#Real Estate Insiders

[mfi-miami]

Luxury Real Estate Insiders Say 2nd Home Demand Down 50%

Luxury Real Estate Insiders Say 2nd Home Demand Down 50% As Wealthy Investors Pull Back from Investing In Real Estate Luxury real estate insiders say mortgages secured for vacation properties are at their lowest since 2016. Insiders say the second home market is definitely in a recession. Redfin is reporting lock-ins for second-home mortgages are down 52.2% in March from pre-pandemic…

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Beautiful English Tudor in Bethesda, MD, asks $1.27M, but you can't go inside, as it is "believed to be occupied."

https://www.redfin.com/MD/Bethesda/5908-Bradley-Blvd-20814/home/10701660

[blueiscoool]

Steve Silver stands inside his 5,000-square-foot loft in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Silver, a painter, moved into the loft in 1979.

A Look Inside New York’s Historic Artist Lofts

The Last of Their Kind.

They used to be printing shops, garment factories and flophouses. Now they’re some of the coolest artist spaces you’ll ever see.

These unique, expansive lofts, rarely seen by the public, are all over New York City.

For decades, they’ve been occupied by painters, sculptors and other artists who moved in when manufacturers started leaving the city in the second half of the 20th century.

“When people think of New York City as a cultural epicenter, these are the artists that they’re envisioning,” said Joshua Charow, a photographer and filmmaker who has spent the past few years documenting the artists and their studios for his book “Loft Law: The Last of New York City’s Original Artist Lofts.”

Artist Claire Ferguson moved into her loft in the city’s Tribeca neighborhood in 1981. At the time, the building in Lower Manhattan had a mix of artists and industrial tenants. “The floor below me was a paintbrush factory,” she told photographer and filmmaker Joshua Charow. “The floor above me put lines on paper before they had offset printing, and they had these huge machines. They had a guillotine that cut through the reams of paper every morning. At 6 a.m., they would turn it on, and it was this noise, aargh!”

JG Thirlwell’s loft in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood doubles as his home recording studio. “Loft living is not for everyone,” he told Charow. “You’re responsible for everything in here, and not everyone wants a life like that.”

A cat rests inside the Tribeca loft of Ken and Flo Jacobs, experimental filmmakers who moved into the space in 1965. At the time, the monthly rent for the 2,000-square-foot loft was just $70.

For the first half of the 20th century, New York City was a major manufacturing center. Factories were all over, producing everything from ice cream to torpedoes.

But when companies started finding it profitable to move their operations to other parts of the country and the world, many buildings were abandoned. By the 1960s and ‘70s, industrial neighborhoods, including those we now know as SoHo and Tribeca in Lower Manhattan, were largely deserted.

Landlords were desperate to find tenants. A big problem, however, was that the buildings were not zoned for residential use. Many of them didn’t have kitchens or showers, or even electricity or heat.

“The only people that would rent the space were artists,” Charow said. “And that’s because (the buildings) had tall ceilings, so they could make big work. They had big windows to let in lots of light. The spaces were completely raw, in many circumstances.”

Anne Mason sits in front of one of her late husband’s paintings in the loft they lived in together in the Little Italy neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Frank Mason died in 2009, but his wife preserved his studio and his paintings.

Plants thrive in the natural light of the Midtown loft Bob Petrucci and Ray Bailey call home. It’s on the 16th floor of a building previously used as a necktie factory.

Artists would move into the empty factories and warehouses and make them more livable spaces. It was technically illegal, of course, but everyone was benefiting and the once-abandoned neighborhoods started to thrive again.

By the end of the ’70s, however, loft living had become quite fashionable and some landlords were looking to cash in, pushing out the artists for a wealthier clientele.

The artists pushed back, and in 1982 state lawmakers enacted Article 7-C of the New York Multiple Dwelling Law, which is commonly known as the 1982 Loft Law. This legislation gave protection and rent stabilization to people who had been living in these spaces. It also required landlords to bring the units up to residential code.

When the law was enacted, Charow says in his book, there were tens of thousands of artists living in lofts across the city. Now just a few hundred remain.

Noah Jemison moved to his Williamsburg loft in 1980. He remembers his neighborhood not having as much traffic as it does now. “You could walk down the streets and see nobody,” he told Charow. “It was a place where you could hear yourself think. It was perfect for artists.”

