, a 14-story co-op in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, was a pretty tranquil place to live. At […]

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A Mandate for Boston’s Suburbs: Make Room for More Apartments

Working at a cafe in Winthrop, Mass., for the last seven years, Valdineia Santos fell in love with the seaside suburb of 20,000 people, just north of Boston. But the two-bedroom apartments she found there rented for about $3,000 per month, considerably more than she could afford. So Ms. Santos and her young daughter stayed […]

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California Bill Would Force Insurers to Pay Full Coverage Without Requiring Itemization

California’s insurance commissioner joined with state legislators on Friday to propose a new law that would force insurers to pay homeowners 100 percent of the coverage for belongings inside destroyed homes, releasing them from the mentally taxing process of listing every object they lost — a requirement of many insurers, and one that consumer advocates […]

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A Philip Johnson House Is on the Market in Newburgh, N.Y.

Jeremy Parker and Jiminie Ha, longtime friends and collaborators, knew they had to act fast on a listing about five years ago for a Philip Johnson-designed house in Newburgh, N.Y. “We were shocked to find this house,” Mr. Parker said in an email. “Nobody knew about a Philip Johnson home in Newburgh,” Ms. Ha added. […]

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Leda Athanasopoulou’s Patmos Home Reflects Centuries of History

THE GREEK DESIGNER Leda Athanasopoulou — whose practice spans jewelry, furniture and interiors — has spent her life in Athens, London, New York and Paris. But when the 34-year-old thinks of home, her mind immediately goes to Patmos, the rocky, secluded Dodecanese island near the coast of Turkey where her mother, Katerina Tsigarida, an esteemed Greek […]

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The Housing Crisis Forces Change on a Low-Rise Pocket of Brooklyn

Change doesn’t always come easily in Brooklyn’s liberal strongholds. But New York’s push to build more housing in every corner of the city — even in places that have sometimes been skeptical of new development — cleared a significant hurdle on Wednesday, when a key City Council committee approved a zoning change that will clear […]

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In Fight Over San Francisco Building, Bitcoin Pioneer Is Rejected by Democratic Elite

In San Francisco, it is informally called “Susie’s Building” in deference to the owner of the 12th-floor penthouse with wraparound views of the bay. Susie Tompkins Buell, a power broker in Democratic politics, is known for throwing lavish fund-raising parties and writing checks so large they can start a campaign. A who’s who of the […]

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L.A. Faces Pressure From Wealthy Residents as the Pacific Palisades Rebuilds

The Pacific Palisades — the Los Angeles community where more than 6,800 structures were destroyed and nearly 1,000 were damaged in the California wildfires — is among the wealthiest enclaves in the United States. The average household income is $375,000, three times the city average, and the typical home is worth $3.7 million. The community […]

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The Many Ways You Can Give Antiques a New Life

It’s not always obvious what to do with some pieces of furniture. Most of us hang on to family heirlooms even if we don’t love them, have favorite chairs and sofas that inevitably start to fall apart and second-guess ourselves about timeworn items that turn up at antiques stores at estate sales. Fortunately, there’s no […]

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How Old Prisons Are Being Converted Into Stylish Apartments

Diamond Pearson needed a new place to live and was looking for something with an industrial feel. When Liberty Crest Apartments in Fairfax County, Va., came up in her online search, she was intrigued. “I checked it out and fell in love — the brick, the concrete floors — it was so beautiful,” said Ms. […]

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7 Steps L.A. Could Take to Gird Against Future Wildfires

Fire and wind are certain to shape the future of Los Angeles as the world warms. Los Angeles had started taking steps to prepare. But there are lessons it can learn from other cities adapting to extreme fire weather: managing yards; taking care of neighbors; making it easier to get out of harm’s way. One […]

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Community Solar Projects Make Renewable Energy More Accessible, and Trump May End Them

In a suburb about an hour north of New York City, a former dairy farm is now producing solar energy. Some of the people who will benefit live nearby, while others are dozens of miles away in Yonkers, which borders the Bronx, or in Downtown Brooklyn. The 20-acre farm, in Yorktown, N.Y., is part of […]

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New York City Landlord Wants You Out? There Had Better Be ‘Good Cause.’

