Apartment Look

At the end of one sticky month during the summer of 2017, Elizabeth Bolles will have finished packing the contents of her Riverbend apartment. She, her partner, their two young sons and two dogs will then pile into her Subaru and drive 350 miles to Houston, where her partner will start a new job.   The move is the upshot of six years of frustration and disappointment for Bolles since she graduated from Tulane University's law school in 2011. Since then, she's struggled to find a well-paying job in New Orleans; she's been runner-up for several positions and has worked odd jobs and short-term gigs to make ends meet . She's in the same boat as many of her friends and acquaintances in the city — a one- time National Merit Scholar who's been waiting tables for a decade, a buddy with two doctorates who can't find a professional job .   "You hear one person's story," Bolles says, "and you think maybe there's something going on with them, maybe...

The city of East Palo Alto , a wedge of modest houses and light industrial sites in the heart of Silicon Valley , has been passed by in the great tech boom . A historically black area , it has seen a big Hispanic influx in the past two decades, with more than three out of four residents now coming from one of those two groups. It is still living down its reputation, gained a quarter of a century ago, as the murder capital of the US: one out of every 571 of its residents was the victim of a homicide in a single year. Things have improved since then. But over the same period, it has become the poor neighbour to some of the world's richest companies. In one of the ultimate signs of the divide between the haves and have-nots of the western US, the municipal government of East Palo Alto didn 't own the rights to draw more from the state's water reserves, which it would need in order to grow. In June this year, it took a gift of cash, from the private foundation set up by Mar...

When it comes to condominium development , Cascadia’s two largest cities couldn ’t be more different. Last year nearly 60 percent of new housing starts in the city of Vancouver, BC , were condominiums; meanwhile, Seattle saw no new condominium buildings open . And that’s not changing anytime soon: less than 10 percent of all building slated for downtown Seattle in the next three years will be condos. What’s the difference—why the blossoming of condominium construction in one city and the almost complete dearth in the other? The short answer is economics. In Vancouver, apartments are saddled with an unfavorable tax code , making condos the more lucrative multi- family housing investment even despite high rental demand . In Seattle’s skyrocketing rental market , one that’s climbed even faster than the condo market in recent years, apartment buildings are much more financially attractive, while condos come with bigger risks and, typically, lower returns. Compounding this profit differe...