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Nickel was a construction company I learned about through a student giving a presentation in class. Its a residential/commercial  construction company. They have a project further down the high line from the Hudson yards project. I want to work for them.

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T.G. Nickel & Associates is an experienced construction management and general contracting firm serving clients in the academic, corporate interiors, healthcare, landmark restoration and residential markets. For nearly two decades, our clients have depended on us to provide the honest, straightforward solutions needed to successfully guide a project from concept to completion. On every project-no matter the size-we make decisions with our clients' best interest in mind, always striving to provide the highest standards in quality, schedule and cost.

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About Nickel T.G. Nickel & Associates is an experienced construction management and general contracting firm serving clients in the academic, corporate interiors, healthcare, landmark restoration and residential markets. For nearly two decades, our clients have depended on us to provide the honest, straightforward solutions needed to

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CB&I are another one of the largest construction companies in the country. they have work in the NYC and pretty much every big city in the country.

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CB&I is a leading provider of technology and infrastructure for the energy industry. With more than 125 years of experience, CB&I provides reliable solutions to our customers around the world while maintaining a relentless focus on safety and an uncompromising standard of quality.

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Fluor is a company that deals mostly with oil and nuclear waste. They helped work on the Manhattan project. I think it would be great to work for a company like that maybe they would tell me a few secrets about the Manhattan project.

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Fluor - Global Engineering and Construction Company - EPC Services

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Fluor, a leading engineering construction company, provides engineering, procurement, construction (EPC), maintenance and project management services worldwide. Contact us to discuss your next project.

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Bechtel is the largest construction company in the United States. The opportunities I would have to learn about everything in Heavy Civil.

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Engineering, Construction & Project Management

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Learn why Bechtel is one of the most respected engineering, construction, and project management companies in the world.

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Kierwit is one of the biggest construction companies in the country they are based out of Omaha with a lot of offices throughout the country. I would have the chance to work on megaprojects.

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What began in 1884 with two hardworking brothers has grown into a construction, mining and engineering powerhouse.

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Whiting-Turner is one of the smaller construction giants. I like that there company is smaller and it offers more room to grow.

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Since 1909, the firm has been guided by the principles of integrity, excellence and customer delight in the delivery of construction services.

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Turner is one of the largest construction  management companies in the United States, with a construction volume of $10 billion in 2014. They have a lot of work in NYC.

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Turner has a culture of innovation and promotes advances in technology, sustainability, lean practices, building information modeling, safety, community involvement, learning and development, and knowledge sharing.

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I worked for Cascade builders for two summers. I loved working there and they even paid over time. Its in the Adirondacks and I liked living there. They build beautiful high-end residential construction.

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Cascade Builders Professional Adirondack Home Builder in the heart of the Adirondacks

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Cascade Builders Professional Adirondack Home Builder in the heart of the Adirondacks

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Cascade Builders have been building great camps, cabins, cottages and boat houses in and around the Lake placid area. Our company's passion and dedication for high quality and customer relations has made us the premier builder in the region.

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C-2
Shimizu is a company based out of Japan that has sales of 15 billion dollars annually. I know them for their crazy mega project concepts. One being putting a solar panels belt around the moon to harvest energy. Another is making a city inside of a pyramid in Tokyo bay. Its cool stuff.

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Shimizu Corporation - Today's Work, Tomorrow's heritage

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Promotion of Diversity & Inclusion by Shimizu Corporation

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C-1
Skanska is one of the companies I want to work for. A branch opened up in Maspeth, Queens. One of the largest companies in the world just open a branch 20 min walk away. they have tons have work all over the world and a lot in the motherland Poland. If I wanted I could possibly work in Poland for a while.

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Search Our Projects | www.usa.skanska.com

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When I buy my land and build my tiny house I want it to be self efficient. I want to have solar panels, collect its rainwater, and wood stove.

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A-9
There is a construction boom in the city especially in Brooklyn. Its a great time for me I want to work in the city when I'm done with school.

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Construction in New York City Goes Through The Roof

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In the first six months of the year, developers received new residential building permits for 42,088 apartments and houses in the city, more than in any full year since 1963, when nearly 50,000 permits were issued.

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I want to be a part of mega project if I could and right know the Khazar Islands are being created. It will have the tallest building in the world when it is finished and the total cost an estimated 100 billion dollars.

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Sitting on a couch in the temporary headquarters at the construction site of his future city, Ibrahimov mulled the possibilities. The headquarters, which looks like a very modern log cabin, features a big conference table, flat-screen televisions, a bar, pretty assistants and a dining table that is always set. There is a gargantuan portrait of the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, hanging from a wall, next to the bar. Spread out on the conference table were blueprints for Khazar Islands, which looked like battle plans. Men in leather jackets picked from crystal bowls filled with nuts and dried fruit and caramels in shiny wrappers.

Ibrahimov had slept five hours, he said, but was not tired. He started the day with an hourlong run, followed by a dip in the Caspian Sea, followed by a burst of phone calls over breakfast, followed by meetings with some people from the foreign ministry, then the Turks, then his engineers and architects. Now, while sipping tea, Ibrahimov's attention was back on Khazar Islands, which he insisted was not modeled after Dubai. "Dubai is a desert," he said. "The Arabs built an illusion of a country. The Palm" - a faux-island development in Dubai - "is not right. The water smells. Also, they built very deep in the sea. That's dangerous. The Palm is beautiful to look at, but it's not good to live in."

Ibrahimov paused and took a sip of tea. The tiny creases of his face bunched up under his eyes, which looked off into the distance, out the tiny window of the faux log cabin, toward the construction site. He said that he was put off by the inorganic feel of Dubai, the sense that it was so . . . ephemeral. "Everything," he said dismissively, "is artificial."

Few countries have come as far in mastering the art of geopolitics as Azerbaijan. After being occupied by Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, the Seljuks, the Mongols, the Persians, the Russians, the Ottomans and, finally, the Soviets, Azerbaijan, which achieved its independence in 1991, has cultivated relationships with the United States and many European countries and deepened relations with Russia and key Central Asian "stans." These days, Azerbaijan, which is overwhelmingly Muslim, buys advanced weapons systems from Israel in return for oil. A new member of the United Nations Security Council, the country sided with the United States against Russia last year on a resolution condemning Syria. "This is a very small country on a very significant piece of real estate," says Matthew Bryza, the former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan. "Azerbaijan pursues a very realpolitik policy."

In the old days, they came for geography (Azerbaijan is perched on the Caspian). About a century ago, they started coming for oil. Then, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the energy sector became a source of enormous wealth. Now Azerbaijan is trying to take advantage of that wealth. As such, Avesta's sales and marketing team recently produced a gleaming 101-page coffee-table book in a gilded box promoting Khazar Islands. It features photographs of men in Italian suits and women with pouty faces; everyone drinks wine and is on a cigarette boat or in a Mercedes convertible. There's also a video that shows computer renderings of Khazar Islands in the not-too-distant future. The video lasts 5 minutes 6 seconds and includes an image of a make-believe skyline at night and another of Ibrahimov on a cellphone in front of a private jet, even though, he conceded, he doesn't own one.

Two things about the video are striking. First, there isn't any information about asking prices, square footage, move-in dates or why anyone would want to live in Baku. And then there's the soundtrack, which is a synthesized blast of violins, harps, horns and snare drums that makes you feel as if you're riding a stallion in the desert in the 1980s.

The day before my three-hour flight from Moscow to Baku last spring, Avesta's sales and marketing director at the time, Kenan Guluzade, flew to the Russian capital to hand-deliver the book and DVD to me at a Starbucks. Guluzade said he had to be in Russia anyway, but he was also worried that, as a journalist, I might not get into Azerbaijan. Guluzade came with his assistant and his father, who sported an elegant, silk scarf and a tailored jacket. Guluzade spoke quickly, in English. "It's really nice to feel attention to our construction project," he said, and then he handed me a fancy shopping bag with the DVD and the book. His father sipped a latte. "The new Baku is stunning," his father said. Then Guluzade said: "This is true. It's amazing what is happening."

When I arrived in Baku, the first of the Khazar Islands had already been plunked down, and the first few apartment buildings were going up. The entrance featured a menacing, falconlike archway. Boulevards and traffic circles had been paved, and there were long strips of palm trees - "Mr. Ibrahimov loves palm trees," Nigar Huseynli, Ibrahimov's assistant, said - and everywhere there seemed to be mounds of earth and retaining walls and the concrete outlines of future cineplexes and shopping malls. Amrahov Hasrat, who was the chief engineer at Khazar Islands, told me that 200 trucks brought in rocks every day from a bluff eight miles away. "We are destroying the mountain," Hasrat said, pointing off into the distance in the direction of a hill, "and taking the rocks back to the sea to build the artificial islands."

