Las Urbanistas

Isaias Corona of Bradshaw Honey Farm, near Visalia, Calif., putting corn syrup — bee food — into hives. The farm has lost about half its be

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

Published: February 27, 2007

VISALIA, Calif., Feb. 23 — David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

 

“I have never seen anything like it,” Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.”

The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.

Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.

Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.

Along with recent stresses on the bees themselves, as well as on an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear this disorder may force a breaking point for even large beekeepers.

A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts. “Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food,” said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.

Beekeepers are the nomads of the agriculture world, working in obscurity in their white protective suits and frequently trekking around the country with their insects packed into 18-wheelers, looking for pollination work.

Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.

Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.

“There are less beekeepers, less bees, yet more crops to pollinate,” Mr. Browning said. “While this sounds sweet for the bee business, with so much added loss and expense due to disease, pests and higher equipment costs, profitability is actually falling.”

Some 15 worried beekeepers convened in Florida this month to brainstorm with researchers how to cope with the extensive bee losses. Investigators are exploring a range of theories, including viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.

They are also studying a group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries to see if they are somehow affecting bees’ innate ability to find their way back home.

It could just be that the bees are stressed out. Bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. That has most likely lowered their immunity to viruses.

Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many worker bees. The queens are living half as long as they did just a few years ago.

Researchers are also concerned that the willingness of beekeepers to truck their colonies from coast to coast could be adding to bees’ stress, helping to spread viruses and mites and otherwise accelerating whatever is afflicting them.

Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the state of Pennsylvania who is part of the team studying the bee colony collapses, said the “strong immune suppression” investigators have observed “could be the AIDS of the bee industry,” making bees more susceptible to other diseases that eventually kill them off.

Growers have tried before to do without bees. In past decades, they have used everything from giant blowers to helicopters to mortar shells to try to spread pollen across the plants. More recently researchers have been trying to develop “self-compatible” almond trees that will require fewer bees. One company is even trying to commercialize the blue orchard bee, which is virtually stingless and works at colder temperatures than the honeybee.

Beekeepers have endured two major mite infestations since the 1980s, which felled many hobbyist beekeepers, and three cases of unexplained disappearing disorders as far back as 1894. But those episodes were confined to small areas, Mr. van Engelsdorp said.

Today the industry is in a weaker position to deal with new stresses. A flood of imported honey from China and Argentina has depressed honey prices and put more pressure on beekeepers to take to the road in search of pollination contracts. Beekeepers are trucking tens of billions of bees around the country every year.

California’s almond crop, by far the biggest in the world, now draws more than half of the country’s bee colonies in February. The crop has been both a boon to commercial beekeeping and a burden, as pressure mounts for the industry to fill growing demand. Now spread over 580,000 acres stretched across 300 miles of California’s Central Valley, the crop is expected to grow to 680,000 acres by 2010.

Beekeepers now earn many times more renting their bees out to pollinate crops than in producing honey. Two years ago a lack of bees for the California almond crop caused bee rental prices to jump, drawing beekeepers from the East Coast.

This year the price for a bee colony is about $135, up from $55 in 2004, said Joe Traynor, a bee broker in Bakersfield, Calif.

A typical bee colony ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 bees. But beekeepers’ costs are also on the rise. In the past decade, fuel, equipment and even bee boxes have doubled and tripled in price.

The cost to control mites has also risen, along with the price of queen bees, which cost about $15 each, up from $10 three years ago.

To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.

“A couple of farmers have asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” Mr. Bradshaw said. “I ask myself the same thing. But it is a job I like. It is a lifestyle. I work with my dad every day. And now my son is starting to work with us.”

Almonds fetch the highest prices for bees, but if there aren’t enough bees to go around, some growers may be forced to seek alternatives to bees or change their variety of trees.

“It would be nice to know that we have a dependable source of honey bees,” said Martin Hein, an almond grower based in Visalia. “But at this point I don’t know that we have that for the amount of acres we have got.”

To cope with the losses, beekeepers have been scouring elsewhere for bees to fulfill their contracts with growers. Lance Sundberg, a beekeeper from Columbus, Mont., said he spent $150,000 in the last two weeks buying 1,000 packages of bees — amounting to 14 million bees — from Australia.

He is hoping the Aussie bees will help offset the loss of one-third of the 7,600 hives he manages in six states. “The fear is that when we mix the bees the die-offs will continue to occur,” Mr. Sundberg said.

Migratory beekeeping is a lonely life that many compare to truck driving. Mr. Sundberg spends more than half the year driving 20 truckloads of bees around the country. In Terra Bella, an hour south of Visalia, Jack Brumley grimaced from inside his equipment shed as he watched Rosa Patiño use a flat tool to scrape dried honey from dozens of beehive frames that once held bees. Some 2,000 empty boxes — which once held one-third of his total hives — were stacked to the roof.

Beekeepers must often plead with landowners to allow bees to be placed on their land to forage for nectar. One large citrus grower has pushed for California to institute a “no-fly zone” for bees of at least two miles to prevent them from pollinating a seedless form of Mandarin orange.

But the quality of forage might make a difference. Last week Mr. Bradshaw used a forklift to remove some of his bee colonies from a spot across a riverbed from orange groves. Only three of the 64 colonies there have died or disappeared.

“It will probably take me two to three more years to get back up,” he said. “Unless I spend gobs of money I don’t have.”

