The trend for digital detox holidays and other fashionable manifestations of spare, minimalist, decluttered living: what if they’re at least partly motivated by avoidance?
Tag: realestate
Living and Dying on Airbnb — Matter
Startups that redefine social and economic relations pop up in an instant. Lawsuits and regulations lag behind.
“People who don’t live in the area drive by, see people hanging out in the park or on the street talking, and assume everyone’s dealing drugs or up to something. Most of them are just living their lives.” [Police Lieutenant Douglas E. Little, speaking about Bedford Pine in Atlanta]
Building Boulevard: following last year’s Year of Boulevard initiative, what’s next? | Rebecca Burns, Atlanta Magazine (via atlurbanist)
Rebecca Solnit · Diary: Google Invades · LRB 7 February 2013
I loved this essay on San Francisco and boomtowns. Nicely done.
Rebecca Solnit · Diary: Google Invades · LRB 7 February 2013
See the big picture of how suburban developments are changing the country’s landscape, with aerial photos and ideas for the future. A typology of suburbs. The variety is kind of cool.
In China, millions make themselves at home in caves – latimes.com
More than 30 million Chinese people live in caves, many of them in Shaanxi province where the Loess plateau, with its distinctive cliffs of yellow, porous soil, makes digging easy and cave dwelling a reasonable option.
Wow! 30 million.
In China, millions make themselves at home in caves – latimes.com
Marginal Revolution: Leaving Las Vegas (if they can)
Using U-Haul pricing for one-way trips to figure out where people want to move. Very clever idea.
One-Way Trip (August 2005)
Los Angeles to Las Vegas – $454.00
Las Vegas to Los Angeles – $119.00One-Way Trip (October 2010)
Los Angeles to Las Vegas – $223.00
Las Vegas to Los Angeles – $234.00
Reminds me of an excellent trio of recent Florida real estate journalism… In Harper’s, from Paul Reyes, Paradise swamped: The boom and bust of the middle-class dream and Bleak houses: Digging through the ruins of the mortgage crisis. And from George Packer in the New Yorker we have
The Ponzi State: Florida’s foreclosure disaster. All three are pretty darn good.
Condos of the Living Dead | Culture | Vanity Fair
“It’s not that these new Manhattan buildings don’t look very good. It’s that they look lazily derivative, and they’ll make New York look like every other grubbily transparent financial hub in the world.”
Baffler – A Cottage for Sale
A piece about painter Thomas Kinkade and the California real estate market.
We have to accept that the violent orange glow that emanates from the interior of nearly every house in a Kinkade painting merely indicates that the house is warm and inviting, not burning to the ground. […] He says that as the son of a single mother who worked late, he often came home to a house that was dark and cold, especially in winter. The “Kinkade glow” represents what he wished was there instead. He tells the story more than once, which raises a question or two: Didn’t he maybe just want to burn the place down? Is his art really a form of arson?
Mark Larson 