In some ways, though, reality is already taking shape. When Guluzade met me in Starbucks, 96 apartments had been sold. Two days later, that figure inched up to 102. Now, it's 136. The asking prices run from about $280 to $460 per square foot, meaning a typical 1,076-sqare-foot apartment at Khazar Islands starts around $300,000. Ibrahimov expects geometric growth after 2015, when they're scheduled to break ground on Azerbaijan Tower.

Western financial analysts and real estate developers are understandably skeptical. For one thing, there's President Ilham Aliyev's regime, which opposes political competition and other reforms that would diversify its economy and spur the long-term growth needed for this kind of mega-project. There's the fact that no one has ever tried anything this ambitious in Azerbaijan. Finally, this is a rough neighborhood. The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous region within the country, raged between Azerbaijan and Armenia from 1988 to 1994 and has never really been resolved. Russia could invade Georgia, as it did in 2008. There's the chance of an American or Israeli strike on Iran, Azerbaijan's southern neighbor. Last month, riots raged for two days in Azerbaijan as people protested local corruption in Ismayilli.

Yet Ibrahimov, sitting behind the blueprints in his log cabin, remained extremely optimistic. Azerbaijan, with its new money and undeveloped coastline, offers "biznessmen" from the former Soviet Union - a group that might be defined as importers, exporters, government officials who dabble in the private sector, people who aspire to be Ibrahim Ibrahimov - an affordable nearby playground. As of late 2011, according to WealthInsight, a market research provider, there were nearly 160,000 so-called high-net-worth individuals in Russia alone, with a combined worth of nearly $1 trillion. Even Turkmenistan, the North Korea of the former Soviet Union, is building a luxury development, Avaza, which also has fake islands and reportedly will cost $5 billion and sit on the Caspian's eastern flank.

It was crucial, Ibrahimov told me, to visualize what everything will look like in 2022, when Khazar Islands is supposed to be finished. He pointed outside the small window, to the sea. "That is where it will be," he said, referring to Azerbaijan Tower. "In the water. Can you see it?"

Some in Baku already can. Indeed, the most crucial factor underpinning the project is that President Aliyev's regime seems to want Khazar Islands built. Ilgar Mammadov, chairman of the pro-democracy Republicanist Alternative Movement, characterized Khazar Islands as an inexorable beast. The country's international strategic monetary reserves are now more than $46 billion, Mammadov said, and in 10 years, as oil and gas revenue rise, they could be near $150 billion. "Azerbaijan has the capacity to build the tallest building," Mammadov said, a hint of lamentation in his voice. "That's not in doubt. We will create this big building, and then it will, by itself, by the very mere fact of its existence, bring cash. How will that work? Nobody knows."

Ibrahimov was sitting in the back seat of a black Rolls-Royce as it tore across island No. 1 of his soon-to-be built archipelago. Nigar Huseynli, his 23-year-old assistant, was sitting up front in a black and white floral-print skirt, black tights and rectangular black sunglasses. She seemed to be vaguely worried, always. She wore a great deal of perfume that, she said, came from Italy. "When he's in Azerbaijan," Huseynli said, "Mr. Ibrahimov always drives in his black Rolls-Royce. In Dubai, he has a red one."

Before I arrived in Baku, Huseynli tried to convey just how much power Ibrahimov wields in his country. But it wasn't obvious until I landed at Heydar Aliyev International Airport and showed the passport-control officers a letter from Huseynli stating that I would be meeting with Ibrahimov. The letter included Ibrahimov's name and signature at the bottom, and it seemed to frighten, shock and amaze all at once. A crowd of guards and customs agents gathered around and stared in silence.

Ibrahimov seems to be vaguely aware of the numinous glow that envelopes him. He is supremely concrete, focused on things like buildings, cars, hand-held devices, jeans or which country he'd like to be in right now, but in a manner that suggests he can have whichever of those things he desires most. As the Rolls sped past large knots of men in hard hats and jumpsuits, he sent text messages and juggled cellphones. His son called. Then the Qatari ambassador. Then someone who annoyed him. A television screen positioned three feet in front of the seat that Ibrahimov always sits in blared music videos, and some girl group was singing a two-minute riff called "Take Me Away."

Ibrahimov, who sported blue Stefano Ricci crocodile-skin shoes that matched his blue Stefano Ricci jeans, blue Zilli jacket and blue Zilli button-down shirt, tapped his foot arrhythmically. Every time I started to ask a question or he started to answer, there was a call or an incoming message. Occasionally Ibrahimov said something random that could be mistaken for something profound: "I live very simply," or "My favorite places are France and Turkey."

When Ibrahimov talks about himself, he hews to platitudes about, say, family ("it is important") or how to get ahead in ex-communist countries ("instinct"). They are lessons he seems to have internalized. Ibrahimov was born in a village in the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, a sliver of Azerbaijan wedged between Armenia and Iran. He has four brothers and two sisters. He called his father a "good Soviet" and a major influence in his life, but some suspect that Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan's previous president, played a more important role.

Aliyev, a former Politburo member, also came from Nakhichevan. In 1991, he became de facto leader of the autonomous republic, just as the Soviet Union was falling apart and Ibrahimov was starting his first business, a limited-liability corporation called Ilkan. It's unclear what Ilkan made or sold - Ibrahimov said only that he made his first million, in 1992, in the furniture business - but in the early '90s, according to Avesta company literature, Ibrahimov built a three-story headquarters for Ilkan in Nakhichevan, which would probably have been very hard without support from someone powerful. Then, in 1993, Aliyev became president of Azerbaijan, and in 1996, Ibrahimov began Avesta. "Mr. Ibrahimov has always had very good relations with the government," Guluzade, Khazar Islands' former marketing director, told me.

Today Avesta oversees Ibrahimov's many smaller companies. Some of these companies do things that seem to actually support Ibrahimov's larger, development-related projects (building things, hauling equipment, clearing debris). Others, like the Azerbaijan-Iran Gunel Joint Enterprise, suggest more political interests. Opposition figures say that Ibrahimov owes much of what he has to the Aliyev family, but when I asked Ibrahimov about this, he shrugged. He said Avesta is not only a corporation but also a philanthropy, building water pipelines and mosques for poor villagers. He called Heydar Aliyev, who died in 2003, his inspiration, and he made a point of saying, more than once, that he likes Aliyev's son, the current president, very much and thinks that he is guiding his country toward a more glorious and profitable future.

As Ibrahimov spoke, the Rolls trundled over an unpaved road. He maintained, always, the outlines of a barely discernible grin, and every few seconds he would point at something that wasn't there but he could already see perfectly, that had been part of his vision. The Azerbaijan Tower, he proclaimed, would definitely be in Guinness World Records, and if the Saudis or Emiratis or anyone anywhere tried to build a bigger building, then he would build an even bigger one.

I asked him if there was anything Freudian about all these skyscrapers. He didn't reply. Then suddenly, Ibrahimov blurted a series of unprompted factoids in his faux-profound style. First, "One hundred and fifty bridges are planned for Khazar Islands." Then, in what seemed like a reference to his love of yachts: "Today the Caspian is only used for oil, but it's not right." Huseynli pointed at a cluster of recently planted palm trees. This seemed to cheer him up.

On some level, there is an economic logic behind building the tallest, biggest, brashest building anywhere. The rise of superdevelopments in cities like Doha, Riyadh, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai - and, of course, Abu Dhabi and Dubai - sent signals to investors that the state supported growth. Usually, these sorts of developments attract the attention, first, of regional investors who know the local topography, which Khazar Islands has already done. "They're coming from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, the Arabic countries and especially from Israel," Guluzade told me. Next are the more skeptical international investors that Ibrahimov is hoping to impress. Hence the Azerbaijan Tower. "The investor is faced with this battery of choices," explained Brian Connelly, a strategic-management professor at Auburn University 's College of Business. "But there are things they can't see, so they're looking for a signal that tells them this is good for them. If I can see that there's the tallest building in the world, I know the host-country institutions are behind them."

