London

Home prices in London's swankiest neighborhoods are dropping faster than in the rest of Britain, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reason? You guessed it: the financial crisis. The sorts of buyers who buoy these neighborhoods are losing their jobs or are facing other economic uncertainties.

While average U.K. home prices began to slide in October 2007, prime London property was still holding up at the end of the first quarter. Since then, it has been playing catch-up, and with a vengeance. According to an index compiled for Jones Lang LaSalle, a property-services and investment-management company, the price of residential space per square meter in the capital's most upmarket locations fell 12% during the third quarter, more than twice the rate of decline in London's less glitzy neighborhoods. During the first nine months of the year, prime London prices were down 19%, while in the rest of London prices were down 9.4%.

Will the same fate unfold in Manhattan's posher neighborhoods, like the Upper East Side or the downtown locales like Tribeca and Battery Park City? Perhaps. Time will have to tell, of course, but brokers already report ominous signs of slower sales.  read more »

From the Wall Street Journal: "Outside the Bank of England, a makeshift memorial recently appeared: a lamppost decorated with flowers and a sign: 'In Loving Memory of the Boom Economy.' The financial crisis is hitting many drivers of London's growth as a global financial capital in recent years. London's economy appears to be changing in fundamental ways, and, with it, the psyche of the City. ... Some of the bankers, lawyers and other professionals who made London the preferred port of call for the rest of the world's money are moving to places such as Dubai and Shanghai. Residential property prices have fallen 12.1% this year through late September, according to British real-estate company Savills PLC. About 19% of houses sold this year in central London for between £2 million and £4 million ($3.4 million and $6.9 million) were purchased by people born outside the U.K., down from 32% in 2007, estimates Savills' director of residential research, Lucian Cook."

I wrote in the latest Observer print edition about the improbable end of the New York-London race to be the world's financial capital.

The London housing market has gone ka-blooie. Real estate brokers in the British capital report the slowest pace of business in 30 years, according to this morning's Wall Street Journal.

London's real-estate agents sold an average of 8.3 properties apiece in the three months ended in September, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. That is the lowest tally for any region of the country since the survey started in 1978. In Britain as a whole, agents sold an average of 11.5 properties during the three-month period, down more than 50% from a year earlier.

My colleague Oliver Haydock has a column in The Observer's latest print edition about what would happen to the Manhattan housing market if all those previously flush Europeans split. Bad times, folks. Bad times.

With apartments fetching an average price of $7,500 per square foot, Fifth Avenue ranked third place in a new survey of the top 10 most expensive residential streets in the world from Barclay’s Wealth Bulletin. But if you thought top-tier residential prices in Manhattan were stratospheric, take a look at the two most expensive streets on the survey.

Avenue Princess Grace in Monaco ranked No. 1 in the survey with homes fetching an average of $17,750 a foot.

“Properties on the avenue change hands for up to $41 million – and many of them are fairly modest four-bedroom apartments,” the report said.  read more »

At least Australians can afford property in New York City!

The comparative weakness of the dollar and the tanking American economy, coupled with New York City's international cache, have made New York top dog among American cities in its ability to soak up the international real estate dollars, according to Forbes.

The other cities in the top 10 -- which is based on an annual Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate Survey -- include: 10-Orlando; 9-Phoenix; 8-Las Vegas; 7-Chicago; 6-Boston; 5-Seattle; 4-San Francisco; 3-Los Angeles; and 2-Washington, D.C.

According to the article:  read more »

New York holds the top spot, but not because of the much celebrated pied-à-terre buyers in Manhattan using the weak dollar to buy into pricey neighborhoods, a trend that has flattened out, says Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a New York appraisal firm.

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For the second year in a row, London was ranked the No. 1 most influential city in the global economy by the MasterCard Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, followed once again by New York City. Chicago was the only other U.S. city to make the top 10 of the 75 cities surveyed. (Complete index can be found here as a PDF.

Only $111 separates the average monthly rents for higher-end apartments in New York and London, according to a new survey. New York's better apartments average $4,000 a month, while the British capital's average $3,889. But don't think the higher average daunts British tenants here: The dollar's at a 25-year low against the pound.

