All tagged real estate
Unbuild Downtown to Make Cities for Living
The pandemic catalyzed a tectonic shift in how Americans use cities: as places to live rather than work. The result is record-high vacancy rates in downtown office districts, and a rapid decline in retail and transit: a situation many are describing as a cataclysmic “doom loop.” In “Unbuild Downtown to Make Cities for Living,” PLATFORM editor Matthew Gordon Lasner discusses proposed solutions, including converting office buildings to housing. The problem is not only that most office buildings aren’t well suited to housing or that conversion is very expensive, but that central business districts are anathema to most Americans' notions of home. To save downtown — and avert a new financial crisis as office towers plunge in value — Lasner proposes using public subsidies to make office rents affordable to artists, makers, and startups, and to physically transform downtowns, incorporating changes such as building setbacks and courtyards, parks, and grocery stores, to make them appealing places to live.
The Social Origins of the Miami Condo
The catastrophic collapse of Champlain Towers South has drawn much attention to Miami-Dade’s condo boom of the 1970s and 80s. In “The Social Origins of the Miami Condo” Deborah Dash Moore and PLATFORM’s Matthew Gordon Lasner—as historians and as individuals with family connections to the Miami condo—contend that this proliferation was fueled not just by pursuit of profits and the “Florida dream” of affordable leisure but by the sense of community such buildings offered. As more Americans could afford a leisurely retirement, many sought homes that offered things to do and people to do them with, including high-rises. Miami’s condo boom was also driven by the emergence of the city as a center of Jewish American life, with Jewish builders and architects like Morris Lapidus catering to a largely Jewish clientele. While the tragedy at Surfside is an urgent reminder of the fragility of condo ownership and a call for new safeguards, Lasner and Moore reminder us to also remember the social void that the Miami condo filled.
