A strong economy or a stable lifestyle: Which scenario is preferable? I. INTRODUCTION I grew up in the 1950s and 60s when the Japanese economy was experiencing a strong growth. Everybody in Japan believed that tomorrow would be better than today as long as we worked hard. Dr. Ezra Feivel Vogel published a book titled […]

Wall of Equity and Debt The current interest rate environment in the European Union (EU) creates the following situation, which can be described best as a “wall of equity meets a wall of debt”: Real estate projects, which could not have been realized/financed several years ago, are financed today using favorably priced equity, hybrid and/or […]

Driving through my neighborhood in  Southern California, I see a different landscape than when I moved in a little more than a year ago. In my gated community, there once was an almost cult-like grooming of yards with massive green carpets of grass. The homeowners’ association gave out tickets to residents outside the cult who […]

Interest in, and use of, the Public Trust Doctrine has reached unprecedented levels recently in response to the growing threat that urban growth poses for parks and open spaces. The Public Trust Doctrine forces governments holding land assets in trust on behalf of the public to balance their short-term interests against the long-term protection of […]

One need only reflect upon the headlines of late regarding Brexit, Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP), Hanjin shipping bankruptcy, and slowing GDP growth to realize that all is not harmonious in the global economy. The common threads that run through these headlines — as well as other noteworthy current events, such as the Syrian refugee crisis and U.S. […]

I met my business partner Dan Gans in 1972 when we were both freshman at Gettysburg College. One year after graduating, we decided to start a development business together. After studying the entire New York Metropolitan area for three years as we completed our post-graduate studies, we came to the conclusion that Hoboken would be […]

Book by: Hugh F. Kelly, Ph.D., CRE (© 2016, Routeledge; 326 Pages) Hugh Kelly reminds us in more than one place in 24 Hour Cities that “a list of ingredients does not constitute a recipe.” In his book, Kelly offers us a full-flavored, sit-down, multi-course meal of form and function, detail and design, ebb and […]

Book By: Joel Kotkin (© 2016, Agate B2; 304 Pages) Joel Kotkin is a significant persona and one of the more prolific writers on the non-politically correct side of the “urbanism” debate. The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us puts him once more into the fray. By way of full disclosure, I am generally […]

The Impact of Submarket Trends on Property Performance   I. Introduction Location matters for how commercial real estate will perform over time. This statement will seem painfully obvious to industry practitioners, who may argue that (aside from timing and luck) location is the only thing that matters. However, in an age where capital flows across […]

The underlying goal of this article is to highlight issues in current smart city approaches, find common success factors of established projects and to create a framework based on these findings, which should lay ground for future smart city concepts and research. There are 31,700,000 results on Google if one searches for the keyword pair […]