The 234 Apartment

Manhattan is about to become a testing ground for what could be the next luxury real estate boom . Well, maybe mini-boom, considering the rather narrow target group : frail urban seniors with fat bank accounts . Developers are spending hundreds of millions on high-end assisted- living apartment projects , one on the Upper East Side and one in Midtown, and aiming for more in the area and across the U.S. The bet is that there are sufficient numbers of the affluent and aging in big cities who won't want to leave their neighborhoods, even as they suffer cognitive decline . It is, of course, a rather small group of any age or mental ability that can handle the monthly rents these kinds of places will command. They'll start at $12,000 at the complex that Maplewood Senior Living and Omega Healthcare Investors Inc. are putting up on Second Avenue and 93rd Street. Some will top more than $20,000 at the building Welltower Inc. and Hines are about to break ground for on the corner of ...

(Bloomberg)—Manhattan is about to become a testing ground for what could be the next luxury real estate boom . Well, maybe mini-boom, considering the rather narrow target group : frail urban seniors with fat bank accounts . Developers are spending hundreds of millions on high-end assisted- living apartment projects , one on the Upper East Side and one in Midtown, and aiming for more in the area and across the U.S. The bet is that there are sufficient numbers of the affluent and aging in big cities who won’t want to leave their neighborhoods, even as they suffer cognitive decline . It is, of course, a rather small group of any age or mental ability that can handle the monthly rents these kinds of places will command. They’ll start at $12,000 at the complex that Maplewood Senior Living and Omega Healthcare Investors Inc. are putting up on Second Avenue and 93rd Street. Some will top more than $20,000 at the building Welltower Inc. and Hines are about to break ground for o...

Having worked with Musgraves, KBC, Port of Cork, the HSE, the Montenotte Hotel and Reardens Group, architectural firm PLM has rebranded as Meitheal. Pádraig Hoare speaks with managing partner Patrick O Toole Cork- based architectural firm Meitheal is adamant that the economic upswing cannot be wasted, with Cork on the cusp of a special period of transformation but only if the changes are tackled with everyone rowing in the same direction. Managing partner Patrick O Toole sees Cork ’s future as a bright one, with the caveat that mistakes of the past are not repeated. “Cork has all the ingredients to be a successful European city . Cork is compact already, by accident. It will never be Los Angeles, because we have the wonderful accident of the metropolitan green belt , which protects the circumference of the city. If you were planning a city, Cork is a good model. It is a template to grow in a compact way. It should have diversity in terms of being able to live here, work here, ente...

Along Florida's Turnpike in South Miami -Dade, where potato farms and fields of row crops stretched all the way to the visible horizon at the time when Hurricane Andrew struck , it’s virtually all rows of close-packed houses and townhomes today. Now the unavoidable noise walls are going up to forever block vistas once among the most beguiling in South Florida. Along South Dixie Highway , where scraggly lots, small farm fields and vegetable- and fruit-packing houses once mixed it up with used-car lots and budget motels, the landscape is a cornucopia of strip malls, Publix and Wal-Mart stores and fast- food chain restaurants . And everywhere there is traffic, backed up one way in the morning, when three-quarters of all employed adults in South Miami - Dade head north to downtown Miami , Coral Gables or even Doral to work, and the other way when they drive back home in the evening. Lightning struck as thunderstorms swept through the ruins of Homestead in the days after Hurricane...