Apartment Choice

Is a market with hardly any liquidity a market? Look at property in Hong Kong, where housing is the least affordable in the world and prices keep climbing in the face of official curbs. Up and Away Hong Kong home prices have paused in the past month but have been climbing for more than 10 years Source: Centaline Property There's very little buying and selling of old homes in the territory. Painful loan-to-value rules mean second-time buyers of property valued at more than HK$10 million ($1.3 million) -- just enough to bag an apartment of less than 500 square feet in Central District -- can only borrow a maximum of 40 percent; it's 50 percent for transactions below that level. An increase in stamp duty last November set the transaction tax at 15 percent of the cost of a resold home for permanent residents, and double that for foreigners (mostly those from mainland China). According to JLL, as Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. is known, transaction volumes in the secondary market have ...

Leesha Posey remembers cutting across a vacant lot in North Portland on her way to Harriet Tubman Middle School . "It's been empty since I was a little girl," says Posey, 41. That was three decades ago. But the lot still sits empty—a rarity in a city where vacant land is coveted, especially in the red- hot North Williams Avenue corridor . Its emptiness is a reminder of what the city and its urban renewal agency , Prosper Portland , took from the black community . In the 1960s, the city-owned agency, then known as the Portland Development Commission , condemned vast tracts of inner North and Northeast Portland . The takings—including the still-vacant block at the northwest corner of North Williams Avenue and Russell Street—allowed urban renewal, including construction of parts of Interstate 5, the Oregon Convention Center and Legacy Emanuel Hospital . But in the process, the agency gutted neighborhoods and dispersed the black community . In a belated ef...