MOSAIC SOPHISTICATION A quasi-crystalline Penrose pattern at the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: February 27, 2007

In the beauty and geometric complexity of tile mosaics on walls of medieval Islamic buildings, scientists have recognized patterns suggesting that the designers had made a conceptual breakthrough in mathematics beginning as early as the 13th century.

A new study shows that the Islamic pattern-making process, far more intricate than the laying of one’s bathroom floor, appears to have involved an advanced math of quasi crystals, which was not understood by modern scientists until three decades ago.

 

The findings, reported in the current issue of the journal Science, are a reminder of the sophistication of art, architecture and science long ago in the Islamic culture. They also challenge the assumption that the designers somehow created these elaborate patterns with only a ruler and a compass. Instead, experts say, they may have had other tools and concepts.

Two years ago, Peter J. Lu, a doctoral student in physics at Harvard University, was transfixed by the geometric pattern on a wall in Uzbekistan. It reminded him of what mathematicians call quasi-crystalline designs. These were demonstrated in the early 1970s by Roger Penrose, a mathematician and cosmologist at the University of Oxford.

Mr. Lu set about examining pictures of other tile mosaics from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Turkey, working with Paul J. Steinhardt, a Princeton cosmologist who is an authority on quasi crystals and had been Mr. Lu’s undergraduate adviser. The research was a bit like trying to figure out the design principle of a jigsaw puzzle, Mr. Lu said in an interview.

In their journal report, Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt concluded that by the 15th century, Islamic designers and artisans had developed techniques “to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before discovery in the West.”

Some of the most complex patterns, called “girih” in Persian, consist of sets of contiguous polygons fitted together with little distortion and no gaps. Running through each polygon (a decagon, pentagon, diamond, bowtie or hexagon) is a decorative line. Mr. Lu found that the interlocking tiles were arranged in predictable ways to create a pattern that never repeats — that is, quasi crystals.

“Again and again, girih tiles provide logical explanations for complicated designs,” Mr. Lu said in a news release from Harvard.

He and Dr. Steinhardt recognized that the artisans in the 13th century had begun creating mosaic patterns in this way. The geometric star-and-polygon girihs, as quasi crystals, can be rotated a certain number of degrees, say one-fifth of a circle, to positions from which other tiles are fitted. As such, this makes possible a pattern that is infinitely big and yet the pattern never repeats itself, unlike the tiles on the typical floor.

This was, the scientists wrote, “an important breakthrough in Islamic mathematics and design.”

Dr. Steinhardt said in an interview that it was not clear how well the Islamic designers understood all the elements they were applying to the construction of these patterns. “I can just say what’s on the walls,” he said.

Mr. Lu said that it would be “incredible if it were all coincidence.”

“At the very least,” he said, “it shows us a culture that we often don’t credit enough was far more advanced than we ever thought before.”

From a study of a few hundred examples, Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt determined that the technique was fully developed two centuries later in mosques, palaces, shrines and other buildings. They noted that “a nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose pattern” is found on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran, which was built in 1453. The researchers described how the architects there had created overlapping patterns with girih tiles at two sizes to produce nearly perfect quasi-crystalline patterns.

In the report, Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt said the examples they had studied so far “fall just short of being perfect quasi crystals; there may be more interesting examples yet to be discovered.”

In a separate article in Science, some experts in the math of crystals questioned if the findings were an entirely new insight. In particular, Emil Makovicky of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark said the new report failed to give sufficient credit to an analysis he published in 1992 of mosaic patterns on a tomb in Iran.

Mr. Lu and Dr. Steinhardt said they regretted what they called a misunderstanding. They pointed out that the length of their report was strictly enforced by journal editors, but it did include two footnotes to Dr. Makovicky’s research. None of the referees or editors who reviewed the paper, Dr. Steinhardt said, asked for more attention to the previous research.

Although their work had some elements in common with Dr. Makovicky’s, Dr. Steinhardt said in an interview that their research dealt with not one but a “whole sweep of tilings” interpreted through a few hundred examples.

The article quoted two other experts, Dov Levine and Joshua Socolar, physicists at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and Duke University, respectively, as agreeing that Dr. Makovicky deserved more credit. But, the article noted, they said the Lu-Steinhardt research had “generated interesting and testable hypotheses.”

TIME WILL TELL Stewart Brand with a chime prototype for his 10,000-year clock.

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: February 27, 2007

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

 

He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.

He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he’s been straddling and blending since the 1960s. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their famous Trips Festival in San Francisco, directing a multimedia show called “America Needs Indians.” That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of romantic.

But he created the shows drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied principles of machines and electrical networks to social institutions. Mr. Brand imagined replacing the old technocratic hierarchies with horizontal information networks — a scientific vision that seemed quaintly abstract until the Internet came along.

Mr. Brand, who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, Calif., has stayed ahead of the curve for so long — as a publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme networker — that he’s become a cottage industry in academia.

Last year, Fred Turner of Stanford published “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.” This fall Andy Kirk of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is putting out “Counterculture Green: The Environmentalism of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog.” By next year we should be due for a revisionist historian’s discovery of a modern social movement that Mr. Brand did not orchestrate.

In addition to publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, he organized the first Hackers Conference, in 1984, and helped found The WELL, the early electronic community that was a sort of prototype of the Web. In Professor Turner’s history, he was the impresario who knew everyone and brought the counterculture and the cyberculture together, from the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s to Wired magazine in the 1990s.

He is now promoting environmental heresies, as he called them in Technology Review. He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon.

