The only way to win this blood sport is to waive  all contingencies. If you want the house, escalate way over asking. If you want the house, bid before you even see it. If you want the house—sorry, you lost to an all-cash offer.

Although many factors contributed to this crisis (pent-up demand, stock markets on the rise, low interest rates), one stood out: Insufficient housing! There are more real estate agents than there are homes for sale right now, and it’s not particularly close. New York City, for example, built fewer new homes in the boom years of the 2010s than during the depopulating 1970s, and has built fewer new homes in the past half-century than it did in the 1920s alone.

The promise of the pandemic’s remote-work revolution—a geographic reshuffling that might revive struggling regions and free knowledge workers from high-cost cities—has not yet panned out. Instead, everyone is going exactly where they went before. Far from changing the geography of demand, COVID-19 has given us a housing market that is basically the same, but worse.

Not great. One unfortunate, paradoxical effect of rising home prices is that they seem to lock in opposition to new housing. Joe Homeowner, obviously, is having the time of his life. But for buyers, too, new market-rate housing gets more and more out of reach as prices go up and up. It’s hard to blame tenants for scoffing at new construction when every new unit comes to market at five or 10 times the median income. Instead, this fuels the widely held belief that new housing makes neighborhoods more expensive.

Nevertheless, it is possible that the current crisis is dramatic enough to convert new buyers to the idea  that housing supply matters. Even “luxury” housing. (“Luxury housing,” as Nolan Gray writes in the Atlantic, is a marketing term, not an official classification; in reality, new “luxury” apartments are usually cheaper than the existing older houses nearby.) No matter how many cranes you see, your city almost certainly isn’t building enough new units.

In a way, the housing shortage couldn’t come at a better time. The president’s infrastructure plan offers grants to communities that ease barriers to constructing infill housing in central, walkable neighborhoods—the type of housing we should be building. Such efforts have also gathered steam at the state level. The stars are aligned: We need more housing and we have the perfect place to build it. Not just in walkable places, but in places that aren’t yet walkable but would be with a little well-placed housing, commerce, and institutions. (Billions in mass-transit investment wouldn’t hurt either.)

Matt Yglesias writes this week that we get housing scarcity in spite of widespread agreement that abundance would be better, because the housing shortage fosters a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: Every city would be better with new housing, but having it on your block or in your school district comes with real costs. Let someone else build it.

But this diagnosis isn’t quite true: I don’t think most people even believe there’s a housing shortage. Their evidence to the contrary lies in downtown cranes, vacant apartments, far-off suburbs, and low-cost cities. Instead, the consensus has settled around a shortage of affordable housing—a phenomenon supposedly detached from the slow drip of new construction.

That view filters up to politicians, who feel little pressure to remedy the situation in the name of either racial justice or economic growth, in spite of growing pressure on both fronts.

What’s happening now in the real estate market feels like it is of another order of magnitude than past price run-ups in expensive places. A colleague looking for houses in the D.C. area lost on a house that went for $100,000 over asking price. Her agent saw a house with 10 pre-offer inspections and 32 offers. Her friend bid on a house that went for $320,000 over asking.

Sadly, those who win these all-out bidding wars will probably, suddenly feel that there is enough housing, and yes, we need affordable housing, but really affordable housing, you know? (And not here!)

But for every winner there will be many losers, and maybe the process can radicalize these would-be buyers, and their friends, and their parents, and the people they talk to. There really aren’t enough places to live. Those people can channel their frustration with bidding wars into political activism aimed at housing suppressants like parking requirements, restrictive zoning, and density limits. If appeals to neither historical wrongs nor economic growth get the job done, a strong dose of self-interest can’t hurt.

The National Association of Home Builders’ monthly confidence index held steady at a reading of 83 in May, the trade group said Monday.

Index readings over 50 are a sign of improving confidence. A year ago, the onset of the pandemic caused the index to drop below 50 in April and May, but confidence quickly rebounded as many Americans opted to resume their search for a new home last summer.

“Low interest rates are supporting housing affordability in a market where the cost of most materials is rising,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), in the report.

What happened: The gauge of builders’ expectation of home sales in the next six months jumped higher than the other components of the broader monthly report. The index measuring builders’ attitudes toward current sales conditions remained the same, while the component that measures traffic of prospective buyers decreased slightly.

