All Articles Tagged "real estate developers"
When Innovation is a Risk for Small Businesses
(Washington Post) — The big idea: A small Chicago South Side business gambles that “green” will mean gold.The scenario: Lisa and Clarence Hall, an African American couple living on Chicago’s South Side, are seasoned real estate developers in urban Chicago. After years of developing multifamily residential and mixed-use properties, they are interested in developing a commercial property: a derelict and vacant building owned by the city of Chicago. What’s more, they want to transform it from an eyesore into a glimmering, sustainable retail and office space featuring the latest in environmentally sustainable design.
Atlanta Builders Try to Shelter Through Economic Storm
(AJC) — When the metro Atlanta housing market began to spiral downward out of control, many builders were taken by surprise. Land and speculative inventory, once seen as assets, quickly became liabilities as sale prices and acreage values fell. Homes sale prices are now 22 percent off the April 2007 peak, according to the latest S&P Case-Shiller Index. And housing starts are down nearly 90 percent from 2006, the metro area’s “bubble period,” said Eugene James, head of the Atlanta division of the research company Metrostudy. “This is not necessarily a bad thing,” he said of the dramatic decline. “We never should have been building as much as we were.”
Tackling Neighborhood Renewal One House at a Time
(Baltimore Sun) — From a window of his family’s longtime North Bond Street rowhouse in East Baltimore, Lloyd Williams videotaped the activity on the street. A builder and home remodeler who grew up in the Oliver neighborhood, Williams was shocked by how the area had deteriorated since he left in the early 1990s. The scene was surreal, he thought, with addicts darting around corners to score drugs. “It was something out of a story, some type of science fiction story, to see people controlled by drugs so vividly,” he said. Williams, 46, president and CEO of The Verde Group, a Baltimore development company, decided that he wanted to help turn around his old neighborhood, starting with the North Bond Street home his grandfather bought in 1942. Documenting the decay was a starting point, and that’s what he set out to do nearly four years ago.
