Public investment and state sponsored speculation

Great piece with a critical take and neat data analysis of how the New York’s High Line project affected real state property prices. It was written by The Dark Matter Labs & Centre for Spatial Technologies teams, who use this case to draw some interesting reflections on public investment  and state sponsored speculation.

credit: Dark Matter Labs & Centre for Spatial Technologies

The urban landscape of Hong Kong

Johnny Harris (Vox) has filmed a great series of short-videos that helps us understand the urban landscape of Hong Kong. In one of these videos, Johnny talks about how one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world is driven by government's land-use regulations. The videos also cover the decline of Hong Kong's neon nightscape and even how feng shui shapes the city skyline. There is also a very informative one about the changing relationship between Hong Kong and China. You can check the list of videos below.

Comparing house price trends worldwide

Leonard Kiefer has a new post where he presents some interesting analysis of global house price trends. Lonards has used data from the international house price database, organized by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank.

The analysis is written in R and the code is available at the bottom of his post. Thanks Leonard!

ps. don't forget to check the related links at the bottom of this post.

credit: Leonard Kiefer

Related Links:

• Aggregate homeownership rates for different countries
• Commuting times and housing costs in eight major cities
• 3D dataviz of house prices in England and Wales
• The importance of titling and property rights

3D dataviz of house prices in England and Wales

Nice 3D dataviz of house prices in England and Wales, by Jason Cole. You can read more about this work here.

Assorted Links

1. The changing gap between male and female life expectancy in the UK
   
   
2. Till Nagel is starting a collection of bike visualizations (maps, flows, timelines…)
   
   
3. Great piece at The Economist on the role of land in modern economies and the role of housing wealth in rising inequality ht Leo Monasterio
   
   
4. A real-time map of cyber attacks via @flowingdata
   
   
5.  Nice interactive version of Schelling's Segregation Model in JavaScript
   
   
6. London's historic road network from Roman Times to today
   
   
7. Other things I'd rather be doing
   
   
8. A new tool from Google can estimate the total sunlight a rooftop receives throughout the year
   
   
9. Visualizing usage patterns of the bike sharing scheme in Philadelphia, by Randal Olson

Assorted Links

1. The average price for a Manhattan residence is $1.7 million
   
   
2. A nice visual introduction to machine learning
   
   
3. Contemporary art with Classical Paintings
   
   
4. Interactive map with the delayed flights rates in Brazil, by Fabio Vasconcellos
   
   
5. John Lennon hanging out with Miles Davis
   
   
6. 27 Differences Between ArcGIS and QGIS
   
   
7. What's the difference between Lyft and Uber
   
   
8. The future Internet of Cars and how Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway
   
   
9. Interactive Dot map visualizing where renters and owner occupiers live in the United States via Maps Mania

Housing Bubble in Brazil

Robert Shiller (Yale Prof. and 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, “for their empirical analysis of asset prices”) talks about the recent home price boom in Brazil, aka 'Housing Bubble in Brazil' (via Sergio Jatobá).

Related Links:

• Call for chapter proposals: Trends and Issues in Housing in Asian cities
• Location, Location: The Hottest Real Estate Markets On Earth
• Where Housing Prices Are on the Rise in the US
• Brazil's High Flying Real Estate Prices Outpace All Countries

Assorted links

1. 100 things we didn't know last year (via Bernardo L Queiroz)
   
   
2. Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward
   
   
3. The Economis: interactive guide to the world's housing markets
   
   
4. Where UK immigrants were born: 1951-2011
   
   
5. Brazil has more ATMs than any other country
   
   
6. The Google Art Project
   
   
7. Astrology and birth rates in East Asia
   
   
8. National Geographic Photo Contest 2013
   
   
9. The 52 publications most cited by sociologists in 2013 (Based on citation analysis of 1,166 articles published in 39 sociological journals)
   
   
10. Spatial Patterns of Household Car Ownership in London

click on the image to enlarge it

[image credit: Meead Saberi ]

 

Assorted Links

1. The world's tallest slum (via Pedro Souza)
2. Observing the Earth with Incredible Satellite Photos
3. Tweet City: Building Heights by Number of Tweet
4. Things I'd rather be doing
5. The Gap Between Schooling and Education
6. Is Regional Policy a Waste of Time? (via Leo Monasterio)
7. Driverless vehicles are not going to solve congestion problems
8. A scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998
9. How much of your salary would you need to spend to rent a room in London?

[Image Credit: FT]

Assorted Links

1. @NatureMagazine special issue on Research Impact
   
   
2. The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown on 1922 - handy
   
   
3. Zipf’s Law also holds for countries! via Leo Monasterio
   
   
4. Just five years after China’s high-speed rail system opened, it is carrying nearly twice as many passengers as the country’s domestic airline industry
   
   
5. The Funniest Reviews in Amazon (via Analise Real)
   
   
6. Neat page of R spatial examples (via Alistair Leak)
   
   
7. The Impact of Population Ageing on House Prices: A Micro-Simulation Approach
   
   
8. Global Urban Networks - International Summer School 2014
   
   
9. Things I'd rather be doing right now

dsstp://ww

"The Land of Many Palaces"

In the local mongolian language 'Ordos' means “the land of many palaces". This is the title of a documentary (in production) on one of the famous Ghost Cities in China. It is an independent and low budget film featured by Adam Smith & Song Ting and I wish them luck because this is a great material for a documentary!