A scan of a 1913 blueprint shows one of the Manhattan buildings Charow photographed. New York City was a major manufacturing center for the first half of the 20th century.

Painter Betsy Kaufman walks inside her Tribeca loft. She uses the front half as her studio. It still has its original wooden floors.

Legislation enacted in 1982 allowed loft residents in New York to establish legal residence and have their living spaces brought up to code. It also stabilized their rent and protected them from eviction.

Charow wanted to document these artists — and their extraordinary lofts — before their numbers dwindled even more. He found a map of the remaining protected buildings and went door to door to see whether their tenants would be willing to share their story with him.

He was often rejected at first. But over time, more doors started to open up as people he met would introduce him to others.

Over the past three years, Charow has photographed 75 artists — 30 of whom are in his book.

“My life has been greatly enriched by meeting some of these artists and learning about their lives and their stories,” Charow said. “It’s had a big impact on just my life, and I can’t imagine how much of an impact this group of people has had on the city as a whole.”

Art created by Carolyn Oberst and Jeff Way adorn the walls of the loft they share in Tribeca. They live on the top two floors of a building they started renting in 1975. “I won’t tell you what it cost, but it was very cheap. We’ll just leave it at that,” Way told Charow. “But that was an incentive to fix it up. It was sweat equity, they called it.”

Ellen Christine makes new hats and restores old ones. She’s one of the last milliners in New York City. “In the 1930s, you could walk down any street, and there would be at least 30 milliners,” she said. “It was just (that) everybody wore hats, you see… So they needed new ones all the time.”

Curtis Mitchell remembers when he first walked into his loft in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building used to be an ice cream factory. “It looked just like a dream,” he said. “To me, it still is a dream. It’s a fantastic place. Cold as hell in the winter and hot as hell in the summer, but I don’t care.”

One of Charow’s favorite spaces was the Bowery loft of Carmen Cicero, who is now 97 years old but moves with the energy of someone much younger, Charow said. Cicero lives in the loft with his wife, the art historian Mary Abell. Filling the space are hundreds of Cicero’s paintings, some bigger than he is.

“When you dream of what a painter in their loft in New York would be like, it’s Carmen,” Charow said. “And he’s filled with incredible stories. He has such phenomenal stories of his time as an artist here.”

Cicero’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

He told Charow the story of how he got his big break: “I had a lot of friends who thought I was a really remarkable painter. One day, they said, ‘Carmen, you’re going to a gallery.’ And they had two guys grab my feet, and two guys grab my arms — they threw me in the car and said, ‘We’re going.’ We went to four or five galleries, and almost every one of them wanted my work — I was lucky.”

Carmen Cicero lives in the Bowery, which has one of the highest concentration of Loft Law-protected buildings in the city. The painter moved to New York in 1971, after his home studio in New Jersey went up in flames

Charow says it has been a thrill to meet these artists and listen to their stories.

“The spaces are beautiful and interesting and historic in their own ways. But without the artists, these spaces lose the significance and the interest to me,” he said. “The artists are the ones who are giving the spaces meaning. Their decades of life and working there is what makes these spaces sort of a sacred thing.”

Through June 29, Charow’s photos are being exhibited at Westwood Gallery NYC, alongside the art of many of the people he photographed.

“I’m really excited that people get to see the paintings and sculptures and and see where they’re made,” he said.

Filmmakers Ken and Flo Jacobs have lived in their top-floor Tribeca loft for more than 50 years. “Once, we staged a live shadow play with a stretched curtain in the loft. Our audience consisted of just two people: Yoko Ono and John Lennon,” Ken told Charow.

Sculptor Marsha Pels lives in what used to be a glass factory in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood.

Even though the book is already published, Charow’s project will continue. After he began sharing his photos and videos, more artists started reaching out to him so that they could tell their story.

He now has a list of artists to photograph over the next few months.

“This isn’t just a thing of New York’s past. This is the present,” Charow said. “You can walk down the street and look at a window and you might see (an artist), and they’re still working and they’re still making their paintings and sculptures.

“I think it’s a beautiful part of our city, that this exists. It took a lot of resilience and ingenuity to stay in these spaces.”

Kimiko Fujimura, a painter, moved from Tokyo to New York City more than 50 years ago. She has lived in this Chinatown loft since 1979. It was the top floor of a former bow-and-ribbon factory.

