urbanSTL

He had traveled 3,700 miles from Lima, Peru, to make a simple request. “I am interested in buying the Packard plant,” he said. “And I want to speak to the man in charge.”

Mr. Palazuelo’s $405,000 is now in the county treasury, and is nonrefundable. It represents a small down payment on the $350 million he says he needs over the next 10 years to transform the Packard into a successful, mixed-use development.

Just ten years ago, living in Chicago without an automobile was considered eccentric behavior. In 2002, a food writer friend moved there from New York and attempted bravely to get by using public transportation, taxis, and her own feet. Her colleagues at the Tribune thought her quite mad, and assigned her pieces in the suburbs ("part of my hazing," she says). Being from Indianapolis, I often described Chicago as what would happen if my home town and New York had a baby: Chicago is Midwestern but urbane, approachable but grand — and somehow both car­-oriented and transit-­friendly.

Some days it feels like Google is taking over the world. For the residents of Mountain View, California, that feeling is personal. Two weeks ago, Google signed a deal for its very own airport just east of the Googleplex, complete with a blimp hangar large enough to house the Hindenburg. But building a better blimp probably isn't the reason that Google is leasing the historic Moffett Federal Airfield from the US government. At the same time the search giant is building robots and self-driving cars, Google is on a hometown real-estate binge — and Moffett Field could be the missing piece Google needs to reshape the city in its own image.

Who really lives at One Hyde Park, called the world’s most expensive residential building? Its mostly absentee owners, hiding behind offshore corporations based in tax havens, provide a portrait of the new global super-wealthy.

Silicon Valley is marketed as The Future of Humanity.

But as a human landscape, it's a crushingly boring sunny suburban slab of freeways, fast food, traffic, and long smoggy boulevards of faded retail sprawling out to endless housing developments of sand-colored stucco boxes. It's Phoenix with milder weather, Orlando minus the mosquitos.

After 12 years of anticipation, the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere is ready for its close-up. How 10,000 workers lifted 104 floors, gave new life to an international symbol and created one spectacular view

The Wilshire Grand is among a gaggle of projects, 97 in all according to Los Angeles Downtown News, put into development in the rapidly reinventing neighborhood just in the past five months. Overall, 5,000 market-rate housing units will come online in the next two years, joining a boom in office space, museums, restaurants and brand-name shopping. Downtown L.A., left for dead amid the open spaces of Southern California, is back.

There’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter. Over the past hundred years, as automobiles have been woven into the fabric of our daily lives, our legal system has undermined public safety, and we’ve been collectively trained to think of these deaths as unavoidable “accidents” or acts of God. Today, despite the efforts of major public-health agencies and grassroots safety campaigns, few are aware that car crashes are the number one cause of death for Americans under 35.

Despite complaints about well-educated white people buying up houses in low-income minority neighborhoods, recent studies show that gentrification often helps the original residents.

In January, Rick Caruso, the C.E.O. of Caruso Affiliated, one of the largest privately held American real-estate companies, stood on a stage at the Javits Center, in New York, and forecast the demise of the traditional mall. “Within ten to fifteen years, the typical U.S. mall, unless it is completely reinvented, will be a historical anachronism—a sixty-year aberration that no longer meets the public’s needs, the retailers’ needs, or the community’s needs,” he told his audience, which had gathered for the National Retail Federation’s annual convention.