[I saw this at Paula Morais' facebook wall]

Assorted Links

1. Brazil’s Changing Religious Landscape
   
   
2. A map of the African population density (via Demotrends)
   
   
3. A view of Earth from the dark side of Saturn
   
   
4. Transport is Mostly a Real Estate Problem, by Alain Bertaud
   
   
5. Emigration Chart-of-the-Day
   
   
6. Stratospheric land prices in London
   
   
7. In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters
   
   
8. Emergency landings, by Dietmar Eckell
   
   
9. Top 10% Institutions and Economists in the Field of:
• Urban & Real Estate Economics
• Economic Geography

The importance of titling and property rights

A 10-minute video from MRUniversity course on development economics covering the theory and empirical research on the importance of titling and property rights (via Alex Tabarrok).

Related Links:

• Course - The American Housing Finance System
• de Soto's Book - The Mystery of Capital
• Paper - Entitled to Work: Urban Property Rights and Labor Supply in Peru (ungated)
• Paper - Property rights for the poor: Effects of land titling

Assorted Links

1. GPSing Your Cat
   
   
2. London’s Changing Population
   
   
3. Perhaps you should reconsider your PhD topic (via MR)
   
   
4. Two good reasons to make a trip to China
   
   
5. Is there a shortage of STEM workers in the USA? Yes, No, Depends
   
   
6. Home prices in some U.S. metropolitan areas
   
   
7. The new issue of the Journal of Transport and Land Use is out
   
   
8. "WTF" link: Richard Nixon and Robocop ?!
   
   
9. An old interactive map with lots of info on murders in NY

Assorted Links

1. The Central Bank of Brazil has come up with a new Real Estate Price Series it was about time  (via Drunkeynesian)
   
   
2. A new paper that has been shaking up Malthus's theory (and an institutionalist reinterpretation of Malthus)
   
   
3. The Journal of Unpublished Results (via Bernardo Furtado)
   
   
4. Attribution of CO2 emissions from Brazilian deforestation to consumers between 1990 and 2010
   
   
5. Pervasive Externalities at the Population, Consumption, and Environment Nexus, a new paper published at Science, by Dasgupta and Ehrlich
   
   
6. An impressive Skyscraper
   
   
7. Agent-based models are getting more interactive (via M Batty)
   
   
8. Urbanization and Climate Change Hazards in Asia via (Sebastien Goulard)
   
   
9. Really impressive TweetMap ALPHA developed by Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis (via infosthetics)

Assorted Links

1. Most common Origins and Destinations of international refugees
   
   
2. Location, Location, and Pacification: The Effect of UPPs in Rio (via Brandon Fuller)
   
   
3. March 15 marked the 200th anniversary of John Snow’s birth, aka the father of modern epidemiology
   
   
4. Foreign-Borns in the US: Then and Now
   
   
5. Woody Allen Answers 12 Unconventional Questions
   
   
6. PDR Journal has recently published a supplemental issue in honor to Paul Demeny focusing current themes in population and public policy
   
   
7. The lasting effect of the initial allocation of land
   
   
8. Demographic convergence in US metro areas by Alan Berube (via Peter Gordon)
   
   
9. A neat animation by Oliver O`Brien (CASA/UCL) showing the touch-ins (red) and touch-outs (green) at London’s tube and train stations

Assorted Links

1. Top 10 Most Expensive Neighborhoods in Brazil
   
   
2. The price of office space in mega cities around the world
   
   
3. The top 10 emerging technologies for 2013 (via MR)
   
   
4. Top 20: World cities with the most billionaires; Sao Paulo at 12th
   
   
5. 100 fundamental ecological questions (via @UrbanClimateLab)
   
   
6. World's top 100 universities 2013: their reputations ranked by Times Higher Education

Assorted Links

1. Brazil Ignores World Cup Costs to Lift Housing: Mortgages (via Adolfo Sachsida)
   
   
2. How names change from one generation to the next
   
   
3. Pablo Picasso and Le Corbusier (Bonus)
   
   
4. Free E-books on GIS by Esri (via Anderson Medeiros)
   
   
5. The Beatles - Unplugged [Full Album]
   
   
6. Five things economists know about immigration (via Drunkeynesian)
   
   
7. 'Why I Am Not a Christian' by Bertrand Russell
   
   
8. Building heights in Manhattan (via Carlos Gomes)

Assorted Links

1. Heading for success: or how not to title your paper (via David Levinson)
   
   
2. The 10 largest African cities in 2013
   
   
3. PAA 2013 Preliminary Program (via Eddie Hunsinger)
   
   
4. The Rio favela transformed into prime real estate (via Andres Marroquin)
   
   
5. Muddy Waters in Manchester (1964)
   
   
6. A monumental burden: Should Washington DC build skyscrapers?
   
   
7. Mapping climate change (via Per Square Mile)
   
   
8. The Skyscraper Index

Recent Real Estate Trends in China

Abstract:

We provide the first multi-city, constant quality land price index for 35 major markets in China. While there is meaningful heterogeneity in land price growth across cities, on average the last nine years have seen land values skyrocket in many markets, not just those on or near the coast. The typical market has experienced double-digit compound average annual growth in real, constant-quality land values. The 2009-2010 stimulus period typically saw large surges in prices. Three notable characteristics about the land value appreciation series are their strong mean reversion at annual frequencies, the strong common factor in their movement, and their very high volatility. Quantities, not just prices, have been sharply increasing in recent years. The typical amount of space supplied via land auctions in our 35 city sample has doubled since 2008. Some local political economy traits such as the time the local Chinese Communist Party leader has been in office are correlated with land supply volume.

I saw this at Andres Marroquin's blog (it goes to my blog-reading list, by the way)

Related links: 

• China's Housing Market: Is a Bubble About to Burst?
• The Economist interactive overview of global house prices and rents
• JTRG call for papers: Transport and Logistics in China