The Lower Manhattan skyline is seen from a loft in Brooklyn.

Joshua Charow’s book, “Loft Law: The Last of New York City’s Original Artist Lofts,” is published by Damiani Books. The exhibition at Westwood Gallery NYCis taking place through July 13.

Photographs by Joshua Charow. Story by Kyle Almond. Published June 16, 2024

[swordmaid]

thinking about how profound it must’ve been for shri’iia when she first received scratch’s ball (woman who has never gotten anything for free in her life ever)

[mabaki]

Yeah, that meme Cairadin @floral-necromaniac

and then i released it to the wild discord servers and got back...

I fucking love you guys oh my god you know who- you know what im tagging y'all LMAO

Tit, Mbk himself, Onlyhands 'who tf r u': @vitaeplaysgw2

cabbage: Hel (no tubml awh)

Ham: @zlidestuff but they also put the pilow but pillow by @the-skrool the art on pillow by Fenrilia ofc cuz its his waifu :ramblerambleramble:

Maweenie placed by @creativebrainrot (Theryn), maweenie art by @shroomlet

Cigarette: Theryn

White to black turtleneck: @fern-hounds

Black to black turtleneck Theryn

Peitha Smash: VITAEEEEE HAHAHAHHASLKFJlkjsdflkj

[belethlegwen]

The Rescue - Chp 54 - That Dark Old Friend [+ Life Update]

Hey there everyone!

So sorry about the delay in updates since the Christmas season, there's a lot of shit to blame for it and I'll get into it in more detail, but in short this was a wildly busy Christmas season where I had 0 time to write between work and family stuff from like, November-end of December, and then a whole lot of house shit started happening and I've been unbelievably stressed since just before New Years.

Longer details and stuff below the cut for people who are interested, but in short the important details are:

Updates to works on AO3 may be at random times with long delays between for the coming year. Can't be sure, but for now that's how things are looking while I have way too much shit going on IRL.

Please enjoy this little chapter for now, and if you're up for a long winding journey about why it felt like all of my hair has been falling out for two weeks, meet me below <3

So the Christmas season at my job was wildly busy, on top of that there's some issues going on there between the business owner I rent space from and the person who owns the building. It's a mess, for a while it looked like/still kinda looks like we're going to have some major issues with the lot clearing what with winter being a major issue where I live in the Frozen Nor'Atlantic. That was all bad enough.

I had been told back in the fall by my landlord, who I've been renting from for 10 years now, that her mortgage was up for renewal in January and that it looked like it was going to go up a hot amount. Rates are super fucking high in Canada right now, shit's bad, the mortgage specialist at the bank I was talking to yesterday said that it's bad enough they legitimately expect the government to be stepping in soon to do something about it before it's a crisis (or more of a crisis because personally, it's already a fucking crisis and has been, but I digress). She warned me the rent was going to have to go up, I told her I expected it, I knew it was going to happen, she's been amazing to me for 10 years, if it's gotta go up it's gotta go up, I get it.

This past fall is when my partner Zip came to visit for 6 weeks and we got engaged, and when we started to plan to move them up here so we could start immigration and the like, which we were aiming to do for the beginning of this summer.

So as we're gearing up to New Year's and everything, I am expecting to deal with the start of immigration application readying, and expecting rent to increase. December 27th, I got a message from the landlord that uh, someone wants to buy the house (as an investment property and keep the renters) and despite her best efforts to try and bounce around and get a lower mortgage rate, it didn't work out and she's going to have to sell either way. So we suddenly had to get the house ready to be listed and viewed.

Viewings were fucking hell, by the way. While priority for accepting the offer was going to someone who wanted to take the property over and keep the renters in place, Real Estate agents just want the fucking sale, so being in my home while people are wandering around it scaring my cats and talking about how my bedroom was going to be the kid's room and my office was going to be turned into something else? Shit time, don't recommend. Not to mention the agents that were showing up half-hour not just away of their own scheduled appointment but a half hour outside of when viewings were actually permitted to happen.

I'm glad we have such high paying careers available for people who are, apparently, fucking illiterate, but I was getting extremely rude to agents and their desperation for a sale by the end of it. Someone tried to show up yesterday after a offer was accepted literally the night before and we sent them packing fine enough, but now anytime the rain hits the gutters too hard I think someone is walking into my home so that's fun.