He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture’s fears of computers turning into Big Brother. “Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines,” he told Conservation magazine last year. “Where are the green biotech hackers?”

He’s also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.

“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

Mr. Brand got his first look at the big picture one afternoon in 1966 while sitting on a roof in San Francisco at what he calls an “altitude of three stories and 100 mikes,” meaning micrograms of LSD. He contemplated the skyline and decided the buildings weren’t parallel because he was seeing the curvature of the Earth.

This reminded him of Buckminster Fuller’s theory that people abused the environment because they thought of the Earth as flat and infinite, not as a finite globe. The next day the Earth looked flat again, but the 28-year-old Mr. Brand had a new cause. He printed up buttons asking, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”

Two years later, when Earth’s portrait from space was finally released, he used it on the cover of his new project, the Whole Earth Catalog. The catalog became the bible for the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement, but Mr. Brand was not into the simple self-sufficient life on the farm. He was into new tools and new ways of sharing information. As he famously explained in the introduction to the catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Along with the potter’s wheels and organic-farming tips, the catalog featured a state-of-the-art offering from Hewlett Packard: a desktop calculator that cost $4,900. In 1968, which was 16 years before the Apple Macintosh, Mr. Brand helped arrange the first demonstration of a computer mouse.

In a 1972 article, he contrasted “hackers” (a novel term then) with old-fashioned “planners,” hailing the experimental, collaborative culture that was taking shape in cyberspace. At the first Hackers Conference, he uttered another of his enduring aphorisms, “Information wants to be free.”

Mr. Brand’s latest project, undertaken with fellow digerati, is to build the world’s slowest computer, a giant clock designed to run for 10,000 years inside a mountain in the Nevada desert, powered by changes in temperature. The clock is an effort to promote long-term thinking — what Mr. Brand calls the Long Now, a term he borrowed from the musician Brian Eno.

Mr. Brand is the first to admit his own futurism isn’t always prescient. In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford.

The famine never arrived, and Professor Ehrlich’s theories of the coming “age of scarcity” were subsequently challenged by the economist Julian Sinon, who bet Mr. Ehrlich that the prices of natural resources would fall during the 1980s despite the growth in population. The prices fell, just as predicted by Professor Simon’s cornucopian theories.

Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon’s victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn’t. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking.

“It is one of the great revelatory bets,” he now says. “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”

He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he’s afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people.

Old-fashioned rural simplicity still has great appeal for romantic environmentalists. But when the romantics who disdain frankenfoods choose locally grown heirloom plants and livestock, they’re benefiting from technological advances made by past plant and animal breeders. Are the risks of genetically engineered breeds of wheat or cloned animals so great, or do they just ruin the romance?

Mr. Brand would rather take a few risks.

“I get bored easily — on purpose,” he said, recalling advice from the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix. “Jim Watson said he looks for young scientists with low thresholds of boredom, because otherwise you get researchers who just keep on gilding their own lilies. You have to keep on trying new things.”

That’s a good strategy, whether you’re trying to build a sustainable career or a sustainable civilization. Ultimately, there’s no safety in clinging to a romanticized past or trying to plan a risk-free future. You have to keep looking for better tools and learning from mistakes. You have to keep on hacking.

That’s the concept that triumphed for the acre-plus lot at Octavia Boulevard and Oak Street, where ramps once funneled cars up to the Central Freeway. The site is one of four that was offered to development teams in a competition conducted by the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. These projects are primarily for market-rate condominiums, though other former Central Freeway sites will be reserved for affordable housing.

 

When teams of architects and developers were asked to submit bids in October, the rules stressed that the bottom line wasn’t the only consideration. They also called for “excellence and innovation in urban infill and architectural design.”

Judging by the teams selected last week, city officials stuck to their guns.

The most intriguing proposal is for the parcel at Octavia and Oak. The winning firm is Build Inc., which slices the parcel east to west and fills the middle with a landscaped mews, then frames the mews with 12 buildings — a single broad structure on the east and west and a procession of narrow ones filling the block between them along Oak and the alleyway on the north.

It all adds up to 239 residential units in five-story buildings that can be designed by individual architects and built at their own pace — just the way cities once naturally evolved.

The other two winners look promising, as well. For the site that starts at the wedge-shaped northeast corner of Octavia and Market and stretches to Haight Street, the city selected AkS Development Group and Stanley Saitowitz, whose Natoma Architects is responsible for such distinctive local housing as the machine-like Yerba Buena Lofts on Folsom Street.

The new proposal is a six-story-high translucent form that extends the entire block — each unit cloaked in tinted glass fins that serve as sunscreens, pivoting open or shut. Multistory notches in the building would slice apart the cube and create wide courtyards visible from the street.

The two trickiest sites are 16-foot-wide slivers on the east side of Octavia between Fell and Oak streets. They were awarded to a team that includes Envelope A+D — the architecture firm that won the design competition for Octavia Boulevard sponsored in 2005 by the San Francisco Prize. The look? Imagine a scaffold wrapped in clear glass.

The city now must negotiate details with the teams and send the projects to the Board of Supervisors for final approval. Revenue from the land sales will fund street improvements related to the five-block boulevard that opened late in 2005.

No matter how sharp the additions to Octavia Boulevard turn out to be, here’s a wager: They won’t measure up to the best work of Timothy Pflueger — perhaps the finest architect San Francisco ever produced, and the subject of a lovingly thorough portrait in the winter 2006 edition of the Argonaut.