On a regional basis, builder confidence improved in the South and held steady in the West, but decreased in the Northeast and Midwest to the lowest levels since August.

The biggest picture: There are few existing homes for sale and the low rate environment encourages market interest in new homes. But buyers and builders alike are facing price pressure that could complicate the feasibility of sales.

The aggregate material costs for home construction are up 12% compared to a year ago, and builders have indicated that they expect prices to move even higher. The short supply of lumber and steel used to construct homes is a major driver of these higher material costs, in particular.

Builders also face challenges in securing lots and labor in many markets, the NAHB warned. “Some builders are slowing sales to manage their own supply-chains, which means growing affordability challenges for a market in critical need of more inventory,” Dietz said, adding that buyers should expect rising prices.

What they’re saying: “The trend in homebuilding should remain upward due to rising employment, still-low interest rates, and a record-low supply of available homes in the resale market,” said Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, in a research note.

Market reaction: While the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 moved lower Monday morning, home builder stocks, including Lennar Corp.,  Toll Brothers Inc.,  D.R. Horton Inc.  and PulteGroup Inc.,  saw larger declines immediately after the report’s release.

Smith attended Texas A&M University, pursuing a Bachelor of Architecture and was simultaneously involved with the Corps of Cadets. Leaving his graduation midway, Smith started working for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) in 1967.

He graduated in 1969 from the University of Illinois, Chicago College of Architecture and Arts. In 2013, Smith was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters degree from Texas A&M university.

In 1960s Smith started working at a firm SOM as a young architect. He started designing Burj Khalifa while he was still attached with that firm. The firm SOM was famous for producing corporate projects mostly but Burj Khalifa was an exception.

Smith got retirement from the firm three years earlier than the official time and took a ten years lease on an office and gathered a number of colleagues to work with and began another phase of his career.

Smith has great interest in making tall buildings and remarks that such buildings act as landmarks and leave a great influence on their surroundings.

The name of the firm set up by Adrian Smith is Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG) which focuses majorly on providing a platform to work for high-performance, energy-efficient and sustainable buildings on international level.

Smith has great passion for the use of vernacular and indigenous forms and compositions and this can be seen in his work as well. With evolution in the world of technology he is up to the integration of regional techniques and industrial methods for his designs. He focuses majorly on the physical features of each of his design.

Since the major goal for all of his projects is to achieve the environmental sustainability so he puts so much attention to location, climate, geographical, geological, cultural, and social influences of site. During the course of some recent years, he has adopted a new design approach of producing energy “on site”.

In order to make sustainable buildings with less energy and more efficiency he designs buildings in such a way that they absorb more and more energy from natural resources including sunlight, wind and geothermal conditions thus producing energy for projects on the respective sites.

This not only aids the energy but also lessens the dependency of buildings on the local infrastructure. Smith’s this technique has opened up new dimensions in the field of architecture and led to the proposal of new philosophy in architectural world called Global Contextualism.

Smith has always had great interest in international projects and very actively took part in all the development programs he could get his hands on. He has been a keynote speaker at the ABN Amro symposium (1990); the Ouaternario conference in Singapore (1991); the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) Fifth World Congress (1995); CTBUH World Congress Dubai (2009); CTBUH World Congress Chicago (2011); CTBUH World Congress Shanghai (2012); and has also lectured in Frankfurt, London, Buenos Aires, Notre Dame, Amsterdam, Prague, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, New York, Chicago and Washington DC among other locations.

Adrian Smith has been a registered architect in twelve states of the USA and his designs have won him more than 125 awards which include 5 international, 9 national and 3 Urban Land Institute Awards for excellence. He is making most of his time working on his projects with a lot of dedication and unstoppable energy.

Few Famous Constructions

The city’s continued reopening, helped push the number of new leases in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens to record highs.

“There’s still such a high amount of inventory, and tenants know that,” says Hal Gavzie, executive director of leasing at Douglass Elliman. “[They’re] looking at neighborhoods that pre-Covid they could not afford.”

Areas like Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, and the West Village in Manhattan, are particularly hot, with demand so high for some units that landlords are asking prospective renters to submit their best and final offers above the advertised rent price—akin to what would be expected in a competitive market for home buyers.

Still, the median rental price in Manhattan is down 18.5% compared to a year ago, while Brooklyn is down 16.2% and Queens 13.1%, the report said.

