Real Estate & Development

If the 2010s zoning fights were about apartments, the 2020s fights are increasingly about infrastructure disguised as real estate. Data centers—driven by cloud computing and the AI boom—are land-intensive, power-hungry, and politically explosive when they land near neighborhoods. Zoning is now the front line. Northern Virginia is the case study because it’s one of the world’s most concentrated data center regions. As expansion accelerated, the conflict shifted from abstract

Local control is the mythology of American zoning. But in 2025, the real story is state power—especially in California, where the state has increasingly treated housing scarcity as a statewide economic emergency rather than a neighborhood preference. The result is a new zoning reality: your city’s plan may be less powerful than the state’s housing statutes. Start with SB 9, California’s lot-split and duplex law. It was designed to legalize small-scale infill in single-family

Developers obsess over rates, rents, and construction costs. But in 2026, one variable increasingly separates winners from losers : time. Permit time. Review time. Re-submittal time. Hearing time. Because time is carrying cost—and carrying cost is margin. That’s why a quiet shift matters: cities are piloting AI-assisted permitting and plan review to reduce backlogs and accelerate housing delivery. What AI can actually do ( and what it can’t ) AI is not a magic stamp that app

If NYC is rewriting rules citywide, Chicago is running a different experiment: fix downtown by changing what downtown is for. The Loop’s office-heavy identity is being rebalanced, and LaSalle Street is ground zero. Chicago’s LaSalle Street initiative has been framed publicly as a vision and an implementation pipeline—explicitly acknowledging that downtown needs more residents, more mixed-use, and a better public realm. Why conversions are the new downtown development Office

New York City didn’t “announce a boom.” It rewrote the rulebook that determines what is even possible  to build, where, and how fast. That’s why zoning text amendments matter more than ribbon cuttings: they quietly change the math for thousands of parcels at once. And in NYC, that quiet rewrite has a name — City of Yes . City of Yes isn’t one project, one neighborhood, or one developer. It’s a citywide zoning reset  that adjusts baseline feasibility: unit counts, allowed uses

The loudest housing debates aren’t always about a single tower, a single block, or a single rezoning. More and more, the fight is over the operating system  of the city: citywide zoning packages that tweak the rules everywhere, unlocking “small” amounts of additional housing across thousands of lots. That’s the “ City of Yes” template —and it stays a core conversation because it touches every neighborhood, shifts what’s legal by default , and rewrites baseline feasibility for

The biggest housing reshuffles in America aren’t always announced with a flashy “rezoning map.” Increasingly, they arrive as something more technical—and more consequential: citywide zoning text amendments. These are rulebook rewrites that change what’s legal everywhere at once , turning “maybe, with a variance” into “yes, by-right” for small-to-mid intensity housing types. That’s what “gentle density at scale” really means. Not a handful of tower sites. Not a few corridor up

The quiet power shift in commercial real estate (CRE) isn’t just about interest rates, cap rates, or vacancy. It’s about who now controls the debt dial. As bank lending standards tightened after 2020, private credit stopped being the “ alternative ” and moved directly into the center of the capital stack. What started as gap-filling mezzanine and bridge capital has scaled into senior and whole-loan territory—redrawing pricing, covenants, and execution speed across the market