The 27-page piece by Timothy Keegan is a well-illustrated tour of work by an architect who peaked in the 1920s and ’30s and, like New York’s Raymond Hood in the same era, spun out designs that managed to be both of the era and for all time. Among the projects by Miller and Pflueger: The Pacific Telephone Building on New Montgomery Street, the Castro Theatre and 450 Sutter St.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the latter is a swellegant slab, 26 stories high in the middle of the block. The terra-cotta skin hums with Mayan motifs; Keegan quotes a review by Architect & Engineer from 1930 that likens the building to “a giant tapestry hung against the sky.”

Pflueger was born in 1892. He lived his entire life at 1015 Guerrero St., hired artists like Diego Rivera whenever he could and died in 1940 of a heart attack as he strolled out of the Olympic Club.

In the article for the Argonaut — which is published by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society — Keegan quotes this 1989 summation by Kevin Starr: “Pflueger designed buildings for people who liked cities and who liked themselves.” These days, it sometimes seems that both are in short supply.

Finally, a raised eyebrow for the “Wallpaper* City Guide to San Francisco” — the latest in a new breed of travel books for the would-be uber-hipster.

The pocket-size volume is part of a series billing itself as an “insider’s checklist of all you need to know about the world’s most intoxicating cities.” But it would have more credibility if it didn’t say Julia Morgan was the architect of the Fairmont Hotel (credit goes to Reid Bros.; Morgan worked on a 1906 restoration). Or that the Sheraton Palace Hotel “weathered the great quake of 1906″ (it collapsed in flames). Or that the Monterey Bay Aquarium is “an hour’s drive south of San Francisco.”

On the other hand, the guide says the new federal building designed by Morphosis at Seventh and Mission streets “has already divided locals as to whether it is an icon or an eyesore.” Wallpaper knows whereof it speaks — but that’s fodder for another column.

Place appears on Tuesdays. E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.

The company, defending its resort zone, seeks to block a revote on a housing plan it opposes.

By Dave McKibben, Times Staff Writer
February 27, 2007

Maintaining its aggressive posture, Disney officials filed suit Monday against the city of Anaheim as part of the entertainment giant’s continuing efforts to thwart a residential development in the resort district.

The suit comes as the Anaheim City Council ponders whether to reopen debate on a controversial proposal to build 1,500 condominiums and apartments, including 225 units for lower-income residents, near Disney’s amusement parks. The project was killed this month on a split council vote.

Disney says its action is the first time it has sued the city where Disneyland was born more than 50 years ago. The city and Disney have historically enjoyed a close-knit, fight-free relationship.

Anaheim is also locked in a legal fight with one of the city’s other icons, the Angels, over the team’s name.

Disney’s legal challenge signals a new, hardened approach to maintaining the tourist-friendly environment of the resort district. Disney has spent years trying to buff up the resort area, going back to the days when Walt Disney expressed revulsion at the cheap motels and tacky retail outlets that had taken root outside the gates to Disneyland.

In addition to Disneyland and California Adventure, the resort area now includes Downtown Disney, new hotels and more upscale restaurants.

Disney officials say the 8,000 or so people who would be living in the proposed units would be out of place in a district designed for round-the-clock tourist-friendly uses. Disneyland President Ed Grier said allowing the project would set a “dangerous precedent.” Disney prefers that the 26-acre parcel be developed as an upscale hotel-condominium project.

Housing advocates and some council members favored the apartment-condo proposal’s inclusion of lower-cost units because it would replace a mobile home park and be convenient for entertainment workers making modest wages.

In its lawsuit, Disney demands that the city nullify the environmental analysis it approved for the large residential project, next to an area where Disney may build a third theme park.

“This lawsuit speaks to how important we view this Anaheim resort area and that we make sure the vision sticks,” said Disneyland spokesman Rob Doughty.

Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle said he was not surprised Disney officials decided to challenge the residential project on legal grounds.

“There’s no question this is a very significant issue to them and they are using all the means by which they can express that concern,” he said. “They’ve told me there have been a lot of concerns in the past, but they felt they could work through those.”

Disney’s action comes less than a week after the project’s developer, SunCal Cos., appealed a 2-2 council split that ultimately doomed the plan. SunCal argued that Councilwoman Lucille Kring, who would have been the swing vote, should have been cleared to vote on the proposal even though she had a possible conflict of interest.

In a letter delivered minutes before the council meeting, Disney attorneys argued that a wine bar Kring planned to open nearby could create a conflict of interest. City Atty. Jack White then told Kring she might face criminal or civil penalties if she voted, which prompted Kring to abstain.

Disney’s letter noted that in a similar case, a councilman in Truckee, Calif., was advised not to vote on a housing project because it was determined that he could gain financially from an influx of new residents.

If three Anaheim council members agree to reconsider the project next month, it could come back to the council in April.

Pringle, who is opposed to residential development in the resort area, said he finds himself in “an awkward” place.

“I support Disney’s position,” he said, “yet I certainly don’t want to put the city and taxpayers in an improper place if we’re being sued.”

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david.mckibben@latimes.com

As an upgrade of the Bradley terminal begins, the vow is aimed at stemming flight losses.

By Jennifer Oldham, Times Staff Writer
February 27, 2007

After his wife died, Aaron Green, 83, moved to Pittsburgh from East Lake, Fla., to be near his children.