The best deals in Manhattan are on big spaces—apartments with three or more bedrooms—presumably because Covid-19 has caused tenants to seek fewer roommates.

The median rental price for such units is down 24.4% to $5,000 in the past year, while smaller apartments have dropped between about 15% to 20%.

Such declines have spurred a rush of signings, as tenants seek to lock in deals while they still can. Across apartment sizes, new signings in Manhattan soared more than fivefold compared to a year ago.

The median apartment rented for $2,791 in April, net of concessions like one month or more of free rent, compared with $3,540 in April 2020.

A similar story is playing out in Brooklyn and Queens, though median prices ticked up month over month, by 0.1% and 3.4%, respectively.

In Brooklyn, all apartment sizes are renting at a median discount of at least 18% compared to a year ago, with the biggest discounts on those with two or more bedrooms. Luxury buildings have dropped less. In Queens, where there are comparatively fewer transactions, the median rental price in April was $2,370, a 15.7% annual decline.

Prices could normalize closer to pre-Covid levels in 24 months, Gavzie thinks, but much depends on how quickly the city’s commercial market rebounds.

The pandemic has caused office vacancies in Manhattan to hit record levels, and as companies formulate their long-term work-from-home policies, it is not clear when—if ever—office workers will return in their old numbers. The longer that rebound takes, the harder hit many retail and residential landlords will be.

Still, beyond the bidding wars in the city’s ritziest rental enclaves, there are signs that the worst has passed.

Public transportation is more crowded, and some owners are beginning to once again charge broker fees to tenants, the much-reviled surcharges that are a sign of landlord strength. “I think that we’re still a long way away,” Gavzie says. But “these are all positive signs.”

Despite mounting job losses and bankruptcies in industries battered by social distancing, home sales have been on fire across the U.S., with Americans racing to gobble up larger properties in the suburbs, with room for remote school and home offices.

The fuel has been historically low mortgages rates, which have been held down by the Federal Reserve’s efforts to stimulate the economy. After two decades when urban living was in vogue, the massive millennial generation is aging into home ownership during quarantine and the intense demand for property has met record-low inventory in 2020 to send prices surging.

Important Numbers

$315,000 – median price of a single-family home in the U.S.

2.73% – Freddie Mac 30-year fixed rate in mid-February

842,000 – number of existing homes sold in the U.S. in 2020, the most since 2006

Why It Matters

The question now is whether it can last. The rollout of vaccines is stoking hopes for an economic rebound that could push mortgage rates higher and erode buying power for first-time home buyers or families looking for more space. Plus, there just isn’t much to buy.

Decades of sluggish building has a left a generational shortage of inventory, while older empty nesters who might typically downsize have been wary of trying to sell suburban homes in a pandemic.

All of that is fueling a looming affordability crisis that threatens the historic housing rally.

More Stability

U.S. home values provide steadier growth compared with fluctuations in stocks

Key findings from the report include the most popular cities, the least popular cities, and where the youngest Millennial buyers move to. LendingTree’s Chief Economist and Vice President Tendayi Kapfidze looks at the report’s results. “We found the top cities were attractive to those older millennials with high-paying jobs in the tech industry,” explains Kapfidze.

Two of the most popular cities San Jose and Boston are among the country’s most expensive to buy a home.  It’s no surprise Millennials are the majority of buyers in those cities thanks to tech-based economies and high-paying jobs.

Millennials in San Jose which ranked number one had the highest down payment amounts at $158,040. Those borrowers had the highest average requested loan amount of $704,318. The current home value in the San Jose metro is $1,275,627.

Moving East to Boston a long-time tech hub for Millennials, many of whom went to school in the Boston area and stayed. At number two the typical home in Boston is currently above $1 million. “Tech companies attract younger and wealthier workers that can afford these expensive cities,” Kapfidze observes.

Denver which came in at number three on the most popular metros rankings is a far more affordable market for Millennials. LendingTree’s borrower stats confirm this. The average loan requested from Millennial Denver homebuyers was $354,433. Denver metro’s average home value is $474,618.

Warm weather doesn’t attract Millennials to buy in Las Vegas, Tampa, or Phoenix. LendingTree ranks those metros as the least popular cities for homebuyers.  Too bad since home values there are certainly more affordable than the most popular metros.