Riding around in the Rolls, I couldn't tell whether Ibrahimov was indeed a brilliant strategist or someone who just had the capital to create a vision on a piece of tissue paper and turn it into a construction project. Or perhaps both. As we neared the site of what will be the ritziest restaurant at Khazar Islands, he became very excited. The concrete and aluminum skeleton of the restaurant resembles a Viking helmet, and when it's done, it will include a microbrewery, which Ibrahimov mentioned two or three times. "We have a guy from Austria," he said. Nearby, there were more men in hard hats and jumpsuits, and trucks carting rocks. "In my head," he said, "this project is already done."

Ibrahimov is not the only developer in Baku, and Khazar Islands is not the only major development. Flame Towers, which features three flamelike towers, includes a five-star hotel and, at night, will be lighted in red. The Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid, includes a museum and looks a little like the starship Enterprise. Baku White City will encompass 500-plus acres of new apartments and parking lots and is supposed to be the opposite of Black City, where the oil barons built their refineries a century ago. Finally, there's Crystal Hall, a 23,000-seat arena overlooking the Caspian.

Nearly three years after Ibrahimov's initial vision on the Azerbaijan Airlines flight, Khazar Islands has grown to 4 fake islands, 1 bridge and 13 apartment buildings. All this development can feel a bit weird, or at least incongruous. As the Rolls careered through the outskirts of Baku, Ibrahimov became quiet. Unlike the United Arab Emirates, which was, until recently, a desert, Baku has a rich architectural history, with centuries-old mansions, mosques, palaces, squares and esplanades. (Some sites date to at least the seventh century.) Baku has a grace and cosmopolitanism; it feels like an amalgam of Paris and Istanbul, albeit dustier. It also feels like a gateway to the East, distant places, mythologies and many other things that the new Azerbaijan doesn't have much appetite for. I interpreted Ibrahimov's silence as a sign of melancholy, but in the front seat, Huseynli, who was fielding calls on two or possibly three cellphones, each with its own hip-hop ring tone, turned around excitedly. Glancing at the beige facades, the narrow streets, the old women selling apricots and nuts and pirated DVDs, she said: "All of this soon will be gone. Then we will have a new city. I like the old, of course, the historic. . . . But this will be gone, and then it will be a different country."

When we pulled up to the Avesta Concern Tower, in central Baku, several men in tweed jackets were assembled on the curb and ready to escort us inside. After lunch in Ibrahimov's private dining room, we decamped to the office and sat on a red silk divan with miniature Sphinx armrests. Ibrahimov pointed out his artifacts: his desk, which, he said, is Spanish and the same kind used by Vladimir Putin; a chess set from Italy; a sculpture of his father.

Ibrahimov segued back to Ilham Aliyev, the Boss of All Bosses, whom he called a great supporter, an ally, the son of the savior of the people of Azerbaijan. I asked him about other features of his regime: the lack of transparency, the lack of civil liberties, the detention of opposition activists. Ibrahimov said what oligarchs have been saying since Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian industrialist, was exiled to Siberia in 2003: "I don't know anything about politics." But "biznessmen" are much more intimately woven into the political fabric of Russia or Azerbaijan than C.E.O.'s in the West. They may wear crocodile-skin shoes, but they rely on the state for pipelines and extraction rights.

Ibrahimov, like other successful men in this part of the world, knows his place, and he knows it is best to be philosophical about these things. "Don't ask me about politics," he said. "I'm afraid I'll make a mistake. This is not what I'm good at. This is not what I do." Then his semismile semiwidened, and he started talking about his next big idea, which features more stratospheric buildings and superlong canals and eight-star hotel-palaces and heliports and yacht clubs. He was sure all these things could be done. He knew it. There were important people - "political people," he said - who support him.

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Azerbaijan Is Rich. Now It Wants to Be Famous.

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Sitting on a couch in the temporary headquarters at the construction site of his future city, Ibrahimov mulled the possibilities. The headquarters, which looks like a very modern log cabin, features a big conference table, flat-screen televisions, a bar, pretty assistants and a dining table that is always set.

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I don't want to be in heavy civil but maybe in the future they will attempt to finish the Cincinnati underground subway. I would want to be a part of it. Its 3/4ths finished. The city has to maintain it because it runs under the main highway.

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How Cincinnati tried, and failed, to build one of America's first subways

By Andrew J. Hawkins | Photography by Andrew Spear

It's early June in Cincinnati and the city is steamy after a recent rain. Elderly women fan themselves at bus stops. Tattooed tweakers panhandle in Fountain Square. Men in sweat-stained oxford shirts line up for lunch at Skyline Chili. Downtown is threadbare and lightly populated - everyone is either in their temperature-controlled offices or sitting in their cars, windows up, AC blasting, immune to the outside world.

Like many Midwestern cities, Cincinnati's public transit system has seen better times. On an average day, only 55,000 trips in Cincinnati are made on public buses - the city's only mode of public transportation - in a metropolitan region of over 2 million people. The city ranks 46th among the 50 most populous cities in terms of ridership. And public transit use continues to fall: recently, the city has considered downsizing to smaller buses on some of its routes.

Which is not to say Cincinnati is some transit backwater. It has its own bike-share program; it has Uber and Lyft; and come September, it will cut the ribbon on a brand-new streetcar system. It's just that in Cincinnati, the car is still king. In 2014, Cincinnatians spent an additional 60 hours behind the wheel because of traffic congestion. When I ask Michael Moore, the city's head of transportation, what he was doing to encourage people to ditch their cars for cleaner modes of transit, he disagreed with the premise of my question. "I don't think it's important to get people out of their cars," he says. "I think it's important that we offer people choice."

But under the streets of Cincinnati lies the vestige of a different vision - sealed underneath heavy manholes, hidden behind ivy-draped steel gates, and kept out of the public eye by the city's highest officials. This is the city's abandoned subway system, nearly three miles of empty tunnels and platforms now decorated in dust and graffiti. It is a vast subterranean space that stands as a monument to one of the biggest transportation blunders of all time. Had it been completed, the rapid transit system could have transformed Cincinnati. Instead, a decade after the project broke ground it was canceled, never to be completed. It is the nation's largest ghost subway.

Americans have a capricious attitude toward transportation infrastructure. We green-light passenger rail projects, only to mothball them once the money dries up, or the political winds shift. Canceling much-needed transit projects has become a blood sport in this country. Baltimore's Red Line, the ARC Tunnel between New York and New Jersey, Florida's high-speed rail corridor, and the M-1 light-rail line in Detroit are just a few recent examples of transit projects that met untimely deaths or were severely scaled down in the name of saving taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, the subway systems that were built at the turn of the 20th century are rapidly reaching the end of their natural shelf life. Passengers in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston cram themselves onto increasingly crowded trains, fight for space on station platforms, and suffer an endless cycle of closures and repairs. A torrential waterfall cascades down a staircase of the DC Metro. Lightning strikes a Blue Line train station in Chicago. Videos of both go viral and are held up as larger metaphors about the decline of our subway systems.

Carpooling!, the startups shout. Sharing rides! Sharing cars! Sharing the seats in our cars! But the apps on our phones will only get us so far. And as more people trend toward cities and away from their cars, there has never been a more pressing need for clean, sustainable, affordable, and functional public transportation.

It would be nice to think that of the story of the Cincinnati subway as an anomaly, a rare instance of a good transportation idea that met an ignominious end thanks to bad politics or a crazy twist of fate. But it wasn't - it was the first in a long line of transit failures that have haunted our history ever since.

Built in 1933, Cincinnati's Union Terminal train station is a beautiful, imposing art deco relic that, for the last 20 years, has been left to crumble. At its peak in the 1940s, the station handled up to 216 trains a day. Today it's home to a dilapidated IMAX theater (currently closed for repairs), and the Cincinnati Museum Center (also closed). Until recently, the only way to see Cincinnati's abandoned subway was to take one of the museum's paid tours. But no longer, thanks to the city's recent decision to restrict the public's access out of liability concerns.

The subway tunnels have been designated "a confined space," unsafe for the public. Recently a cameraman filming a documentary fell off one of the platforms, and had to be evacuated on a gurney. It took three EMTs with rope to get him out.

There's no way into the tunnels - unless you know where to look

Visiting Cincinnati's abandoned subway today is nearly impossible. Over the years, the city has done a magnificent job of obliterating almost any above-ground vestiges, save for a handful of innocuous grates embedded in the sidewalk along Central Parkway. Station portals were bulldozed. Tunnels bricked up. Overpasses knocked down. Hardly anyone is left alive who remembers the rise and fall of the subway firsthand. There's no way into the tunnels - unless you know where to look.