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: February 26, 2007

For the first time since the Depression, more Americans ages 75 and older have been leaving the South than moving there, according to a New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data.

The reversal appears to be driven in part by older people who retired to the South in their 60s, but decided to return home to their children and grandchildren in the Northeast, Midwest and West after losing spouses or becoming less mobile.

 

A stream of elderly transplants leaving Florida was detected by sociologists two decades ago, including so-called half-backs, who stopped short of returning to their home states and settled elsewhere in the South. What is new is the growth in the number of people leaving the region entirely and the dimension of the migration.

“As the numbers increase of people in their early to mid-60s that move from the North to the South, we would also expect the numbers of people 75 and older that move from the South to the North to subsequently increase as well,” said Grant I. Thrall, a geography professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

While the number of people ages 75 and older who move at all is relatively small, a survey of geographic mobility released last month estimated that about 121,000 of them left the South from 2000 to 2005, and 87,000 arrived. In a comparable survey a decade earlier, 57,000 left the South and 92,000 moved there.

From 1995 to 2000, another Census Bureau survey of migration patterns found, for the first time slightly more people ages 85 and older left Florida than settled there.

The shifting trends in migration to and from the South might be attributable in part to differences in generation size and other variables, including fluctuations year to year. From 2004 to 2005, a separate Census Bureau survey reported a slight gain in migrants 75 and older to the South.

Phillip Salopek, a Census Bureau demographer, said that while the census sample was small, he “wouldn’t have any hesitation to use the number” in analyzing migration trends for the region over a five-year period.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, said, “The South, and Florida especially, has been a magnet for yuppie elderly: younger seniors with spouse present and in good health.

“These are a catch for communities that receive them, because they have ample disposable incomes and make few demands on public services,” he continued. “The older senior population, especially after 80, are more likely to be widowed, less well off and more in need of social and economic support.”

“Many northern states seem to have better senior services than Florida,” Dr. Frey added.

The Census Bureau defines the South as the 16 states that stretch from Texas to Florida, including Maryland, Kentucky and Oklahoma. Census Bureau surveys ask where people were living one year and five years earlier, not whether they have returned to their home state. But the anecdotal evidence seems compelling.

Virginia Halloran, 83, and her husband, Fred, retired to Florida in 1978 from Cape Cod, Mass. After Mr. Halloran died in 1995, Mrs. Halloran, a former school psychologist, stayed in Atlantis, Fla., just south of Palm Beach.

In 2005, after she had both knees replaced and grew anxious over forecasts of more hurricanes, she moved to a one-bedroom apartment in a Westwood, Mass., retirement community, a short drive from her children and grandchildren.

“It was just to make life simpler for me,” she said, “and, I think, simpler for them.”

Sharon Cofar, who runs a Coral Springs, Fla., company called A Move Made Easy, a relocation service that caters to older movers, said the migration had accelerated since Hurricane Wilma struck in 2005.

“It was very difficult for the adult children to cope with the hurricanes and their inability to help their parents at this difficult time,” Ms. Cofar said, “and many do not want the parents to go through it again, nor do they want to care-give long distance any more.”

Since last year, Ida Kotowitz, 88, has been living in a retirement home in the Bronx, not far from her daughter and grandchildren, where she moved after 22 years in Florida. “I was failing in health, most of my friends have passed away and I was alone,” Ms. Kotowitz said. “Friends are all right when you’re well, but when you’re not, you need family.”

In 1996, Constance Bialek moved with her husband, Fred, to Florida from California after he received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. He died four years ago. Last November, Mrs. Bialek, 78, moved to an assisted living center across the street from her daughter’s apartment on the West Side of Manhattan.

Mrs. Bialek said she did not miss “all those silly accidents with old ladies who don’t know how to drive,” adding that the diversity of New York City “makes you feel more alive, it keeps you interested in life.”

Mildred Morrison, administrator for the Area Agency on Aging of Allegheny, Pa., which includes Pittsburgh, described return migration as part of a natural progression.

“They usually leave after retirement to a warmer climate, and return in good physical health, but maybe on the cusp of declining health, 10 years or so later,” Ms. Morrison said, mostly to “reconnect with family.”

Not all transplants go home. Aaron Green, 83, a New York postal worker, retired to East Lake, Fla., just outside St. Petersburg, about 20 years ago, then relocated to a garden apartment in Pittsburgh near his son and daughter last year after his wife died.

“When my wife passed on, my son said, ‘I think it’s time to come home with us,’ ” Mr. Green recalled. “I said, ‘I think so, too.’ “

Demographers say that the last time more older people left the South than moved there was during the Depression, when there was a net loss of people older than 65. Among those 75 and older “the ratio of in-movers to out-movers has been declining steadily over time,” said Stan Smith, director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Calvin Beale, senior demographer of the Economic Research Service at the federal Department of Agriculture, said: “After age 75, as health diminishes and/or widowhood occurs, there is some measure of return flow back to areas of origin, or wherever a caretaker-minded son or daughter lives. And this means a net outflow from the South.”

An analysis by demographers at Queens College of the City University of New York suggests that those 75 and older who left the South were fairly evenly divided between married and widowed. More of the movers were likely to be women and white.

After his wife died, Al Petzke, an 82-year-old former steelworker, returned to the Cleveland area from Houston to be closer to his only son.

“It didn’t make one bit of sense for my son to be spending all that money every month flying down to see me,” Mr. Petzke said. His retirement home is in Berea, Ohio, just down the street from the bar at the Eastland Inn, where he used to stop after work.