Though the strength of the Euro has been largely credited with staving off a housing market nosedive in Manhattan, it is hitting expatriate American businessmen (and the multi-national companies they work for) stationed in cities like London, Hong Kong and Moscow hard, pushing already expensive rents into the stratosphere, according to Forbes’ survey of the most expensive international rental markets.

Mercer Human Resource Consulting checked out the median rent of Class A, unfurnished apartments, in high-end neighborhoods of commercial hubs around the globe and adjusted them from local currencies to the dollar. The “results spell trouble for businesses dealing in (greenbacks).”

Hong Kong, which ranked No. 1 in the survey, saw the median monthly rent rise from $4,898 to $6,398 between 2006 and 2007, when adjusted to the dollar. Tokyo was the second priciest market with a median rent of $4,102 per month. With a $1,000 rent increase year-over-year, Moscow ranked third, matching the $4,000 median rent in New York--the fourth most-expensive rental market. London rounded out the top five at $3,889.  read more »

As Manhattan prepares to end 2007 with an unusually high number of home sales--as well as with a few home-price records--its main municipal rival may be ending the year struggling.  read more »

Midtown Manhattan is the 12th most expensive office market in the world, well behind the priciest, London's West End, where the cost of occupying office space averages $328.91 a square foot annually. In midtown, the average cost--which includes rent and taxes--is $100.79 a foot, according to a new report from brokerage CB Richard Ellis.

Midtown did top the list of the most expensive office markets in North and South America, well out ahead of the next most expensive, the Calgary Central Business District. Suburban Los Angeles was the third most expensive market in the Americas; and downtown Manhattan was fourth. They were the only other two American office markets besides midtown to make CBRE's top 50 most expensive markets worldwide.

The topmost expensive office markets were all in Europe and Asia. For instance, just ahead of midtown is Singapore with an average occupancy cost of $102.37 a foot annually.

Press release, including the top 50 list, after the jump.  read more »

Could New York City be losing its place as the world’s foremost art emporium?  read more »

City Councilman Lew Fidler, a man who lives on the edge (of Brooklyn, that is), submitted a bill this week that calls on Mayor Bloomberg to oppose congestion pricing before he even gets a chance to propose it. So far, six other outer-borough Council members (Melinda Katz, Tony Avella, Sara Gonzalez, Miguel Martinez, Michael Nelson and David Weprin) have signed on.

The bill argues two sides of the same coin: that London's congestion pricing scheme was so ineffective that only 2 percent fewer people entered the city as a result, but that a Manhattan model would be so effective that it would result in a $2.7 billion loss in economic output.

Anti-anti-congestion forces are fighting back: Streetsblog has some data showing that in Mr. Fidler's district, only 25 percent of commuters to Manhattan drive and the rest use mass transit. That factoid, however, does not deter the bill's sponsor.

"It's economically unjust. Only those who can afford it will pay and those who can't, can't," said Mr. Fidler, who added that there is not a single subway stop in his district, which includes Canarsie and Marine Park. "I believe in subsidizing mass transit. I also believe that it is not the only transportation that New Yorkers use, and it cannot be."

He has a more radical solution, at least to the issue of clean air.

"I would have the federal government ban the manufacturing and importation of combustion engines in 10 years or 12 years or something like that," Mr. Fidler said, "and see how quickly they adapt the technology to cleaner air and alternate sources of energy."

- Matthew Schuerman

I knew that one day I’d be reading in the paper about Arthur’s death, but never really believed  read more »

Mom 'n' pop shops aren't the only ones losing retail space to banks these days in New York City--even banks are losing space to banks.

On Feb. 23, Wayne, N.J.-based Valley National Bank will be moving out of its corner space at 145 Fifth Avenue.

And London-based global banking giant HSBC will be moving in.

A customer-service representative at the doomed Valley National branch suggested that the turnover in financial tenants might have something to do with the building going condo. (A bank spokesperson did not immediately return phone calls.)

Despite its loss, Valley National isn't going far, however. Jersey's so-called "super-community bank" has found a replacement space just one block away, on Broadway.

A sign outside the new location indicates that job opportunities are available, should any prospective tellers be willing to slum it with a mere regional bank.