In 2010, Jake Mecklenborg released a book cheekily titled Cincinnati's Incomplete Subway: The Complete History. A native Cincinnatian, Mecklenborg has made preserving the memory of the subway his life's work. Over a decade of research, he's become obsessed with answering the "crazy and endlessly frustrating" question of why Cincinnati's leaders pulled the plug on the subway after finishing nearly a third of it.

On that bright June day, I meet Mecklenborg outside my hotel. He has dark hair, an imposing forehead, and an encyclopedic knowledge of his hometown. To Mecklenborg, every corner of the city tells a story - "an emotional landscape you can't avoid," he says. As we hop into his Ford Focus and drive to the only section of the subway that's still sort of accessible, Mecklenborg points out traces of a Cincinnati long gone: this is West McMicken Avenue, where the prostitutes used to assemble in the '70s; this is the site of the now defunct Sears garden tiller factory. As we drive, Mecklenborg asks if I mind getting my shoes dirty. No, I do not mind at all. He asks if I mind some light trespassing. Nope.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America couldn't get enough rapid transit. Inventor Alfred Ely Beach helped kick off a nationwide building frenzy in 1870, when he revealed that the secretive postal tube project he was working on under New York City's Broadway was actually an underground pneumatic transit prototype. The city elders were aghast, but the public loved it. Boston's Tremont Street Subway, which opened in 1897, became the nation's first functional rapid transit tunnel. Seven years later, New York City's Interborough Rapid Transit line first opened, and would grow into one of the largest, most heavily trafficked subway systems in the world. In 1907, Philadelphia opened its subway, which ran on both elevated and underground tracks. At the time, fares were just a nickel.

By April 1916, Cincinnati was itching to join the party. A $6 million bond issue for the construction of a project that would come to be called the Rapid Transit Loop was proposed. The plan was to build 16 miles of subway tunnels encircling the city using obsolete canals, unpopulated hillsides, and ravines.

The subway would help Cincinnati reclaim its status as a boom town. In 1850, the city had nearly surpassed Boston and Philadelphia in terms of population and density. But a lack of flood-proof land - Cincinnati is boxed in by the Ohio River to the south, and hills to the north, east, and west - led industrialists to turn their attention to fledging St. Louis and Chicago. A subway, civic leaders promised, could help Cincinnati grow its borders and regain what it lost.

"This is the final word of the Citizens' Rapid Transit Loop Committee," one ad published in the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune read. "We believe that the city we love, our home, is at the turning point, and that with the coming of Rapid Transit we will have the beginning of a Greater, More Prosperous, Healthier and Happier Cincinnati. We believe that a Vote for the Loop is a Vote for the best interests of all of us, and it is with pride that we state that every newspaper in the city is for the Loop, and practically all of the Business organizations as well as the Trades Unions."

"Old Cincinnati said 'Can't,'" the headline blared, "New Cincinnati says 'I Will.'"

Voters enthusiastically agreed and the project won with overwhelming support. The proposed loop around Cincinnati was to be 16 miles long, with the underground portion running north along the partially drained Miami and Erie Canal to the Brighton neighborhood. There, it would surface through the Mill Creek valley to the suburb of Saint Bernard. It would hook east through heavily industrial Norwood and south through Oakley and Evanston to the river, where it would run along an elevated railway back into the downtown area. The design was based on the specifications of Boston's Cambridge-Dorchester line, which began operation in 1912. In total, 20 stations, both above and below ground, would be built.

After a complicated legal fight over the subway's lease ordinance, construction officially began in late 1920. The first ground was broken at the intersection of Walnut Street and what would eventually become Central Parkway. But even at the outset, construction went very slowly, thanks to a shortage in construction materials in the wake of World War I.

The planning itself was shoddy. Houses along the planned route began to crumble, with foundations cracking and porches falling off. Lawsuits started to pile up. Then Prohibition went into effect, closing many of the city's breweries and taverns, imperiling the city's finances. The plan for the subway was downsized, with the entire eastern branch of the loop completely scrapped.

When the bonds ran out and the money dried up in 1927, only seven miles of tunnels had been completed. Meanwhile, the boulevard that ran on top of the subway, Central Parkway, officially opened that same year to much fanfare. Suddenly, automobiles were all the rage, while the subway that ran underneath them was increasingly becoming Cincinnati's white elephant.

But more than war or a booze ban, Mecklenborg argues that it was politics that killed the subway. When it was first approved, Cincinnati was controlled by a political machine run by George "Boss" Cox, a former saloon owner, and his unscrupulous cronies (mostly bartenders) on the city council. These were guys who would casually "switch" religions - from Protestant to Catholic, depending on which district they were in - in order to appeal to the local voters. After his death in 1916, Cox was replaced as head of the machine by a burlesque owner, who managed to run Cincinnati's government while living full-time in New York City.

Reform, in the form of a Harvard-trained lawyer named Murray Seasongood, swept through Cincinnati in the late 1920s. After his election to city manager, Seasongood passed new laws to weaken the mayor's office and city council. The Rapid Transit Loop became a symbol of the old machine's corruption and cronyism. Newspapers pounced, proclaiming the slow-going construction project "a botch." The trains were too big for the tunnels and the curves were too sharp, they reported. Nevermind that both claims were easily disprovable.

In January 1929, Seasongood oversaw the dissolution of the Rapid Transit Commission, transferring its authority over the construction project to his office. Nine months later, the stock market tanked and the nation took a nosedive into depression.

"It was at its core a work that would have benefited the public good, even though it was conceived and built during a period of boss rule," Mecklenborg says. "The project was undermined by a reform movement that disguised itself as grassroots even though it was orchestrated by the area's blue blood families to take back control from a machine which rose from and was comprised almost entirely of men of lower class origins."

We pull over on Hopple Street and get out. A quick dash across Central Parkway and we stand before a locked and rusted chain-link fence. Some fellow trespasser had cut a hole to the side, so we squeeze through, careful to avoid the jagged metal of the fence.

With tractor-trailers rumbling down the interstate just a few yards away, we make our way down the trash-strewn path and through a thick, almost impenetrable wall of foliage toward the tunnel entrance. We have to be careful; the guys who own the nearby gas station are known to call the cops if they see anyone snooping around.

At the time, the subway's cancellation was thought to be just temporary

This tunnel, known as the Hopple Street Tunnel, was excavated in 1926 and 1927, a full year after the city had promised the Rapid Transit Loop was to be completed and fully operational, and two years before the entire project would grind to a halt. It is the incomplete subway's northernmost point. At the time, the subway's cancellation was thought to be just temporary. None of the city's leaders at the time, not even Seasongood, actually believed it would remain forever fallow.

The tunnel's entrance is barely visible through the brush. A machete would have been useful, and a broom - empty, sun-bleached beer cans, soiled blankets, and shattered glass carpet the ground, making for difficult terrain. A weather-beaten bible sits atop an overturned bucket at the mouth of the tunnel. "Forgive men their trespasses," it reads.

Mecklenborg uses a large tree branch to swipe away the spider webs. Flashlight in hand, he wastes little time plunging into the depths. He's been down here before, dozens of times. He was 18 the first time he went spelunking in Cincinnati's man-made caverns. He wanted to create his own website - this was in the heady days of the dot-com bubble - and thought some pictures of Cincinnati's creepy, cool abandoned subway would make for compelling online content.

The light recedes behind us. I was told this would be a short trip, but we are already more than 400 feet deep into this tunnel. He shouts "Hey!" to make our presence known to any homeless people that may be using the tunnel as a shelter. The Hopple Street Tunnel is an ideal place for anyone without a permanent address: sleeping bags and muddy clothing are strewn throughout.

The idea of accidentally stepping on a slumbering body gives me sudden vertigo. My imagination kicks into overdrive. Cincinnati's subway tunnels are not haunted - as far as I can tell - but Cincinnatians love to tell stories about hearing footsteps or seeing moving shadows while exploring the subway. Some tell stories of being chased from the tunnels by an unseen presence. I flick on my phone's flashlight, half expecting to see a bearded face with bloodshot eyes suddenly appear before me. But all I see was Mecklenborg's back as he strides deeper into the tunnel.

My flashlight sweeps over an ominous message scrawled in murder-black paint on the tunnel wall: "Back up motherfucker." I resist the urge to comply.