“I know exactly how I want to die,” he said. “I want to go over to the Eastland Inn, have a shot of whiskey and a beer, and then they can take me to the funeral home.”

DETERMINED TO STAY LaToya Cantrell, president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, rallied residents to move back and rebuild after a commission threatened to raze homes.

By KRISTINA SHEVORY

Published: February 25, 2007

NEW ORLEANS

FOUR months or so after Hurricane Katrina, and just as residents of the Broadmoor neighborhood had begun moving back into their water-logged homes, a rebuilding commission set up by the mayor delivered another shock.

 

If Broadmoor did not bring back half its residents within four months, their homes could be razed and the land turned into parks. So Broadmoor took action.

Three days after the commission released its plan, residents of Broadmoor, which is west of downtown, held a protest rally. A meeting was called to work out a plan, and more than 600 people attended, many of them driving from Baton Rouge and Houston. For them, their neighborhood’s future could not be left to someone else. This was where they had grown up, married and had children.

“We love our neighborhood, and we had to do something,” said LaToya Cantrell, the president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association.

Ms. Cantrell estimates that two-thirds of the 2,900 homes in the economically diverse neighborhood have been repainted and restored. The hope is that by year’s end, 80 percent of the houses will be rebuilt.

Although only 55 percent of its former residents have returned, new residents are moving into Broadmoor, the group says, many attracted by the neighborhood’s spirit and low home prices. (Before the August 2005 hurricane, the average home price for Broadmoor and the surrounding area was $255,750, compared with $167,500 last year, according to Real Property Associates in Metairie, La.)

While New Orleans haggles over a master redevelopment plan, people in some neighborhoods like Broadmoor have been rebuilding on their own. They are forming partnerships with companies, universities and nonprofit organizations to help gut homes, assemble volunteers and find pumping equipment.

“I think what has happened is the government has pursued a very laissez-faire approach,” said Thomas Murphy, a senior fellow with the Urban Land Institute in Washington. “There’s been no strong redevelopment authority to date; that agency doesn’t exist.”

Rebuilding has not been easy. For those who choose to stay, sky-high insurance premiums and rising crime rates await them. Insurance payouts have been slow, and a state rebuilding program has paid only a small fraction of applicants. In a city that often did not run smoothly before Katrina, some residents are growing frustrated and leaving. But others, like those in Broadmoor, refuse to go.

The flood waters and the hurricane damaged 71.5 percent of the city’s homes, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Flood depths in the city ranged from 4 to 20 feet because much of the city sits below sea level. In Broadmoor, when the levees broke, 8 to 10 feet of water surged through homes after the local pumping station flooded. High winds and helicopter rescues also damaged roofs. Then looters took over.

“Everything was dead,” said Ernie Osteen, a Broadmoor resident who visited his home a week after the storm. “I was in the military and the smell reminded me of dead bodies.”

Before the storm, Broadmoor resembled much of New Orleans. More than two-thirds of its residents were African-American, and most residents were lower-middle-income. About half were homeowners.

Designated a historic neighborhood, Broadmoor had much to lose in the storm. Many of the homes, which include Spanish colonials, bungalows, classical mansions and double-shotgun houses, were built by the early 1950s.

Working out of a doublewide trailer at a local church, residents surveyed Broadmoor and designed a database on the area’s 7,000 residents and selected block captains to monitor the area. Meetings were held on the best ways to revitalize the neighborhood, like deterring crime and reopening the local elementary school.

At the time, many people were juggling full-time jobs and community work while they renovated their homes. Ms. Cantrell lived in a downtown Marriott hotel for months until she finished gutting and renovating her house. Others lived on the second floor of their homes while they gutted the lower floors.

Even though their neighborhood group was strong, the residents knew they couldn’t do it all themselves. They appealed to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for help in writing and carrying out a rebuilding plan. (Initially, Harvard students showed Broadmoor the template for a development plan and told them about the kind of data and statistics they would need to write one. Harvard later sent students from the schools of law, design and education to help put together a database, pass out fliers, call residents to see if they were returning and start a training program for block captains.)

By late March 2006, Mayor C. Ray Nagin scrapped the rebuilding commission’s recommendation and said that people could rebuild wherever they saw fit — but that they would be doing so at their own risk. It didn’t really matter to Broadmoor, though, because the residents had already seen it was possible to resurrect their neighborhood.

“The city did us a favor” with the original commission decision on razing homes, said Kelli Wright, who heads the neighborhood’s repopulation committee.

Broadmoor’s residents kept pushing ahead, contacting former residents scattered across the country. Many were eager to return, but they wanted to ensure that they wouldn’t be the only ones on their block. Others needed help in gutting homes, finding doctors and looking for temporary residences. So the group set up a database to track what people needed and to connect them with people who could help.

“They didn’t know who to call or what to do,” said Marilyn Crump, vice president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association. “Information was crucial because it wasn’t really available.”

In July, Broadmoor released its blueprint and became the second neighborhood in the city with one; the other is Gentilly. They hoped that it would encourage more people to return and that it would bring in other donors. Within a few months, the neighborhood received $5 million in pledges from the Clinton Global Initiative — an annual event in Manhattan started by the William J. Clinton Foundation that brings together corporate and individual philanthropists who pledge to help different causes.