- Chris Shott

Imagine how New Yorkers might react. The Wall Street Journal reports on Tuesday that someone mailed a letter bomb to the London office that collects fees for driving in some heavily trafficked parts of the British capital. New York is considering a similar congestion-pricing arrangement. A worker at the London office was "slightly injured" by the bomb. - Tom Acitelli

Publishing’s newest relationship expert, J. Courtney Sullivan, was born on Aug. 10, 1981.  read more »

“I notice when I am riding that I run a lot of red lights,” the 6-foot-2 Paul Steely Whi  read more »

Manhattan office-market stats out last week showed what everyone already knows: The borough has one  read more »

A Quinnipiac poll finds that New Yorkers oppose congestion pricing--charging drivers a fee to travel below 60th Street during rush hours--by a margin of 2-1. Streetsblog, which has been advocating for such a policy, still has hope:

the results are very much in line with the findings of surveys conducted in London and Stockholm prior to the launch of those cities' successful and, ultimately, popular experiments with congestion pricing.

-Matthew Schuerman

Thumbing through a new "oral bigraphy" entitled Giuliani: Flawed or Flawless?, I came across this colorful quote from Al Sharpton about the former mayor's presidential bid:

"Rudy Giuliani is a power-hungry person. But I also think he knows that the honeymoon he's had with the media since 9/11 would be over if he ran and had to defend things that they don't now bring up. I think he's going to flirt with it; I think he's going to constantly keep himself in the papers because of his ego. But I don't think he'll ever pull the trigger because he knows that he will have to go back and explain everything - from Dorismond to Diallo to how his family separated - a lot of things he doesn't want to explain. It's better to live the reinvention than to have somebody move the veil and see that the wizard really isn't the wizard. So right now, he can lead all the media and the national pundits on the Yellow Brick Road. He'd better never let us get near the veil. I know what's back there; I've pierced it before."

Sharpton is hardly an objective judge, but it seems inarguable that the longer Giuliani goes forward as a serious candidate, the less effective his 9/11 credentials will be in winning him friendly treatment from the press outside of New York.

Arguing from the opposite point of view in the book is Giuliani's former adviser and biographer Fred Siegel, who says -- to sum up simplistically -- that Rudy has plenty of mayoral accomplishments that have nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but that a massive attack during the course of the presidential campaign wouldn't hurt his chances, either.

"The pre-9/11 accomplishments haven't gotten nearly enough attention because if you're going to look at how he'd govern as president, you have to look at how he governed as mayor. And so it's important to see how he operates - the kind of tight staff style he has, where he brings things together; he breaks down barriers. Giuliani is a student of government and I suspect that right now he's studying the federal government. Our vulnerabilities are considerable. If, as we're approaching the presidential campaign, you get something like today's [July 7, 2005] London bombing, that will give his campaign an enormous boost."

-- Azi Paybarah

Miss Potter may have the cinematic punch of a wet vanilla wafer, but the cynics who have dismissed i  read more »

By the end of the week, Al Gore will have finished training the last of a thousand "Climate Project" volunteers, who will be charged with spreading the word about the bleaker aspects of 70-degree January days.

According to Gore's office, the former vice president has been busy indoctrinating said volunteers for more than ten hours a day, and will now, at last, be free to do... other things.

No, says his office, not that -- despite the latest speculation.

On Thursday, Gore plans to fly to Tokyo to stroll down the red carpet for the opening of An Inconvenient Truth. After that he is off to Scotland, Denmark and England to do more movie promotion. (London, it turns out, will also be the headquarters for the European branch of Gore's growing volunteer network.)

And then, without so much as a breather, Gore will begin promoting his next book, "The Assault on Reason," which is scheduled to hit stores in May.

Sounds like he's campaigning for something, anyway.

--Jason Horowitz

UPDATE: From Gore's spokesperson Kalee Kreider, the following:

"The vice president has been clear that his campaign is really about the issue of global warming and we are currently evaluating whether or not to continue the training program after the UK, but he currently has no intention of running for office in 2008."

Lower Manhattan had the highest annual growth in office occupancy costs among 134 markets surveyed in a new report. Lower Manhattan's occupancy costs have increased 63 percent, according to the report issued by Staubach Company and its London-based partner.