About three miles from the Hopple St. Tunnel, Cincinnati's City Hall does a bad job at blending into the skyline. It's a Romanesque castle among otherwise bland Midwestern architecture, capped with soaring arches and a grand clock tower. Inside, magnificent stained-glass depictions of the city's history line the stairwell. Not included among them is the political squabbling that ultimately led to the demise of the subway. Not exactly the type of story that looks good in stained glass.

Moore, Cincinnati's genial director of transportation and engineering, has a spacious office on the fourth floor. Rolled up schematics and blueprints are stacked against the wall. A framed child's painting sits on his desk.

I ask Moore if the subway is still, decades later, such a huge embarrassment for Cincinnati that they'd rather shove out of sight. Moore dismissed that out of hand, though he remains unsentimental about the city's ghost subway. "Subways are great," he says with a grin. "But, and maybe it's just because I'm too close to it, but for me it's a long basement."

The subway wasn't just the end of Cincinnati's mass transportation dreams, it also marked the end of the first chapter in America's rapid transit story. It was the last subway project of the pre-World War II era. The automobile, once a toy for the rich, suddenly became cheaper and more accessible to the middle class. Taxpayer money that would have gone toward tunnels and train tracks was instead spent on roads, bridges, and highways.

The second chapter wouldn't start until 30 years later, when San Francisco's BART train broke ground in the mid-1960s. Washington's Metro followed soon after. A handful of cities that had done without subways, including Baltimore, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, embraced rapid-transit and light-rail projects. The memory of Cincinnati's shame had faded, and America was ready to fall in love with mass transportation again.

All those metro systems are today in varying stages of disarray. New York, Washington, and Boston are home to the three busiest subway systems in the nation, and all three currently need billions of dollars to make crucial repairs and meet rising demand. Ten of the nation's largest public transit agencies face a collective repair backlog of $102 billion, according to the Regional Plan Association. That means that nearly one-fifth of the US population is standing on crumbling train platforms, waiting for out-of-date buses, or coping with more frequent delays due to mechanical problems.

The Canarsie Tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn serves 225,000 passengers a day. But thanks to Hurricane Sandy, the tunnel will need to shut down for 18 months for repairs. And the MTA's first major expansion in decades, the Second Avenue Subway, is mired in cost overruns and delays. Meanwhile, in an unprecedented move last March, the entire DC Metro shut down for a whole day to address safety concerns. Gridlock, austerity, an allergy to tax increases and debt - all make for a toxic stew in which our urban transit systems are sinking.

New projects to replace the old, falling apart systems run into a different kind of problem: self-sabotage. Baltimore's Red Line is a perfect example. A 14-mile light-rail line to connect the city's impoverished west side to its more affluent east side, the project was weeks away from breaking ground in 2015 when Maryland's Republican governor dubbed it a "boondoggle" and pulled the plug. The same thing happened to the Access to the Region's Core (ARC) tunnel, recently described by President Obama as the most important infrastructure project in the country. It became the pawn in a political pissing contest, and eventually bit the dust.

"These rail services are expensive, quite frankly."

"These rail services are expensive, quite frankly," Robert Puentes, president and CEO of the 95-year-old Eno Center for Transportation, told me. "They're expensive to build, they're expensive to operate, and when you do them right, they can have enormously positive implications on regional economies. And if you do them wrong, they can be a big white elephant."

In 2002, Cincinnati's voters had a chance to resurrect their incomplete subway, to transform it from a graveyard of embarrassment to a linchpin in a multi-billion dollar transit plan. The Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority proposed a ballot referendum called Metro Moves, which would have created an extensive light-rail system incorporating the three remaining 1920s-era subway stations at Liberty, Brighton, and Hopple streets.

In many ways, Metro Moves was more ambitious than the original Rapid Transit Loop. It included seven light-rail lines and 72 stations, at a total cost of $2.7 billion. While the federal government would have covered the bulk, Hamilton County (which encompasses Cincinnati) residents were asked to approve a half-cent sales tax levy to cover their portion. Just like they had a century ago, local businesses endorsed the plan, as well as environmentalists and good government groups. Supporters blanketed the airwaves with positive ads in favor of Metro Moves, and dominated opponents during numerous public debates.

Metro Moves was the result of a decade-long effort to bring light rail to Cincinnati. Moreover, it was the city's chance to erase the stain left behind by their unfinished subway project. But Hamilton County residents rejected Metro Moves in a 2-to-1 vote, with over 68 percent voting against the project.

Wedged between the Fort Washington freeway trench and the Ohio River, a stone's throw from the city's baseball park and football stadium, sits the Riverfront Transit Center, a two-story tall, half-mile long underground concrete tube opened in 2003. That makes it one of the largest transit stations in the world. It is also another failed Cincinnati public transportation project: most of the time it sits completely empty.

When it was envisioned, planners thought that the transit center would be a hub where light-rail lines - if Cincinnati ever got around to building them - could converge. In the meantime, the massive underground transit station would serve as a pick-up and drop-off location for public and private buses, as well as special shuttles during game days. Today, the above-ground portals are locked and the driveway leading up to the main entrance is closed for 275 days out of the year. Though I'm told the center is lined with subway tiles and mosaic art, I wasn't allowed inside.

"It is an orphaned station," a Channel 9 reporter mused in a 2011 investigative piece on the station's underutilization. No rail lines currently run to the Riverfront Transit Center, and it's only open during during major events. Public metro buses are left to do their pick-ups and drop-offs at street level.

With a $48 million price tag, the transit center has been enough of a money pit to turn once ardent supporters into foes. Former Cincinnati mayor Charlie Luken, who helped cut the ribbon on the Riverfront Transit Center in 2003, now calls it the biggest waste of money he's ever seen. "The only reason there's not more outrage about it," Luken told Channel 9, "is because people don't know it's there."

When I ask him about the Riverfront Transit Center, Dan Hurley, a local historian and civic leader, almost chokes on his water. "Underutilized is such a kind word," he says. "Boondoggle is the one I hear more often."

What is it about Cincinnati that it served as the setting for not one, but two multi-million transportation fiascos? Most of the Cincinnatians I spoke to shrug off the question, insisting that the forces that gave rise to both the subway and the transit center have nothing in common. The subway was never finished, while the transit center is complete, if underutilized.

In September, the city will cut the ribbon on its new streetcar system. Many Cincinnatians are excited for their fancy new streetcars. Others remain opposed, including Cincinnati mayor John Cranley, who calls it a waste of money and "a mistake." In 2013, Cranley tried to stop the streetcar, but the city council, perhaps realizing the horrible irony involved in canceling another half-complete transportation project, overruled him.

Today, most people don't know why the subway was never finished

Recently, the city realized it was losing money by keeping its empty spaces like the Riverfront Transit Center empty for most of the year. In October, the station will be unlocked and the gates flung open for Ubahn, a two-day hip-hop and EDM musicfest. (The German word "U-bahn" translates as an underground rapid transit or metro.) The organizers are billing it as the "the first underground music festival in Cincinnati."

New York City transformed an abandoned elevated train track into a world-class park. It's now doing the same for an empty trolley terminal in Manhattan. The High Line begat the Lowline. If the Ubahn is successful, could the Cincinnati subway be far behind?

Moore says no. "We've had people approach us about using the tunnel for everything from grain malting, to a water bottling operation, to nightclubs - you name it." None of these ideas will work, though. There's no way the subway can accommodate thousands of sweaty club kids. The floor is uneven, there are pillars, and the water main, which was installed in the 1950s, leaks constantly.

Which is not to say the tunnels aren't in good condition. In 2008, the city was faced with a choice: spend $100.5 million to revive the tunnels for modern subway use, $19 million to fill the tunnels with dirt, or $2.6 million to simply maintain them as an abandoned space. After two years of debate, the city went with the cheapest option. The subway houses a water main, as well as fiber optic cables. And with Central Parkway running directly above, the tunnels needed to be refortified to keep the street safe.

Today, most people don't know why the subway was never finished. Even Murray Seasongood, the posh city manager who was most responsible for its demise, didn't seem to understand his own role in the boondoggle. When he was researching his book, Mecklenborg stumbled across an old interview from the 1960s with Seasongood, who was in his 80s at the time. The interviewer, a college student from the University of Cincinnati, asked him if he regretted killing the subway. "He was very jovial, very enthusiastic," the student said of Seasongood. "But as for the details of the subway system, he could not recall them."

Back at Hopple Street, Mecklenborg and I emerge from the labyrinth, a little dirtier than when we entered but otherwise unharmed. Despite everything that he and his city have been through, he's surprisingly indifferent to the decision to seal off the subway from the public forever. He thought that the tours were okay, but prone to misinformation. Maybe it's better this way. "You can go on a tour of the subway, you can physically see it," he says, "but you still wouldn't understand it."

