Armed with cameras, case files and witness tips, Frankfurt city inspectors track down covert Airbnb-style apartments that are squeezing an already tight housing market.
Tag: housing
Billions in investment, soaring room rates, and hasty construction mark Brazil’s bid to put the Amazon at the center of climate diplomacy.
The housing crisis is not only driving families from their homes, it is also emptying democracy of its substance. Into this vacuum, fear, hatred, and authoritarian rhetoric are growing and gaining ground, especially among young people and the working classes.
In Valencia, Spain, the expansion of both licensed and unlicensed tourist accommodations is raising housing prices and pushing locals out of traditionally working-class neighborhoods.
Across Mexico, where gentrification has pushed housing prices up by 247% from 2005 to 2021, locals are angry over their forced displacement and lack of housing rights. They recently protested against mass tourism and “digital nomads.”
Spain’s coastline is shrinking, caught in a relentless battle between rising seas, legal disputes and private interests. Thousands of homes now stand precariously close to the waves, some awaiting demolition, others clinging to legal loopholes. As nature advances, the struggle for land — and survival — intensifies.
Malaga has announced plans to ban the registration of new holiday accommodation in up to 43 neighborhoods of the city, joining a long list of Spanish municipalities fighting mass tourism and its impact on real estate and rent prices.
A rent-to-own program aimed to help black citizens obtain property in a post-colonial world. Decades later, many homebuyers are still waiting to call their house their own.
China’s real estate crisis is hitting small, unattractive cities like Shaoguan hard. This city of 3.3 million residents in the far south of the country has a stock of empty apartments that could take 10 years to sell.
The tragic death of two people inside the Neapolitan housing complex has thrown the spotlight back on a place that had transformed quickly from model city to a Camorra stronghold. Le Vele are now once again a model for other suburbs.
The “Return to the Neighborhood” program aims to recover vacant houses in order to create affordable rentals that will allow former residents to return to Lisbon’s historic center.
Throughout the ages, convents have been adapted and transformed to fulfil the needs of growing cities such as Portugal’s capital city Lisbon. Now more than ever, with an ongoing housing crisis, researchers, politicians and developers are looking at convents to be transformed into housing solutions.
Residents of the most disadvantaged peripheries of the Argentine capital are pushed to collaborate in the absence of municipal support. They build homes and create services that should be public. It is both admirable, and deplorable.
Gentrification is affecting many Latin American cities. As residents push back, there are worries that existing residents and cultures alike will be erased.
Announced several years ago, 3D-printing in the building industry is becoming a reality with the first houses already going on sale in the United States. Start-ups and manufacturers predict this could be a revolution for the construction industry.
BEIJING — Menglin’s boyfriend accompanied her to the clinic. It took less than 10 minutes for the doctor to place the contraceptive implant in Menglin’s upper left arm. It’s now very unlikely she’ll get pregnant in the next three years. She is 31, a good age to give birth, but she is reluctant to start […]
Demarkated by the British for tax purposes, these villages have since been swallowed by India’s massive capital city, but continue to stand apart in terms of zoning and design.
When the coronavirus hit, Valérie, a rising business executive used to a grueling daily commute into Paris, realized her life needed to change. Now, she and her husband have revived a long dormant dream: a house in Normandy with an ocean view. “We have the impression of advancing — finally,” she told Le Monde, adding […]
A derivative of the Bauhaus revolution, the Isokon building brought modernity, and affordable rent, to conservative Britain — 85 years ago.
These easy-to-build and ‘climate-change-proof’ homes are growing popular in places like Miami that are prone to hurricanes and flooding.
The two-year-old housing project is clean and orderly, unlike the makeshift dwellings its thousands of relocated residents left behind. But it’s also isolated and dull.
BEIJING — “Goodbye,” Ying told her third husband. “Oh,” he responded indifferently. Through their legal, but dishonnest, marriage, Ying earned 40,000 yuan ($6,000). Her “husband” was allowed to buy an apartment in Beijing, which in turn, nets him about one million yuan ($150,000) a year. Ying and her real husband Wang are a couple who […]
PUNTA DEL ESTE — From this Argentine beach resort, it was business as usual this week for the Trump family empire. But the appearance of Eric Trump, the second-born son of the next U.S. President, to promote the family company’s new luxury flats in Argentina was also another flash of the unresolved questions about major […]
In France, more than 23,000 people live in a room of smaller than nine square meters, many in the capital. But to rent out such small spaces is illegal.
The twin problems of the economic crisis and university studies taking longer than expected have conspired to force many young adults to return home to their parents. Problem is, sometimes they bring their partners too.
In the past year, the greater Los Angeles area has seen a surge in the number of Chinese buyers interested in the area’s real estate — in particular, those mega-properties valued above the $15 million mark. The trend has been confirmed by both L.A.”s high-end real estate brokerage firm, John Aaroe Group, which has recently […]
A new study shows income and asset inequality in China has reached epic proportions, with the top undertaxed and the bottom at grave social risk because of a lack of civil protection.
TIANJIN — A stone’s throw from the highly polluted Bohai Gulf, the Tianjin eco-city is like a mirage. Its buildings, surrounded by trees, offer a rare green and airy setting in the surrounding industrial development zone, which is choked, for much of the year, in a blanket of smog. Public lighting is charged through solar […]
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VANCOUVER — James Hankle, a software engineer in his 50s sporting bluejeans and a Green Party T-shirt, is explaining his fix for Vancouver’s runaway property prices when he’s interrupted by an eavesdropping passer-by: “Stop allowing people from China to buy our houses and leave them vacant,” she says and walks away. Despite British Columbia’s aversion to pipelines and affection for pot, housing affordability has pushed both aside as the No. 1 issue raised by area residents in the run-up to Canada’s election this month. It’s not completely surprising given that Vancouver has become North America’s most expensive city. Surging purchase […]
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TEL AVIV — Despite its ongoing problems, the Palestinian economy has recently shown significant signs of recovery. It’s particularly evident after a period of deep recession, economist Yitzhak Gal notes in an article published by a Tel Aviv University journal. The Palestinian Authority has faced the threat of collapse and, with it, the destruction of […]
CAIRO — Questions abound in the wake of Egyptian Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb’s announcement that the government will build a 700-square kilometer business and administrative center called The Capital Cairo. Topping the list of queries is whether Egypt, which has millions of vacant property units as it stands, even needs this type of project. The […]
Here is a preview of our exclusive newsletter to keep up-to-date and stay inspired by Smart City innovations from around the world.
Here is a preview of our exclusive newsletter to keep up-to-date and stay inspired by Smart City innovations from around the world.
Here is a preview of our exclusive newsletter to keep up-to-date and stay inspired by Smart City innovations from around the world.
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Here is a preview of our exclusive newsletter to keep up-to-date and stay inspired by Smart City innovations from around the world.
An Argentine couple struggling to afford rising housing prices went down to the dock and took matters into their own hands.
Masters in the art of skirting real estate regulations…