Marker December 2020 “None of us knows how long this crisis will last,” pleaded Robert Reffkin in a letter to Nancy Pelosi and her Republican counterpart Kevin McCarthy in March. Reffkin, CEO of real estate startup Compass, was urging Congress to include independent contractors like real estate agents— some 2 million of them in the United States, according […]
GEN Magazine August 2020 It’s a Thursday morning in July at the Jackson County Circuit Court in Kansas City, Missouri and Judge Mary Weir is running one of four landlord-tenant dockets processing housing cases — usually landlords seeking to evict their tenants. These state courtrooms, which typically try cases involving payday lenders and financial companies, […]
AIA Oculus Summer 2020 Of all the places that went quiet during the sudden coronavirus quarantine of New York City, the silent streets and sidewalks may be the most unnerving. More than 6,000 miles of roads, from small side streets to broad boulevards, course through the city’s five boroughs, serving as urban arteries of people, […]
Curbed November 2017 Small businesses and streetscapes, boulevards and bodegas: These aren’t the typical aspirations of up-and-coming architecture firms. But the self-described “scrappy Angelenos” at the helm of LA-Más, a nonprofit architecture and policy practice, see things differently. The name alone—which translates to “Los Angeles more,” as in, amplify the characteristics, personalities, and businesses at […]
Curbed December 2017 Dallas is a booming city within a booming region. The epicenter of the Metroplex—a constellation of cities, including Fort Worth, that saw its population grow 35 percent between 2000 and 2014 and added 717,000 jobs—Dallas, and its surrounding cities and suburbs, is swelling with new arrivals from coastal cities and other countries. The region […]
Curbed February 2020 Bernardy and Tiblanche St. Fleur have seen a lot from their perch on Miami’s Second Avenue, where they have run a modest grocery store for the last 25 years. Down the block from the famed Mache Ayisyen, a marketplace in the center of the city’s Little Haiti neighborhood, the couple sells food […]
Curbed February 2020 If you think you have meeting fatigue at the office, try attending a public meeting. Last September in a Brooklyn church basement, a meeting over new bike lanes spiraled out of control when cycling advocate Doug Gordon was shoved by a guest speaker and filmmaker. In October, during a hearing over a proposed homeless shelter in […]
Curbed San Francisco March 2020 Canceled events, lost work, shuttered stores, empty public spaces, and panic shopping: Life during coronavirus has rapidly, and overwhelmingly, changed. Now San Francisco, which was one of the first cities to declare an emergency over the spread of the disease, and the greater Bay Area have become the first to […]
Curbed December 2018 A year ago, a warehouse filled with rows of electric scooters might have seemed a little dorky, maybe home to a company trying to show fanny pack-wearing tourists local landmarks. But today, in Santa Monica, California, an old industrial space filled with hundreds of electric scooters with purple and pink stripes represents […]
Curbed March 2020 On a small farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, perched on the edge of the sugarcane fields that run through the state’s midsection, married couple Carmen Franz and Tripp Eldridge look perfectly cast as hip millennial farmers. They’re tan, trim, and gregarious, ready to talk composting or crop rotation at a moment’s notice. They […]