Randy Poindexter, who was living in Lafitte, south of New Orleans, vowed to return to the city to help it recover and picked Broadmoor, she said, because of its “tremendous will to survive.” She bid on five houses and finally bought the sixth for $139,000 in June. She later spent $50,000 to renovate the flooded first floor.

“I felt like they had a fighting spirit,” said Ms. Poindexter, 59, who is an artist. “I wanted to be a part of it. It’s the greatest sense of community that I’ve ever experienced.”

There remains much left to accomplish. The elementary school and library are still closed, crime is a problem and the local pumping station needs a generator. Some families are living on their front lawns in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, while others are scrambling to paint their homes and landscape their yards. Salt infuses the lawns and the grass is dead. (Residents who have spent at least $100,000 renovating a house sometimes find it difficult to put more into landscaping.)

But despite the difficulties, Ms. Crump, the association’s vice president, said, “We always said we’re coming back, and we’re coming back better.”

Although redeveloping their neighborhood can seem daunting, residents are focused on doing what they can. They are trying to turn the library into a community center, and they won approval this month to open a charter school next year. Crime is a top priority, and they have recently increased neighborhood patrols and started a housing assistance program to encourage police officers to move into the area.

Their first returning police officer, Nancy Parker, who rented a house in Broadmoor before the storm, expects to move in within the next two weeks. Ms. Wright, who is also a real estate agent, helped Ms. Parker improve her credit, get her title fees waived and negotiate the selling price down $50,000, to $225,000, for her three-bedroom house.

“I’m a first-time home buyer, and I didn’t know the first thing about buying a home,” Ms. Parker said. “They pretty much held my hand through the process and sent us everything we needed. Kelli has worked miracles.”

After living in a government trailer outside New Orleans for the past nine months with her husband, two children and a dog, Ms. Parker said she was thrilled she can finally come home. “I really am happy,” she said. “They gave me a chance to go back home to an area where I’m comfortable, to neighbors I know.”

THAT’S IT! Dr. Carl Gerardi concluded it was time to buy when the rent for his current apartment, left, went to $6,000. For Candice Spielman, right, the deciding factors were outgrowing her 150-square-foot studio and losing her storage space.

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Published: February 25, 2007

WHETHER they preferred apartments uptown or downtown, walk-up or doorman buildings, and old or new construction, many New Yorkers agreed on one thing about the Manhattan real estate market in the last year: it was safer to rent than to buy.

Some feared that if they bought, the market would fall. Others simply put off the hassle of buying for as long as they could. Not surprisingly, the situation has given landlords the upper hand, and the opportunity to raise rents significantly on market-rate apartments in the face of one of the tightest markets in many years.

 

Now, many tenants are crying uncle. If they don’t want to buy, they are fleeing to Brooklyn and the other boroughs. If they want to stay in Manhattan, they are deciding that with rents climbing, it makes financial sense to take the plunge. In some cases, they are buying after outgrowing their current apartments. In other cases, they are buying with the hope that they can sublet if their lives change.

In the last year, rents for market-rate apartments in Manhattan have jumped as much as 20 percent, or nearly three times the standard 5 to 7 percent increases seen each year in the last 15 years, said Fritz Frigan, the director of sales and leasing for Halstead Property. “Rents heated up so much that people said, ‘At this level, we’re better off buying,’ ” Mr. Frigan said.

Dr. Carl Gerardi, a 39-year-old urologist in private practice in Manhattan and Westchester County, lives in a one-bedroom apartment in TriBeCa. But when the rent jumped late last year to $6,000 a month from $5,000, he decided that he had had enough.

So he struck a deal with his landlord, Rockrose Development, to pay $5,800 a month to stay in his apartment at 666 Greenwich Street for one more year, and then he bought a two-bedroom apartment for $2.6 million at 101 Warren Street, which is still under construction.

“It pushed me over the point where I should buy,” Dr. Gerardi said. “This is ridiculous. For $6,000 a month, you can get a million-dollar mortgage.”

Georgia Kaporis, Dr. Gerardi’s agent at Citi Habitats, said that she first showed him apartments that cost about $1.2 million, translating into about $5,000 to $6,000 in monthly carrying costs. She said that he was willing to pay more to get more for his money, especially after taxes.

“When you buy, you’re expecting to pay a little bit more because you want better for yourself,” she said. “When you include the tax write-off, it came closer to his rent.”

Dr. Gerardi said he would put down about $1.3 million on the new apartment to keep his monthly housing costs at roughly the same level.

The dividing line between buying and renting, as always, is whether you can afford the down payment and closing costs and whether you want to make a long-term investment. The difference now is that, with rents rising, monthly costs are balancing out.

“It’s getting closer to being a tossup,” said Gary Malin, the chief operating officer of Citi Habitats. “If you think you’re going to buy and flip, you have to think about it differently. The ‘pie in the sky’ attitude that my apartment is going to escalate 15 percent a year is gone.”

In October 2002, so many people abandoned the rental market to buy homes that Manhattan’s apartment vacancy rate hit a high of 3.8 percent that month, according to Citi Habitats, which tracks about 50,000 Manhattan rentals. That compares with an average rate of 2.25 percent over the last five years.

Some landlords filled empty apartments by offering free rent and by sprucing up abysmal kitchens and bathrooms. Others took advantage of the hot real estate market by selling off more than 8,000 apartments to condominium developers.