Look at Las Vegas where typical home values are right at $224,259. Tampa prices are a bit higher at $250,431. Phoenix has the highest values of the three metros at $321,359.

Kapfidze has a different opinion on the urban flight to the suburbs than the headlines of the summer and spring. “With Millennials as the largest home buying segment, our mid-December data isn’t showing people fleeing those urban cores.”

Following Millennial buying trends is a good look into the country’s current real estate market.

After she died, the penthouse’s buyer was a Saudi prince, according to the New York Post. He is now putting it back on the market for $10 million more than what he purchased it for.

It is a triplex penthouse on 1 East 62nd is just steps from Fifth Avenue and Central Park, offering incredible city and park views. According to the listing, the penthouse is a pre-war condominium set atop a limestone-sheathed, 42-foot-wide mansion.

The neo-French Classic style was designed by renowned architect Horace Trumbauer and is one of his “great houses” in New York.

The mansion with four-bedroom, five-bathroom has a total of 11 rooms, including a dramatic two-story, 23-ft-high gallery room; a spacious living room; library; formal dining room; two spacious terraces; five wood-burning fireplaces; a ballroom; gilded walls; crystal chandeliers; a sweeping staircase; and an office adjoined to the master bedroom.

The house spans a total of 5,200 square feet and 430 square feet of outdoor space from the terraces.

The Louis XIV-style mansion has several museum-quality architectural features, including an elegant parquet-de-Versailles floor restored by museum-trained artisans in the reception rooms.

The formal dining room features ornate 18th-century French panels, original wood-burning fireplaces and connects to a south-facing terrace. The mansion welcomes plenty of light through large windows, thanks to its position atop the building. Bathrooms feature marble tubs and countertops, golden accents and beautiful curtains and lighting.

This ultra-private penthouse is accessed via a private elevator that opens directly into the residence.

However, buyers beware. Rivers was convinced her home was haunted by a former resident named “Mrs. Spencer.” On a 2009 episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories, she brought in a voodoo priestess to rid the home of her ghost, who was supposedly J.P. Morgan’s niece and an original resident in the building.

On the show, the priestess performed a ceremony of chanting and drumming to rid the angry spirit, who, according to Rivers, thought she was still the dame of the house.

On the show, Rivers became concerned when her dog wouldn’t enter certain rooms and she found the apartment to be cold, no matter what she set the temperature too.

Other residents in the building saw throughout many of the common areas, as well. The haunting ended once Rivers hung a portrait of Mrs. Spencer in the building’s lobby.

The property is exclusively listed by Jenny Lenz and Dolly Lenz of Dolly Lenz Real Estate. The founder of the eponymous firm has generated more than $12 billion in sales.

The Architecture Billings Index (ABI) continued to rise for the third month in a row in April, portending a broader recovery.

In the latest figures released by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the ABI hit 57.9, up from 55.6 the month before (any figure over 50 is growth, under 50, decline), indicating that positive growth in February and March wasn’t just a fluke.

Once more, every measure of the ABI, a composite measure of billing and demand, rose across every project type and U.S. region.

This could be pinned on increasing vaccination rates as much of the country moves to reopen, and even record high timber prices haven’t put a damper on things (not yet, at least). However, the AIA quickly mentioned that the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index, which tracks the price of consumer goods, was rapidly rising due to supply chain constraints, and that inflation was quickly increasing as well.

What this means? Does that mean we’re building to a chokepoint where demand will eventually outstrip supply and create an architectural services plateau? Time will tell.

New project inquiries rocketed in April, rising from 66.9 to 70.8, indicating that demand for new projects from developers and homeowners was still strong and that more growth could be on the horizon.

The index of newly signed design contracts rose as well, from 55.7 up to 61.7, indicating that those same interested parties were opening their checkbooks and signing on to build.

If considered region wise, every section of the country continued to show growth. The West went from 52.8 in March to 52.4 in April (staying positive), while the South saw demand rise even higher, going from 55.8 to 58.3.

In the Midwest, demand moved from 56.5 all the way up to 60.6 in April, and in the beleaguered Northeast, demand was finally starting to improve, going from 50.8 in March to 55.0.

The story was pretty much the same when seen sector-by-sector. Firms specializing in commercial and industrial work saw demand increase from 57.0 to 59.1 in April, likely buoyed by the prospect of actual foot traffic returning to public spaces.

