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In Defense Of Land Reclamation: It Ain’t All Palm Islands!

Earlier today Urban Photo Blog tweeted earlier today a link to an article about Hong Kong’s latest land reclamation project, with an obviously sarcastic “because it worked so well in Dubai!” tacked on at the end. Not to pick on Urban Photo Blog – actually, his Twitter account is definitely one of the best I follow – but I think that some of boomtime Dubai’s real estate projects, among them the infamous Palm Islands, give land reclamation a bad rap. …

California HSR Review Panel Recommends Against $2.7 Billion Bond Issue

Enormous viaducts like this are one reason for the project's ballooning cost estimates Well, the other shoe has finally dropped: the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group is recommending that the state legislature not authorize the issue of $2.7 billion in bonds to begin paying for the state’s planned $98.5 billion high-speed rail line….

Qatar’s Skyscraper Diplomacy

London’s Shard tower, soon to be the tallest in Europe, is, financially speaking, a bit puzzling. Europe is in the midst of an economic crisis, and London’s Southwark, across from the skyscraper-crazed City of London, is gentrifying, but not the safest place for a massive real estate investment. The developers have yet to sign a major office tenant, and nobody is expecting the project to turn much of a profit. …

A Roosevelt Island Campus To Make Le Corbusier Proud

Cornell-Technion has released another “fly-over” video, this one focused on the interior. But it does shed a bit more light on what the development will look like from the ground, and it ain’t pretty – the campus will be laid out in a fairly Corbusian plan, replete with lots of concrete plazas and grassy knolls (especially near the campus’ northern gateway to the rest of the island), and no retail space in sight. The empty spaces in the video are packed with students milling around, admiring the beautiful grassy fields and sloping moss interiors. But anyone who’s ever been to one of New York‘s many towers-in-a-park high-rises or zoning code-enabled privately-owned public spaces knows better than to believe that what New Yorkers really want is a bunch of grass and concrete to hang out on….

The Lord Gave To NYC Tech Start-Ups And Universities, And The Lord Hath Taken Away

Stanford's (losing) vision for Roosevelt Island, with requisite acres of green Big news out of New York City: Stanford pulled out of Bloomberg’s applied sciences university “competition” after Cornell got an enormous donation, leaving the upstate university the front runner to build a new campus, likely on Roosevelt Island. This comes with up to $100 million in state subsidies, plus free land and invaluable planning acquiescence. …

The Central Park Caper And Transit NIMBYism

It has often been suggested that one of the reasons that American subway construction is so expensive is that our laws are too friendly to NIMBYs. That is to say, contractors will be paid to engineer expensive, long-term solutions to avoid short-term disruptions to neighbors during construction. The most prominent example is avoiding cut-and-cover subway construction in favor of digging deep holes with tunnel boring machines that don’t disrupt the surface as much. …

Real Estate and Revolution in Moscow

From an interesting NYT analysis of Russia’s new protesting class – young, urban, and doing pretty well: It is a paradox, but one that has been documented by social scientists: the residents of Moscow and other large cities tend to express greater frustration with Prime Minister Putin as his government has helped make them wealthier. One explanation is the high level of public corruption here, which threatens new personal wealth….

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