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The secret history of Cincinnati's ghost subway

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How Cincinnati tried, and failed, to build one of America's first subways By Andrew J. Hawkins | Photography by Andrew Spear It's early June in Cincinnati and the city is steamy after a recent rain. Elderly women fan themselves at bus stops. Tattooed tweakers panhandle in Fountain Square.

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The Hudson yards project is a massive project in Manhattan along the High Line. The investors had to get loans from several banks. The project has sealed 25 billion dollars. I am excited to see the project finished and what it will look like. Maybe I could find work there.

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After four months of negotiating to buy a 44 percent stake in 10 Hudson Yards, a twist of fate kept Christoph Donner stranded in Los Angeles on the day of the closing.

"I was dialed in via email and phone," the top real estate executive for Allianz said, recalling the culmination of the German insurer's largest-ever real estate investment in the United States.

But if the closing was anticlimactic for Donner, the deal itself was a robust endorsement of Hudson Yards, the $25 billion, 17 million-square-foot development by Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group. Despite headwinds in the capital markets, the partners have locked up about $14 billion in debt and equity for the project to date.

In December, Related announced $5 billion in financing for the project's retail component and an office tower at 30 Hudson Yards. Then in late July came news of a $2 billion capitalization at 35 Hudson Yards, followed by the announcement just a few days later Related and Oxford had refinanced 10 Hudson Yards with $1.2 billion in debt from Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs; as part of that deal, Allianz bought Coach's stake as well as part of the Kuwait Investment Authority's stake in the building in a transaction that valued the tower at $2.15 billion.

The Allianz deal will serve as a case study for how the developers may finance the next stage of the project, Related's CEO Jeff Blau told The Real Deal.

"We'll now have about 10 million square feet under construction, and so I think there's a certain story around Hudson Yards being able to proceed through different parts of the cycle," Blau said. "Whether banks are lending or not lending."

Related's success at leasing up Hudson Yards - about half of the eventual 10 million square feet of office space is already spoken for - reassures lenders skittish about financing new construction in Manhattan that the complex will continue to have momentum, sources said.

"What's interesting is they've accomplished this in a market that most people would describe as much tighter; capital is much less available," said Neil Shapiro, a partner at Herrick, Feinstein, which has represented Related but was not involved in the recent recapitalization. "While the market has gotten tighter, the money is only available to the best of the best."
No two financings alike
Given the scale of the project - it's the largest private real estate development in U.S. history - Related tapped a myriad of sources for its money, including conventional lenders, EB-5 investors, opportunistic hedge funds and even the Israeli bond market.

On the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, it raised 847 million shekels (about $224.98 million at today's rates) of five-year debt for Hudson Yards last year. Typically, developers pay 5 or 6 percent interest on the Israeli bonds, half of what it would cost in the U.S. for mezzanine debt. Hudson Yards is also the biggest beneficiary of the EB-5 program : Related raised over $600 million for the first phase of the project in 2014 through it, and is reportedly in the midst of raising another EB-5 round. (The firm was also one of the biggest spenders on lobbying for the visa program, according to OpenSecrets).

And for each asset at the project, Related targeted a different breed of investor.

At 35 Hudson Yards, a 1.1 million-square-foot mixed-use tower with an Equinox-branded hotel and luxury apartments, Related tapped opportunistic investors led by the U.K.-based Children's Investment Fund, which led a $1.2 billion debt financing round. The hedge fund is also a lender on 432 Park Avenue, 30 Park Place and 520 Park Avenue, three of the city's priciest condo projects, and gave Related $850 million in construction financing at 15 Hudson Yards, a 70-story mixed-use condo and rental tower.

By contrast, 10 Hudson Yards, an office skyscraper fully-leased to the likes of Coach, L'Oreal SAP, and Boston Consulting Group, attracted foreign capital looking to invest in long-term, core assets.

"Capital is absolutely flowing into core, stable assets in New York City and these are investors looking for long-term, steady cash flow," Blau said.

And at 30 Hudson Yards, a 90-story, 2.6 million-square-foot office tower, it was all about owner-occupied office condo deals.

In December, Wells Fargo bought its 500,000-square-foot space at the tower for about $650 million, according to Real Capital Analytics. That deal was preceded by buyout firm KKR's October purchase of the top 10 floors (about 343,000 square feet) for an undisclosed price, as well as Time Warner's acquisition of a 1.6 million-square-foot office condo (spanning the 14th through 51st floors). Related, too, is purchasing a 270,000-square-foot condo at the tower, where it plans to move its operations from the Time Warner Center.

The KKR and Wells Fargo deals "changed the tenor of Hudson Yards somewhat," said Cushman & Wakefield's Dale Schlather, who represented Wells Fargo in its office condo acquisition. "Now all of a sudden you have [Steve Cohen's] Point 72 looking at Hudson Yards, and [BlackRock's] Larry Fink is very serious about it."

David Falk, who is president of the Tri-State Region at Newmark Grubb Knight Frank and who hasn't been involved in Hudson Yards deals, said tenants are "able to get more bodies into the footprint [at Hudson Yards] because the floor plates are more efficient. So the rent is competitive or less than Midtown, which doesn't have those efficiencies."
Fill it and they will come
When making its financing plays for 15, 30 and 35 Hudson Yards, Related had to contend with economic turmoil in the global markets. In December, when Blau announced the $5 billion debt and equity financing deal for 30 Hudson Yards and the retail component, he admitted it had been a slog.

"There's not enough capital," he told the Wall Street Journal. Stricter regulations, he added, created an environment that "really limits the banks from making these large scale loans."

But when it came time to recapitalize 10 Hudson Yards and shepherd Coach out of its stake, Related was in a much stronger position, with the building fully leased.

"Being the smart guys they are, [Related and Oxford] going to cut their best deal when the building is 100 percent complete and the tenants are in and paying rent," said a source familiar with the project.

"You've got one kind of debt when you're building, but if you get it right during an upswing and the asset value is higher than you had originally, you can maybe get cash out of that first refinancing," said Jim Costello, senior vice president at Real Capital Analytics.

The lease-up of 10 Hudson Yards wasn't lost on Allianz, which Donner described as a "very cautious" investor. "Clearly, having a building that is fully leased, and leased to investment-grade tenants, makes it attractive, especially at a time when you could arguably say that U.S. real estate in general has seen a pretty good run up in terms of rent growth and cap rate compression," he said. Allianz also liked that Hudson Yards had become a neighborhood, rather than just a patch of land.

"Although we plan to hold it for the long term, 10 years at least, we want to make sure it's not a one-off building that's difficult to sell," he said.

The pool of potential investors had widened, too. Early on, Related and Oxford scored a $475 million construction loan led by Starwood Property Group, which included an extremely rare construction mezzanine loan. The proceeds came in prior to the equity money, which sources told TRD at the time was unheard of.

"Three or four years ago, only a debt fund like Starwood would take the risk," said Garrett Thelander, who oversees the day-to-day capital services operations at Cushman & Wakefield. Now, he said, "it's not easy, but Related has dozens of banks on its list of relationships."
All quiet on the western front
From the outset, Hudson Yards' sheer size and capital needs have been the biggest challenge. "They need to go to all hemispheres to raise the debt because it's a lot of debt they're raising at one time," said Thelander, who said if a bank is in one deal at Hudson Yards, they're not likely to be in another.

The developers are also facing uncertainty in the office market, and a key question is whether they'll be able to maintain leasing momentum if the market goes sideways. There is also pressure on 15 Hudson Yards, an 88-story residential condo with a projected sellout of $1.74 billion, to deliver profits at a time when the luxury market has taken a hit. The tower is launching sales on Sept. 14.

"Everything that everyone talked about at Hudson Yards for the past five years has been about commercial," Blau said. He's betting that there's pent-up demand for residential product in the neighborhood.

Shapiro questioned whether Related and Oxford's recent financing deals were the result of wind at the developers' backs - or a sign that they envision headwinds to come.

"Are they shoring this up because they expect there to be a problem?" Shapiro asked. "My gut is that they're like everyone else; they have some real concerns and want to make sure they're well-positioned if the market does have some softening."

And even if all goes according to plan at the Eastern Yard, there's still the Western Yard, which stretches from 11th to 12th avenues between West 30th and West 33rd streets. That parcel will have another 2 million square feet of office and 4 million square feet of residential space, and there's no telling what the market will look like when it comes to pass.