Institutional demand, long a safe port for firms that were decimated by the pandemic, rose as well, moving from 54.4 to 56.7 in April. Finally, firms specializing in residential projects, the sector hit the least hard during the pandemic (people will always need housing), moved from 52.6 up to 56.9 in April.

Will these gains continue? It remains to be seen, but the numbers in the next couple of months will help analysts figure out if this is a bull run or simply an anomalous blip.

In the AIA’s polling, a rising number of firms ranked cost overruns, project delays, and higher construction bids as their top problems, meaning the aforementioned bottleneck could be approaching.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the city of Los Angeles where, in April, the City Council voted to review a proposal, the City Building Code Fire District 1 Expansion, to expand existing fire safety measures to wildfire-prone neighborhoods, such as Silver Lake and Pacific Palisades, or to any population center with a density greater than 5,000 residents per square mile.

In particular, the proposal seeks to reduce the use of timber for large-scale projects, defined as measuring over 150,000 square feet in floor area or just 100,000 square feet for buildings measuring more than 30 feet tall (a diminutive three stories).

The implications of passing such a sweeping ordinance are potentially seismic. Timber construction, mainly the ubiquitous one-plus-five typology, is profoundly less expensive than other common building materials such as steel and concrete—not to mention far less carbon-intensive.

As reported by Urbanize Los Angeles, the proposal to curtail the use of timber construction in one of the nation’s largest cities may result from less-than-honest intentions.

Build with Strength, a coalition led by the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, is a prominent advocate for the expansion of the Fire District, and a cursory glance of their website reveals a number of hot takes on mass timber, including “A Scientific Rebuttal to Tall Mass Timber Buildings” and “CLT Structures are Burning to Ashes,” among other digressions on wildfire management and the sustainable potential of poured concrete.

The potential push to curtail timber construction follows the California Building Standards Commission’s unanimous approval of the International Building Code’s guidelines for tall wood buildings in August 2020. This, as argued in an AN op-ed by LEVER Architecture’s Thomas, could very well transform California (the world’s fifth-largest economy) into a global leader in mass timber construction and design, all while addressing the state’s housing demands and forest management. Of course, that’s all dependent on whether the proposal becomes law.

Festival curator and dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning Hashim Sarkis admitted the difficulty in staging a large international event during a pandemic, especially when Italy was an infection hotspot early on. But he also expressed confidence that the extra year would give exhibitors time to refine their projects.

The 17th edition of the Biennale now opens this Saturday, May 22, and runs through November 21, 2021. This year’s theme, How Will We Live Together? takes on particular poignancy given the circumstances; radical futures envisioning closely-knit warrens or co-living spaces pre-pandemic have been thrown off-kilter by recent events.

Still, plenty of installations and pavilions are direct responses to the turmoil of the last year but even the ones that aren’t are still worth checking out. This year, there will be 61 national pavilions and 17 collateral events scheduled.

Below are just a few of this year’s highlights, and if you aren’t able to travel to Venice (or don’t feel comfortable) to see the show in person, many of the projects and films this year will be accompanied by online components.

Available here, Biennale Pavilions is the show’s official platform for viewing the event’s content online.

1.   The U.S. Pavilion, AMERICAN FRAMING

2.  The Thai Pavilion, Elephant

3.   The Canadian Pavilion, Impostor Cities

In Imposter Cities, the team will wrap its pavilion in green screens and project iconic Canadian buildings across them, raising the question of how we ultimately view important architecture; in person, or through someone else’s lens?

4.   The Irish Pavilion, Entanglement

Rather than examine physical space, the Irish Pavilion this year is looking into digital architecture.

5.   The Japanese Pavilion, Co-ownership of Action: Trajectories of Elements

This year’s Japan Pavilion is a turn towards sustainability, as curator Kadowaki Kozo tasked his team with disassembling a wooden house in Japan, shipping it to Venice, and rebuilding it in different spatial configurations with new materials, extending the life of a building that would have normally been demolished.

6.   SOM’s Life Beyond Earth

7.   The Spanish Pavilion, Uncertainty

8.   The British Pavilion, The Garden of Privatised Delights

These are just a few of the many visual and intellectual treats at the Biennale. Be at the venue to satiate your senses and get a whole new insight.