The report defined occupancy costs as a combination of rent, maintenance fees and taxes, excluding leasing incentives. Success spirited lower Manhattan to the costly top, The Wall Street Journal reports:

The steep increase in costs in lower Manhattan represents the turnaround from the relatively cheap prices in that area just a year ago and shows how much the area has come back since its devastation from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001...

- Tom Acitelli

I know that they’ve been sleeping. I know they’re not awake.  read more »

“You only get one shot at New York,” Gordon Ramsay told me when I interviewed him in London two  read more »

“You only get one shot at New York,” Gordon Ramsay told me when I interviewed him in Lon  read more »

Compiled as testament to the “belief in the story as a system of knowledge,” E.L.  read more »

• William Lescaze's 6,800-square-foot 1935 Upper East Side modernist masterpiece is on the market for $8 million. What do the commentators say? "It's hideous." And: "A shit for a house [sic] only an architect would fall in love with. Raze it. It was hideous then and it's hideous now." [Curbed]
• Why have the French disallowed H&M from opening a 50-million-Euro flagship? "There is a risk that the Champs Elysees could become banal," the head of planning for Paris's City Council said. She added, zestfully, "We have nothing against H&M." [Times of London, via ArchNewsNow]
• Real estate search engine Trulia has formed a big-name advisory board "to help with strategic planning." Are they planning a new-wave techno-real-estate monopoly? Or maybe a take-down of REBNY? [Matrix]
• Rule of the Day: Cobble Hill may never again be celebrated "for the sheer depth" of its glassware collectibles stores. [Apartment Therapy]
- Max Abelson
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On Friday, Dec.  read more »

• Oh, Ikea! The Swedish furniture kings are rolling out ready-built "timber-framed homes" in London. They're called BoKloks (prounced booklook), which means "live smart" in Swedish. In English, it means "homogenous Scandinavian design is slowly taking over the world, leading inevitably to a deathly, red-and-white colored dystopia." [Interior Design]
• 11 Spring Street is officially the blogosphere's favorite piece of Manhattan real estate. But who can resist a graffiti-heavy Murdoch palace? Here's a realty/art fetish video. [A Blog Soup]
• Speaking of sneak peeks, Brownstoner takes a look at the unholy, unapproved church-to-townhouse conversion at 232 Adelphi Street in Brooklyn. The Lord is not happy. [Brstnr]
• First poor Yves Saint Laurent's French 75-acre estate was price-cut to a paltry $19.9 million. Now, his Jed Johnson-designed Pierre Hotel apartment is down to $7.75 mill. At least he still has those bags. [WSJ]
- Max Abelson
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For the first time ever, downtown Manhattan made a semi-annual ranking of the most expensive office markets in the world. Brokerage CB Richard Ellis' ranking put downtown at 48 among the 50 most expensive markets, with an average occupancy cost for office space of $41.99 a square foot.

Midtown, as it often does, ranked high. The city's leading office submarket came in at number 24 in the world, with office occupancy costs of $62.07 a foot.

The Earth's priciest place to occupy office space? London's West End, where costs can run as high as $212.03 a square foot.

- Tom Acitelli

• London's wonderful mayor Ken Livingstone wants to charge gas-guzzling cars £25 to enter London's "congestion charge zone." What will Mayor Mike do in response? One can only hope that he bans Hummers, at least those yellow ones. [Times of London, via Streetsblog]
• The crawl toward gentrification out in Bed-Stuy is speeding up thanks to a few restaurants on Bedford Avenue (with expensive names like Le Toukouleur.) The street is apparently "turning into something of a Restaurant Row for the neighborhood," even though it's on "an otherwise pretty foresaken stretch of road." [Brooklyn Record]
• But if one small store could ever summarize a mammoth borough, it would be Enamoo in Brooklyn. You'll find a "mixture of vintage household items with uniquely-designed t-shirts and nice little arrangements of plants." Throw in the "trademark antique cheese crates planted neatly with aloe-like vegetation" and you've got upscale New York City in your hands. [Apartment Therapy]
• Superior Inks Warehouse, the last factory on Greenwich Village's waterfront, will probably not live to see its 88th year. On the plus side, a 15-story luxury condo will take its place. Hurrah! Everyone loves more 15-story luxury condos! [NY1]
- Max Abelson
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Yuet-fung Ho made Hong Kong’s first television soap opera.  read more »

Yuet-fung Ho made Hong Kong’s first television soap opera. Now she works for Michael Bloomberg.  read more »

Mark Grotjahn’s large abstract drawings are so meticulously crafted and striking in effect tha  read more »

While Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer blame Messers. Sarbanes and Oxley for New York's woes, London has a slightly different answer. In a survey last year of financial business leaders that examined the competitive position of different world capitals, a team of consultants hired by the corporation of London found that the city's workforce is an even greater attraction to do business there than is its regulator environment.