"That's where the real gravy is for Related," said Schlather. "The Eastern side will be hugely popular and that will cause the Western side to appreciate dramatically, The thought that you're going to be alone or that it's going to be quiet or empty - those days are gone. It's no longer pioneering."

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Inside the Hudson Yards financing playbook

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After four months of negotiating to buy a 44 percent stake in 10 Hudson Yards, a twist of fate kept Christoph Donner stranded in Los Angeles on the day of the closing. "I was dialed in via email and phone," the top real estate executive for Allianz said, recalling the culmination of the German insurer's largest-ever real estate investment in the United States.

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I love history and the city has rich construction history. Their has been a lot of attempts to create the 2nd Av subway line. In the 2000s the city made plans for it and it was agreed on. Pretty soon the 1st phase of construction will soon be finished. The other two will be finished in 8 years after nearly a century.

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One day soon, if projections are to be believed, tourists will lean over you and stare confusedly at this new subway map while you're sitting in the train's end seat.Behold:

It's really there! The Second Avenue line is on this map, which was included in the 's board-meeting minutes on Wednesday. The Q train will be extended up through 63rd Street and shuttle riders to and from the Upper East Side through 96th Street. This is Phase 1 of the project, which is really, seriously, "the said it, okay?" expected to be completed in December 2016. And if a geographically inaccurate map of New York City says it, it has to betrue.

Second Avenue Sagas pointed out a little caveat to this good news: The , which expects the extension to serve about 200,000 riders at first, doesn't really plan to increase the frequency of Q service, so rush-hour waits will be some of the longest across all subways. For example, during the morning rush, southbound trains (i.e., those originating at 96 Street) will run every eight minutes. Then again, it's still probably faster t han watching two or three 6 trains pass by before one arrives with enough space to squeeze onto.

The map also welcomes back an old pal, the W train ( which went into retirement in 2010). The W will run to and from Whitehall Street, in lower Manhattan, and replace the Q train in Astoria,Queens.

The W train will kick back up again in November (the board approved it Wednesday) before the Second Avenue extension opens. At that time, the Q will terminate at 57th Street, so please, someone, let this guyknow.

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This New NYC Subway Map Shows the Second Avenue Line, So It Has to Really Be Happening

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One day soon, if projections are to be believed, tourists will lean over you and stare confusedly at this new subway map while you're sitting in the train's end seat.Behold: It's really there! The Second Avenue line is on this map, which was included in the 's board-meeting minutes on Wednesday.

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Residential construction is the field I want to be geared towards. The knowledge I would learn on a jobsite I could turn around and use in my home. Heavy civil isn't really applicable in my home unless I'm making a subway.

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It's a well known fact that New York City is undergoing another residential building boom, but the extent of that growth has now been brought to light in a new report by the New York Building Congress, based on its analysis of U.S. Census data.

The city's Department of Buildings approved the construction of 56,528 units spread out over 1,998 buildings in 2015. That's a 67 percent increase from the previous building boom in 2008, when the number of units stood at 33,911.

Construction approved in 2015 also marked a dramatic increase from the previous year - a 180 percent increase to be exact.

"The number of residential permits issued in New York City last year was nothing short of epic, and you don't reach an amount that large without a number of factors working in the City's favor," Richard T. Anderson, the president of the Building Congress, said in a press release.

The factors he's referring to include developers making a dash to get permits approved prior to the 421-a program expiring in early 2016, and pending changes to the building code.

Among the five boroughs, Brooklyn saw the most number of permits issued for the fourth year running with 26,026 permits approved. That's more than the permits approved in Queens and Manhattan combined. Only in Staten Island did the number of permits approved drop from 712 permits in 2014 to 541 in 2015.

Of all the units approved for construction, a staggering 97 percent were in buildings with five or more units. Manhattan, in fact, average 120 units for every permitted building.

The building boom has in turn led to higher construction costs. The construction cost per unit reached $124,300 in 2015, up 25 percent from 2014.

NYC Residential Building Permits Surged Past 56,000 in 2015, a 67 Percent Increase from the Height of the Previous Building Boom [NY Building Congress]

Everything You Need to Know About NYC's 421-a Tax Program, Poised to Expire Today [Curbed]

NYC Construction Costs Grew For A Third Year Running Amid Building Boom [Curbed]

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NYC Residential Construction Boom Surpasses Pre-Recession High

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It's a well known fact that New York City is undergoing another residential building boom, but the extent of that growth has now been brought to light in a new report by the New York Building Congress, based on its analysis of U.S. Census data.

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Construction safety is important to me. In the neighborhood I grew in has the 2nd largest oil spill in the country. When the tanks were built they had no bottoms. So the oil would soak into the ground. It did so for decades until it was noticed. The rate of stomach cancer in adults in my neighborhood is absurd. I care for what happens on a construction because the effects could last long after I'm gone.

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Over the last century, between 17 and 30 million gallons of oil were spilled and leaked from ExxonMobil's historic refinery and storage facilities into the soil and groundwater in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. These petroleum discharges formed an over 50 acre underground petroleum plume that underlies local businesses and a residential section of Greenpoint. The contamination has also been leaching into Newtown Creek for decades.

In a 1978 helicopter patrol, the US Coast Guard discovered a large plume of oil flowing out of the banks of the creek. Virtually no action was taken until 1990, when the state entered into consent orders with ExxonMobil. Rather than bring the company to justice, the order required only the most rudimentary cleanup, demanded no cleanup benchmark, and failed to order a single penny in penalties. The spill has been oozing under Greenpoint for five decades, destroying the local aquifer, rendering more than 50 acres of land undevelopable, settling under more than 100 homes on three residential blocks, severely contaminating Newtown Creek, and threatening aquatic life harbor-wide.

Riverkeeper has been the driving force in bringing litigation forward, raising public awareness about the oil spill and compelling state officials to address this historic contamination. Riverkeeper discovered the oil spill during a boat patrol of Newtown Creek in 2002, finding oil sheens, floating garbage and abandoned cars littering the Creek. After investigating the source of the oil and the industrial history of the Creek, Riverkeeper filed a federal lawsuit against ExxonMobil in 2004 to hold it responsible for its role in the contamination. Riverkeeper was joined by six Greenpoint residents as co-plaintiffs in its lawsuit. Riverkeeper's lawsuit was followed in 2005 with a similar suit brought by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, and other local elected officials. In 2007, New York Attorney General Cuomo filed a third federal lawsuit alleging similar claims, as well as other claims over which the State has unique enforcement authority. The three lawsuits were all consolidated for case management purposes by the federal court in Brooklyn, and the parties have been actively engaged in efforts to settle the cases for almost three years.

Since its first boat patrol into Newtown Creek over eight years ago, Riverkeeper has established itself as the leading pollution enforcer on Newtown Creek, exemplified by its citizen suits against oil companies, cement manufacturers and other polluters. Riverkeeper also helped found the Newtown Creek Alliance, a coalition of elected officials, local residents, business owners and other non-profit organizations working to improve the Creek and adjoining neighborhoods.
Current News on Newtown Creek

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Greenpoint Oil Spill on Newtown Creek - Riverkeeper

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Over the last century, between 17 and 30 million gallons of oil were spilled and leaked from ExxonMobil's historic refinery and storage facilities into the soil and groundwater in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. These petroleum discharges formed an over 50 acre underground petroleum plume that underlies local businesses and a residential section of Greenpoint.

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The reason I choose construction was because of the money and the knowledge I would learn will give me the ability to deal with issues in my home without any ones help. I want to be able to construct whatever I want. My dream is to build a tiny house. I love the whole movement using a space making it have multi purpose and getting the maximum efficacy of a space.

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The rise of the tiny-house movement.

As a rule, people in New York wish for smaller places to live about as often as people on airplanes wish for smaller seats. I used to dream sometimes that I had found rooms in my apartment that I didn't know were there, and, as I explored them, I felt a serenity that I did not feel in my waking life. I never had a dream where my apartment was smaller, and I don't think I would feel very good if I did. When I was a child, I wanted a house so big that to go from one end to the other I'd have to ride a motorcycle.

For someone who lives in New York, one of the more enigmatic modern micro-trends is the decision to live in the smallest space possible, in a structure known as a "tiny house." The occupants of tiny houses tend to be committed, and slightly self-regarding, citizens, who cook on little stoves and have refrigerators like wall safes. They shed years of possessions and keepsakes to get by with two shirts and two pairs of pants and two mugs and two forks, in order to occupy what amounts to a monk's cell, for the sake of simplicity, frugality, or upright environmental living. They often embody the zeal of religious converts.