We have signs all over the house about keeping doors closed to keep the cats inside, including one on the back door (where it isn't an enclosed porch) that says in extremely large lettering Access To Patio From Outside ONLY, and there were still at least two agents that opened the back door, so. Nightmares all around.

An offering has been accepted, the person who is hopefully going to buy wants to keep us as tenants, and I'm locked in a lease until later this year anyway. Things are at least, as of yesterday when I got the confirmation that an offer was in that stage, stable now that I didn't throw up this morning. Hooray! It's been hell. I can not stress enough that this has been hell.

It still leaves the later part of the year up in the air a lot, because new landlord may still want us out at the end of the lease of whathaveyou, and between now and then I am flying down to America to drive across that wild country with a car full of stuff to move my fiancee here, then we gonna get immigration rolling and the employment switchover and everything else. My Dad has been a massive rock for me during this time in terms of trying to keep me level, and as he says: "this is all just one-step-at-a-time things. You're just keeping ducks in a row".

And as I keep saying: "Yeah but I've got a lot of fuckin' ducks, man."

So that's the kind of thing that's in the air right now for me. Lots and lots of stuff going on. I'm still picking away at writing but to make things easier on myself, I'm going to not stress about any kind of schedule or the like right now and just play with whatever flows come when I have them and have the time/ability to focus on them in the few quiet moments I have between all of the other stuff.

Much love to all of you, thank you all again as always for the wonderful comments you've all left, the kudos, the people who reached out, all of it. You're wonderful <3

Take care of yourselves out there,

~ Belle

[muchmorethanmuses]

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[aeide-thea]

the inside of the foil on this siggi’s yogurt is like ‘try our new plant-based coconut blend!’ and it’s like. perhaps this advertising would be more effective in a location accessible to people who weren’t already eating yr dairy-based yogurt???

[gorewound]

Bruiser is a film released in the year 2000 directed by George Romero. The plot can best be surmised by this meme:

[mechitecture]

Sometimes you just need to get out. See something new. Maybe, in my case, drive veeeeery slowly down old roads in older neighbourhoods to enjoy the scenery, the century trees, the older build styles... the very modern take on the older build styles... the people who don't care about fitting in with the architectural style of the neighbourhood.... And then sometimes you find something like this

More than anything else, I have to ask: what is that roof line

(There is a greater than 0 chance I'm going to try and build this in the Sims at least. Although... I don't know if even the Sims will let me replicate that roof line in the middle there)

[uniqueeval]

China stimulus calls are growing louder, at home and abroad

Local residents with umbrellas walk out of a metro station in rain during morning rush hour on September 20, 2024 in Beijing, China.  China News Service | China News Service | Getty Images BEIJING — More economists are calling for China to stimulate growth, including those based inside the country. China should issue at least 10 trillion yuan ($1.42 trillion) in ultra-long government bonds in…

[bodybybane]

Real-estate crash: Correction looms for US property market, strategist says https://www.businessinsider.com/real-estate-crash-home-prices-correction-foreclosures-mortgage-defaults-2024-7

[therealtorasia]

How do I find the best Vietnam buying offices for SMEs?

Vietnam has been developing as one of the hot spots for businesses seeking to relocate part of their production in this era of diversification of global supply chains. Often, buying offices can initiate this shift, taking upon themselves a wide variety of services that set up smooth operations and high-quality output. Among the key activities the buying offices would handle for their clients are…

[jellogram]

I despise the Vegas sphere so much. It's actually kind of an impressive feat. You built a structure on the tackiest, gaudiest, most shameless street in the entire world and you still look like a tacky, gaudy, shameless asshole in comparison

[dunmertwink]

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[sauravsharma3489]

Rakul Preet Singh is a Sikh girl from Delhi who was raised in a middle-class household. She made her parents proud when she debuted in the Kannada film "Gilli" in 2009. Rakul competed in the 2011 Femina Miss India contest, and her unstoppable triumph has won millions of hearts. Rakul Preet's success as a rising star in Bollywood was also made possible by her several Femina titles. She hasn't only confined herself to the screen, though; she has also spent time and money on various off-screen ventures. Now let's scroll down to Rakul Preet Singh's home, where grace and wisdom coexist.