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Just in! Oakland A's Stadium Architect Richard Kennedy on the stadium's future civic impact at Bay Area Architecture & Design Summit March 20. |
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President Donald Trump may have pulled the brakes on the state's costly bullet train plans. Uncertainty has surrounded California's high-speed rail network, and now the Trump administration said it intends to terminate a $928M federal grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority agency for a $77B bullet train that would have connected Los Angeles to San Francisco. In a separate statement, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced it is exploring legal options for California to pay back $2.5B in federal funds already spent toward the project. 
“[Federal Rail Authority] has determined the CHSRA has materially failed to comply with terms of the agreements and has failed to make reasonable progress on the project,” the Transportation Department letter read. The letters come a couple of days after…
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Bisnow Wants Your Insight On California's Troubled High-Speed Rail Plan
California's plans for a high-speed rail project have spiraled downward since Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week that he planned to focus construction on the Central Valley. Though Newsom later clarified that he still planned the parts of the project that extended to Los Angeles and the Bay Area to be built later, the federal response has been swift. The U.S. Department of Transportation announced Tuesday that it planned to pull nearly $1B from the project and would seek ways to get back $2.5B already spent on the project. Bisnow wants to know what you think. Was high-speed rail doomed from the beginning? Does the loss of federal funding mean it now has no chance of completion? What does this mean for the areas that were counting on high-speed rail stops nearby?
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Bay Area's Strong Industrial Market Mirrors Strength Of Sector Across U.S.The national industrial market is hot, and the expectation among those in the industry is that it will remain the strongest sector in the Bay Area for the next few years. 
Job growth and strong consumer confidence are driving demand for industrial nationwide, according to a new report from Transwestern. Even though nearly 1B SF of industrial has delivered in the past three years, vacancy is at 4.7% and average asking…
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Defamation Lawsuit Over $2.5B Times Square Project Pits Billion-Dollar EB-5 Fund Against 2 Feisty CriticsFor the past decade, some of America's biggest real estate projects have been built with hundreds of millions of dollars borrowed from foreign investors. The EB-5 visa program encourages foreigners to fork over $500K a pop and be rewarded with green cards for their whole families. For as long as it has existed, the EB-5 program has faced criticism and nearly annual threats of cancellation because of its inherent flaw: The program is highly susceptible to abuse and fraud. Last year, one of the biggest money-raisers in the business, the U.S. Immigration Fund, alleged that a "desperate, bankrupt" Chicago attorney named Doug Litowitz and a Chinese-American woman named Zoe Ma, engaged in "wonton [sic] fraudulent behavior," defaming USIF's projects and scaring off potential investors in order to earn legal fees. Litowitz and Ma contend that USIF is the fraudulent one. |
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TIAA Real Estate Arm Launches New Multifamily FundOne of the world's largest real estate investment managers is launching a new fund focused on multifamily properties. Nuveen Real Estate, the recently rebranded subsidiary of TIAA, announced Tuesday the launch of its U.S. Cities Multifamily Fund, and it already includes a nine-property nationwide portfolio. |
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With Corporations Fleeing Suburban Campuses, Developers See New OpportunityThe campus in the D.C. suburbs Marriott International has called home for decades will soon be redeveloped into a retirement community, after the hotel giant decided to ditch the campus for a downtown Bethesda high-rise. The deal represents the latest in a trend of suburban corporate office campuses being repurposed for other uses as more companies migrate to urban areas to attract millennial talent. From Maryland to Georgia to Illinois, developers are finding it makes more sense to redevelop traditional suburban office campuses than to try to find new tenants for the aging buildings. |
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