Multifamily News

Work begins on Europe's tallest residential tower - 5/6/2008
Spain's building boom may have stalled, but Benidorm soars ever skywards. Work started at the weekend on what is to become Europe's tallest residential structure in the continent's highest-rise beach resort. The In Tempo building, 200 metres high and with 52 floors, represents the latest upward lunge of Spain's "vertical city". The project is expected to cost Euro 45m (£35m), and when completed in 2010, will comprise two gilded towers joined at the top by an inverted diamond motif. Sculptures in the form of flying seagulls will be suspended between the twin structures. Face-on, it resembles the number 11 and the letter M, and is a tribute to the victims of the Madrid train bombs on 11 March 2004. From the windows of its luxury apartments (costing Euro 6,000 per square metre) residents will enjoy an unrivalled bird's-eye view of the sand and the sea, and a unique perspective of the 325 other skyscrapers that already tower over Benidorm's three-mile beach. The resort is visited annually by up to five million holidaymakers, half of them north Europeans, mostly British.

Economy woes put $1B in MD development on hold - 4/27/2008
Apr. 27--More than $1 billion in development projects -- offices, residences, stores and hotels that would change Baltimore's skyline and help to revitalize the city -- have stalled in the face of the nationwide housing slump and faltering economy. The projects, including towers that would be Baltimore's tallest, would swell the tax base and potentially attract new -- and well-heeled -- city dwellers. But the housing slump has dulled the market for new condominiums and houses, and the subsequent credit crunch has made financing difficult to obtain. As a result, at least 11 major projects have been recast or are in limbo, waiting out the market. At the Inner Harbor, two sites planned for condominium and hotel skyscrapers are still parking lots. In Charles Village, the neighborhood's first proposed luxury condo building is on hold and likely to switch to apartments. And in Greektown, plans for 1,000 new residences on a gritty lot have been drastically scaled back. "Some of the big developments are clearly going to be put on hold" from a year or two to a couple of decades, depending on the economy, said Richard Clinch, director of economic development at the University of Baltimore's Jacob France Institute. "I think we're stuck where we are in terms of renewing neighborhoods."

L.A.'s industrial district goes from gritty to glam - 4/22/2008
When Laurel Canyon native Noah Stone went looking for a place to call his own last year, his thoughts first turned to Silver Lake and Atwater Village. But then Stone, 35, remembered an ad he had seen in Dwell magazine about a new part of downtown near the corner of Industrial and Mateo streets, where a couple of old industrial buildings had been converted into lofts. There, he found the Biscuit Co., a hulking building that was the former West Coast headquarters for Nabisco, which developers had restored into lofts. While much attention has been focused on the downtown revival going on around the Staples Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Old Bank District, a transformation of a different order is occurring to the east in L.A.'s gritty warehouse district.

Trump luxury tower opens in heart of Chicago - 4/19/2008
CHICAGO -- Approaching the Chicago River on a stroll down Michigan Avenue, you can't miss the curvilinear behemoth of glass and steel soaring into the sky. The long-awaited Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago, open for business since Jan. 30 but still under construction, commands a prime position in the heart of downtown and has changed the skyline dramatically. At 92 stories, the bold new landmark will be Chicago's second tallest building (after Sears Tower).

Leo DiCaprio buys condo in ecofriendly development - 4/16/2008
Yet more evidence that Leonardo DiCaprio, arguably Hollywood's most attractive green ambassador, lives by his word. The actor, in Boston with Martin Scorsese filming Shutter Island, just bought a Hudson River-facing apartment at Riverhouse, an ecofriendly Battery Park City development that's been LEED-certified gold (the second-highest rating for green buildings). He was spotted numerous times arriving at the site's sales office on his bike. It's a great fit for DiCaprio, one of the first megawatt celebrities to go green: The builders will use only non-pollutant materials and finishes, and residents will be provided with twice-filtered air and solar-powered energy. The do-gooding Action Center to End World Hunger has already signed up for a ground-floor retail space in the building. Through his publicist, DiCaprio, who's executive-producing the upcoming Discovery Channel series Eco-Town, would only say this: "Riverhouse is a prime example of how green technology is both accessible and achievable for new residential developments-it is a groundbreaking building."

Old brewery will morph into $2bil urban precinct - 4/11/2008
A $A2 billion ($US1.85 billion) plan has been unveiled to turn a disused central Sydney brewery into Australia's greenest urban precinct, housing up to 13,000 workers and residents.

Deal to build Canyon Ranch condos scrapped - 4/5/2008
A deal to build a 67-story wellness-oriented hotel and condominium at Rush and Huron Streets has fallen through, according to both the developer and the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, owner of the property.

Old LA parking lot torn down for Gehry condos - 3/26/2008
Even before it opened in 1969, the "Erector set" parking lot at the corner of 1st and Olive streets downtown was one of Los Angeles' most reviled structures. Richard G. Mitchell, head of the Community Redevelopment Agency, complained that it was just another monolith of concrete, asphalt and steel atop Bunker Hill. The mass of girders and slabs, perched atop what look like stilts, "fights you," Mitchell said. He predicted it would have a "depressing effect" on downtown. Robert Bolling, president of the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects, agreed, warning that the structure would have a "deleterious effect on the fabric of the city." At the time, the 1,062-car structure's saving grace was that it was temporary. Planners promised the "portable parking structure" would be dismantled and moved somewhere else, replaced by a more fitting form of architecture.

Philly gets $5.3m to update affordable housing units - 3/22/2008
U.S. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-PA), U.S. Rep. Allyson Y. Schwartz (D-13) and Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter today announced the awarding of $5.3 million in affordable housing grants for the construction or rehabilitation of 645 units of much-needed affordable housing across the city. The $5,335,955 in grants come from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh (FHLBank), a congressionally chartered wholesale bank that uses private capital in pursuit of its mission of affordable housing and community and economic development. Sen. Casey is a member of the Senate Banking Committee while Congresswoman Schwartz sits on the House Ways and Means Committee. Also attending today's announcement were the Rev. Luis Cortés Jr., founder and president of Esperanza USA and a director of FHLBank; Brian A. Hudson, executive director of the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, also an FHLBank director; John R. Price, president and chief executive officer of FHLBank Pittsburgh; and representatives of five local banks that worked with the assembled nonprofits to apply for and deliver the housing grants: Beneficial Savings Bank, Citizens Bank of Pennsylvania, Firstrust Bank, PNC Bank and Sovereign Bank.

First green residential building in Mumbai by 2010 - 3/21/2008
Real estate developer Shree Ram Urban Infrastructure today said it would build the country's firs a cost of about Rs 800 crore by 2010, the company Vice-Chairman Vikas S Kasliwal told reporters here.