The availability of skilled personnel was ranked as the single most important factor in the competitiveness of an international financial centre.... London and New York both scored highly on the availability of skilled staff, with 98 percent of respondents giving a rating of good or excellent. London appears to have a marginal advantage with an excellent rating of 75 percent, compared with 66 percent in New York. (PDF)

Check out pages 21 and 22 also, about what it was with the American regulatory environment that the survey respondents did not like: the number of regulatory agencies and an approach that is "prescriptive" rather than "risk-based."

-Matthew Schuerman

Former Conde Nast editorial director James Truman has resigned his job as editorial director of Louise T. Blouin Macbain's media company.

He informed Ms. MacBain last week, in person, in London, that his resignation was effective immediately.

The debut issue of LTB Media's 'Culture and Travel' was recently celebrated at Ms. MacBain's Richard Meier penthouse.

Mr. Truman has said he has been talking to finance people and will launch his own media company.

"I came on board a year ago to help Louise out. I thought I'd done everything I could. The magazines' ad pages are up between 20 and 50 percent," Mr. Truman said this morning of his work at LTB Media.

"My interest was in moving on and setting up my own company. I was never going to do it long-term," he said. "The project interested me because I tried so long to get an art magazine at Conde Nast."

"I don't think there's much VC money that would want to back a conventional magazine," Mr. Truman said of his new plans. —Michael Calderone

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“I’m a giraffe,” Sophia Loren once said.  read more »

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The Independent publishes newly-discovered evidence that a Polish barber named Kosminski was the serial murderer who killed 5 prostitutes in London in 1888, and says he was never questioned because he was insane.

The story turns on a renovated police crime museum that is not open to the public:

One of the new exhibits is a book, called The Lighter Side of My Official Life, the memoirs of Dr Robert Anderson, who was an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard at the time of the Ripper investigation. The book was handed down through [the] family [of Donald Swanson, the lead investigator in the case]. Swanson names Kosminski in handwritten notes in that book, which are in the margins, across the bottom of the page and on blank pages inside the book.

For those of you interested in urban traffic policy, the pro-bike, anti-car website StreetsBlog has an account of DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall's recent attendance at an international gathering of transportation officials in Stockholm.

To the apparent disappointment of the item's author, officials from London, Stockholm and elsewhere talked enthusiastically about the effects of their "congestion pricing" programs in cutting traffic, while the New York contingent was mostly happy just to listen.

From the item:

Weinshall had no big traffic reduction strategies or plans to share with the assembled because unlike the other cities at the conference, New York City doesn't have any.

While that's not quite true -- this is the administration, remember, responsible for the limited-turn "thru streets" that delighted transportation nerds at the time of their introduction -- Weinshall's reluctance to go within a mile of congestion pricing isn't really a surprise.

Bloomberg, remember, offered a relatively innocuous statement on the subject back in February -- "there are places in the world that have tried congestion pricing, and it's certainly something that we should be looking at," he said -- only to have his press office immediately warn off any interpretation of the comments as a "loosening" of his opposition.

It seems that for the foreseeable future, the rights of New York drivers to sit in heavy traffic will remain free of charge.

-- Josh Benson UPDATE: One of the StreetBlog authors emailed to object to the use of the term "anti-car" in this item. "We've got nothing against cars," he wrote. "Rather, we take issue with transpo policies that promote car use in the city to the detriment of other modes."

Monica Ali is not a subscriber to the guest-worker school of fiction, the vaguely held assumption th  read more »

Monica Ali is not a subscriber to the guest-worker school of fiction, the vaguely held assumption th  read more »

It’s more than the weather, the August doldrums: A dark mood seems to have descended on the city.  read more »