Apartment Choice

When it comes to getting new apartments built, San Diego is the 11th worst city in the nation, said a national study released Monday . Fifty cities were ranked on specific factors, including local regulations and land available for development, that were determined to be critical to construction by trade groups such as the National Multifamily Housing Council and the National Apartment Association . Honolulu was ranked the most difficult market for building new apartments, and New Orleans was the easiest. Research gathered by Florida-based think tank Hoyt Advisory Services for the trade groups looked at the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulation Index, a survey of regulatory laws, and a method of mapping developable land created by Sumner La Croix of the University of Hawaii. It also used the U.S. Census and other data and market research. In California, San Francisco was deemed the hardest to get new supply built at No. 8. Los Angeles was No. 12, Riverside No. 13, Sacramento ...

T he way Lai Jie sees it, there are two kinds of relationships. There is romance. And there is marriage. They are not always the same, and in a city such as Shanghai, the deciding factor on who to wed can have little to do with personality, interest or chemistry. It comes down, instead, to a little brown book, the hukou (pronounced hoo-koh ) document, part of a household-registration system that creates distinctions between urban haves and have-nots that influence salaries, education and, it turns out, love lives for huge numbers of migrants. hukou household registration documents , shows journalists her mother’s hukou in the bedroom they share in Beijing on March 10, 2015. The documents decide what services Chinese people can access, from home-ownership rights to public school enrolment, based on their families’ place of origin." /> Li Xue, 21, who does not have hukou household registration documents , shows journalists her mother’s hukou in the bedroom they share i...

A new initial study from the city’s planning department shows that a 39- story project proposed for Downtown’s Financial District is moving forward. The study, first spotted by Urbanize LA, offers some new timeline details: The project could get underway by the spring of 2019, with completion as soon as fall 2021. The project, called the 8th, Hope, and Grand Project, involves the demolition of a parking structure, its fantastic breeze blocks , and an adjoining surface lot running between Hope and Grand along Eighth Street. In place of the parking areas, a 39-story mixed-use development with 409 studio, one-, and two- bedroom residential units and about 7,300 square feet of ground- floor retail space would rise. The tower’s developer is from Mitsui Fudosan America , Inc. (MFA). MFA’s parent company is Japanese real estate developer Mitsui Fudosan , whose website says the tower will hold apartments. The Johnson Fain-designed tower would also have six levels of parking—three above gr...