Then, by early 2006, New Yorkers who were scared about buying in an uncertain market flooded back into the rental market and found that there were fewer units to choose from. So by last May, the vacancy rate in Manhattan had shrunk to a record low of 0.43 percent. The vacancy rate was even lower in some neighborhoods, like Murray Hill and the West Village, and people were offering to pay more than the asking rents or to put down a year’s rent upfront.

But by late last year, landlords had tried to raise their prices so much that some renters started to balk. By January, Manhattan’s vacancy rate had inched up to 0.97 percent, but rents show no sign of dropping, according to Citi Habitats.

For nine years, Candice Spielman, a 37-year old freelance television producer, lived in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side that measured about 150 square feet if you count the sleeping loft she had built over her refrigerator and desk.

As she stretched her arms across a five-foot-wide section of the living space, she spoke about how she learned to tolerate the rattling in the walls when her neighbors watched television and how she saved room by keeping most of her belongings at her mother and stepfather’s house in New Jersey.

Then they decided to sell the house, and Ms. Spielman realized she would have no place to store her bed, dressers, photo albums and jars of multicolored beach rocks.

She decided that after years of paying $1,086 a month or less, she wanted room for a couch and for her bed at her parents’ house.

Sitting in her old place, Ms. Spielman described how she managed all those years. “You can never fully relax because you can’t sit down on a couch,” she said. “You’re always sitting in a straight chair.”

When she tried to rent something larger, she found most studio apartments with a similar amount of space cost more than $2,000 a month. One downtown apartment listed at that price had a bathtub so filthy that it had turned black. While she was leaving a Lower East Side apartment that cost $2,300 a month but had no living room, a rat jumped over the broker’s foot.

At this point, Ms. Spielman realized she had to buy. By saving and investing all of the money her grandparents had given her over the years, along with what she saved by living in a cheap rental for so long, she had put away more than $100,000.

She put down 20 percent on a $510,000 apartment, a 470-square-foot studio in the Cocoa Exchange building downtown, and expects to pay about $2,500 a month for the mortgage and common charge.

“Everything I was looking at was at least $2,000,” Ms. Spielman said. “So for a little bit more I could own and invest in me.”

In some parts of the Brooklyn real estate market — like the town houses in Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights — brokers say that buying has actually become cheaper than renting.

Leslie Marshall, a broker with the Corcoran Group, advises most clients that since rents for town houses or large apartments in Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill run about $9,000 a month, they are better off buying.

She cites this example: she has a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment in an elevator building in Brooklyn Heights that’s listed at $1.6 million. She estimates that after taxes and a 20 percent down payment, the buyer will pay roughly $7,300 a month.

“For the larger spaces, it’s always better to buy because you throw so much money away in rent and because there’s very little inventory in Brooklyn for renting a large space,” Ms. Marshall said. “If you want to rent a house, there may be one or two at a time in Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill.”

In neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, brokers say that clients are finding they have more bargaining power when buying rather than renting. Rents in these neighborhoods are now higher than they have been in five years, and there’s little incentive for landlords to compromise, said David Maundrell, the president of Aptsandlofts.com, a brokerage firm in Williamsburg.

At the same time, prices for apartments listed for sale in these neighborhoods have dropped by nearly 12 percent because so many new buildings or conversions are being completed. According to data compiled by Halstead, Greenpoint and Williamsburg combined have about 1,150 apartments under construction and another 6,430 units in the planning stages.

Mr. Maundrell said some developers were negotiating on prices and paying part of the closing costs or transfer taxes. “If you’re a single person or a young married couple renting for $3,500 or $4,000 a month, you should seriously consider buying an apartment,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean that Mr. Maundrell thinks that every renter should run out and buy, especially if they expect to sell within less than five years.

“There’s too much product coming out in the next two years,” he said. “In five years, people who are buying today should see a bit of appreciation.”

That means renters who don’t know where they will be living in five years or don’t have the down payment may be better off renting than stretching to buy.

Marc Brewster , 34, a native of London and an engineer in the SoHo office of the Mill, a visual-effects company based in London, received notice last fall that the rent on his one-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town was being raised to $2,400 a month from $2,080.

He refused to pay that much, so he had two options. To raise money for a down payment to buy a place in New York, he could have sold the London apartment he currently rents out. Instead, he moved to Williamsburg, taking a one-bedroom apartment with sloping floors that rents for $1,500 a month.

He leveled out the stove and the bed, bought new blinds and repainted the dirty cream bedroom walls a matte white.

He says that he may buy when he decides how long he will stay in New York. “If I get to the point where I’m looking for a green card, I may take on a mortgage,” he said.

Of course, some buyers who don’t know how long they will be in New York City are hoping they can sublet their apartments if they have to.

When Hans Heer, a 47-year-old general manager for the Food Emporium, moved to New York last April from Cologne, Germany, he planned to rent for a few years. He first moved into an $8,000-a-month furnished apartment on East 12th Street near Broadway. It was so infested with mice, he said, that he spent his nights trying to trap them in the closet. They always seemed to break out. He had mice “jumping around my bed,” he said.

After looking at about 100 rental apartments that cost more than $4,000 a month and lacked basic features like updated electrical wiring, Mr. Heer decided to buy because he believed that the apartments for sale were of much better quality.

He bought a $980,000 one-bedroom condo at 20 Pine Street that he will move into later this year. He says that even if he does not remain in New York and cannot find a buyer, he will be able to rent it out — $5,500 unfurnished or $7,500 furnished.

“It’s a lot of money for one big loft,” he said, “but as an investment it could be quite good.”