Last winter, Eileen Kelley received a notice that her landlord was not going to renew her lease when it expired in a few months. After eight years in the East Village, a neighborhood in Manhattan she had come to love for its street markets and parks, Ms. Kelley, 29, confronted the sudden possibility that she […]

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Rising Prices Dashed Trudeau’s Promise to Canada’s Middle Class

When Justin Trudeau became Canada’s prime minister in 2015, his relentless promise to improve life for the middle class resonated so strongly with Shivaan Burke that she went to work for the local Liberal member of Parliament, who was elected along with Mr. Trudeau. But a decade later, as Mr. Trudeau prepares to leave office […]

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Existing-Home Sales in 2024 Were Slowest in Decades Amid High Mortgage Rates

High interest rates kept U.S. home sales in a deep freeze for much of last year. It could be a while before the market experiences much of a thaw. Americans bought just over four million previously owned homes last year, the National Association of Realtors said on Friday. That was the fewest since 1995 and […]

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What Los Angeles Could Learn From Great Fires of the Past

In the era when American cities regularly caught fire, the widespread destruction seeded what looks, in retrospect, like possibility. Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871 accelerated its rise as a dominant metropolis. In Boston, which burned in 1872, the value of land newly topped with better buildings surged. After its 1889 fire, Seattle built […]

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What Republicans Could Cut to Pay for Trump’s Tax Cuts: Medicaid and More

Top Republicans are passing around an extensive menu of ideas to cover the cost of a massive tax cut and immigration crackdown bill. They could create a 10 percent tariff on all imports, bringing in an estimated $1.9 trillion. They could establish new work requirements for Medicaid recipients, bringing in $100 billion in savings. They […]

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Spain Seeks to Curb Short-Term Rentals Amid Growing Housing Crisis

The Spanish government is moving to rein in real estate purchases by foreigners and curb the spread of short-term rentals, part of a series of measures that officials say are necessary to alleviate a painful housing crunch that has rapidly become one of the worst in Europe. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said on Wednesday […]

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At 10 Cubed, a Restaurant on the 100th Floor, a Chef Toils in Obscurity

As the chef at 10 Cubed in New York City, Nduvo Salaam prepares dishes that blend his African-Caribbean roots with classic French technique on the 100th floor of Central Park Tower — one of the tallest residential buildings in the world. But it can be lonely at the top. The restaurant, 1,000 feet in the […]

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New York City Seeks Jolt for Midtown With Plan to Build 10,000 Homes

A new proposal to ease New York City’s housing crisis would make way for nearly 10,000 apartments in parts of Midtown Manhattan that do not currently allow new residential construction, a shift officials hope will reinvigorate an area that has come to represent economic challenge. The plan, which city officials introduced at a Planning Commission […]

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Loving an ‘Untouched’ Modernist House, and Then Getting Down to Work

In September 2019, Emlen Fischer and Ayla Christman saw a listing for a 1966 modernist home with a roof that crumpled low over the earth in Palo Alto, Calif., and were intrigued. As renters, they never expected to buy a home in the tech-centric city. “You don’t get all that much for the money,” said […]

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Rescuing Pongo, Pearl, Bandit, Tiger and Zipper

David Pierce shouted to his wife, Jane Pierce, to pack, as embers rained down on their block in Altadena. Ms. Pierce set to work on finding the 15 items on the list pinned to their bulletin board — a list they had created after surviving a fire decades earlier and included computers, eyeglasses, spare car […]

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Open Houses in Los Angeles Take on an Eerie Feeling

Rosa Garcia, a real estate agent, eagerly greeted a young woman and her family when they showed up on Saturday at 1 p.m. for an open house in Pasadena, Calif. Ms. Garcia, 50, who has been working in real estate for 24 years, has a personal interest in the three-bedroom home listed for $2.175 million. […]

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How Will L.A. Rebuild? Tubbs Fire Recovery in Wine Country Offers Clues.

Donna and Bob Williamson call the strange souvenirs pulled from the ashes of their home their Museum of Misery. There is the green wine bottle that melted, its glass neck drooping, that looks like it was pulled from a Salvador Dalí painting. Silver forks that fused into a thick, lumpy utensil, its prongs fanning out […]

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With ‘City of Yes,’ New York Finally Gets Real About the Housing Crisis

For decades now, progress in solving New York’s housing crisis has stagnated amid the contest between two dominant visions: one that would have the city build up and up and up as if it were Hong Kong, and another that would privilege intimate scale — in some parts of the city meaning the charming traditions […]

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Amid Wildfires, a New Reality for L.A.’s Reality TV Stars

The two most essential ingredients to any successful Los Angeles-based reality television show are mammoth multi-million-dollar homes and their sun-soaked, scenic views. As drama has unfolded over sex tape rumors, divorces and petty arguments about “ugly leather pants,” palatial real estate has served as a glamorous backdrop for several binge-worthy series. Over eight frothy, bright-skied […]

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When the Retirement Community Goes Bankrupt

Three years ago, when Bob and Sandy Curtis moved into an upscale continuing care retirement community in Port Washington, N.Y., he thought they had found the best possible elder care solution. In exchange for a steep entrance fee — about $840,000, funded by the sale of the Long Island house they had owned for nearly […]

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How Wildfires Came for Southern California

The fire that razed Melise Gerber’s house raced from the dry slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles through thousands of tightly packed homes, through a beloved 1950s diner, a sprawling Victorian-style mansion, an entire strip of downtown stores — its damage extending miles from anything locals considered wilderness. The path of destruction […]

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