Tiny houses are built on trailer platforms. Typically, they are between a hundred and a hundred and thirty square feet, roughly the size of a covered wagon. They aren't toys or playhouses or aesthetic gestures-a copy of Monticello as a sandbox in a field in East Hampton, say-and they aren't shacks or cottages, either. Shacks don't have kitchens and bathrooms, and a cottage is larger than a tiny house. There are between several hundred and a thousand tiny houses in the United States. Kent Griswold, who, four years ago, began Tiny House Blog, told me that initially he "really had to scrounge to find material. Now I can't keep up. People send me stuff constantly. It's all across the country." The number is difficult to know, because tiny houses usually violate building codes by being so small, and thus occupying one is often illegal. Their owners tend to keep them secret and move them around. A man who sold a tiny house on terms went to repossess it, and it was gone.

People who live in tiny houses, or aspire to, appear to fall into one of three overlapping categories. The first consists of young people who see a tiny house as a means of owning a place while avoiding property taxes and maybe rent, since they can often find places to park their house free. The second group includes older men and women who have either sold or walked away from a house they couldn't afford. A subset of this group is retired couples whose children are gone, and who want to live more simply. Both of these groups include transients; that is, people for whom a tiny house is temporary. Among these is a woman named Elaine Walker, who recently listed her house on eBay, although she didn't find a buyer. She had built the tiny house, in New Hampshire, to live in while selling a house. She had planned to build another normal house, then decided instead to move to California. She found a man who would tow the tiny house there for her. Before he delivered it, he took the house to a car wash. The third group is composed of people determined to live environmentally responsible lives--to live "lightly," as they put it. According to Greg Johnson, the publisher of a tiny-house Web site called ResourcesForLife.com, to inhabit a tiny house "you have to remodel your sense of what success is and how important it is to you to convey to the outside world 'Hey, I have a big house and big car and I'm successful.' If you have a piece of inner tranquillity, you don't have to prove anything to anybody." A tiny-house builder describes this group as including people who "want to live off the grid. A lot of vegans. The younger people are idealists. They're big into off-the-map and sharing their experience."

Human beings have always lived in small houses-not to make a statement but because small houses were practical and cheap. "Nomadic people, indigenous people traditionally have small houses," Witold Rybczynski, the architecture critic, says. "In the Middle Ages, people slept many people to a bed and many beds in a room." A Pilgrim house was about a hundred and sixty-five square feet. In "Walden," Thoreau describes one-room houses owned by laborers who kept their front doors open for light. In winter, the places were perpetually cold. In 1987, an architect named Lester Walker published a book of photographs and drawings called "Tiny Houses," which influenced a number of people who build such houses now. Walker's book includes the dune shacks in Provincetown; the two-hundred-square-foot houses built in Texas in the late nineteenth century by German farmers to use on the weekends when they came to town; and the hundred-and-forty-square-foot houses that San Francisco built in 1906 for survivors of the earthquake.

Walker told me that he was especially drawn to fishermen's shanties in Vermont and Minnesota. "These guys take a lot of care in their workshops in the summer to decorate the outsides of the shacks," he said. "On the inside, there are two seats, and they drink beer and eat potato chips, and sleep there. They don't wash, and they can't open the window because of the cold, and they have a kerosene stove giving off fumes, and they keep fish in there. But on the outside they're very ornate."

The rhetoric of modern tiny-house living begins with the assertion that big houses, aside from being wasteful and environmentally noxious, are debtors' prisons. Their owners work in order to afford them, and when they actually occupy them they're anxious. Tiny houses are luxurious, because they are easier to take care of and allow their (presumably debt-free) owners to spend more money on pleasures. The owner of a tiny house, while living intimately indoors, has a larger life outside, and a lighter conscience.

Banks won't finance tiny houses--any house smaller than four hundred square feet is difficult to mortgage--and, in addition to being tricky to occupy legally, the houses are excluded from many R.V. parks because they're too tall. Having corners instead of rounded edges, a tiny house is expensive to tow; it is not a practical substitute for a mobile home.

Owners of tiny houses often believe that there is a conspiracy among home builders and banks to make houses that are bigger than what people need or can pay for. The Times recently published a piece noting that larger houses have become difficult to sell, because more people want smaller houses, closer to where they work. "We might be at the edge of an epochal, cyclical change," Rybczynski says, because house builders have run short of money and building has almost stopped. "When we start again, will houses be the same size as before, or will people think that small is better?"

Jay Shafer is the brainy misfit behind the tiny-house trend and the builder of the most stately tiny houses. He built his first tiny house in Iowa, in 1999, and lived in it for five years. It was a hundred and ten square feet, with a steep gabled roof and a porch. It looked like a Gothic cottage from a children's story. Designing the footprint of a tiny house is simple, since it follows the contour of the trailer. The complicated part is preserving space. What makes Shafer's houses different from others is the classical elements of form and proportion and the graceful compression of his design. More than tiny, his houses feel sleek.

Shafer calls himself a "claustrophile." He is forty-seven, tall and thin, with a high forehead and reddish-brown hair. He has an upright carriage, and he sits with a straight back, like a dancer. His voice is slightly nasal. His hands often seek a settled position around his face as he talks-balled into fists on which he rests his chin, or spread beneath his jaw, so that he appears to be posing but is really just paying attention. He is the species of fierce and stubborn person who conceals his nature behind a mild façade. He makes lists of errands on small pieces of paper, because the small size makes the lists look more manageable. Once, I saw him writing on the wrapper of a drinking straw.

Shafer has lived in three tiny houses-the one in Iowa, and two in California-but four years ago, in a yoga class, he met his wife, a veterinarian named Marty. "I didn't really get it that he lived in a tiny house," Marty told me. She is small and slim with brown hair, and her manner is intent. "The yoga class had a small changing room, and one day he said, 'My house is about the size of this room.' I listened and didn't really hear. Our first date, I went to pick him up, and there was a regular-sized house, and his house next to it, and I looked at them and was, like, 'Can't be.' "

The Shafers have been married for three years, and after they had a son they moved to a five-hundred-square-foot house, in Graton, California, north of San Francisco. Shafer's tiny house sits behind a picket fence in his yard, and he uses it as an office, where he draws plans for other tiny houses. The house is eight by twelve (a porch makes it fourteen feet long), with a sheet-metal roof above cedar walls. In the main room, which Shafer calls the great room, there are two chairs, a closet, a desk, bookshelves, and a stainless-steel propane heater built for a boat. A hallway with more shelves leads to a kitchen, a bathroom with a shower, and, above them, a sleeping loft that has a lancet window large enough for Shafer to climb through if the downstairs ever caught fire while he was asleep.

Shafer owns a design-and-build company called Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, and he has built sixteen tiny houses. He sold his first house to a filmmaker in New Hampshire nine years ago, for thirty thousand dollars. His second house was built for Greg Johnson, who saw Shafer's house in Iowa and commissioned one for himself. Shafer sold one tiny house to a couple from Berkeley, who put it on a property they owned in Telluride. In 2009, Shafer built a house in northern California and towed it to the parking lot of a hotel at the end of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where he gave a workshop on how to build a tiny house. When no one in New York bought the house, he parked it in the driveway of his in-laws' house, in Connecticut. Eight months later, he displayed it on a Harley-Davidson lot in Ohio, where it was sold.

On the second Saturday of each month, Shafer opens his tiny house for a few hours, to attract clients. About twenty people showed up for a recent tour, including Steve Weissman, Shafer's partner in Tumbleweed, who told everyone, "Jay sleeps over there," pointing to Shafer's house, "but he spends all his waking hours here," pointing at the tiny house. Shafer sat on his porch, welcoming people, then admonishing them not to touch his stuff. "It's a visual tour, not a tactile one," he said. He asked them to take off their shoes before they entered, which they did with a certain obeisance, as if they were paying homage to a deity. Shafer adopts an affable persona while discussing his houses, but he is an introvert, and the tours are an ordeal for him. In the intervals when no one had a question, he sat on the porch with his head on his forearm. He looked like a child who has been forced to take part in an adult activity.

A young couple from Michigan told him that they were moving to Palo Alto and wanted to live in a tiny house to save money. A stout woman whose face was framed with long graying hair that she had braided beneath her chin, like a bell pull, asked, "Can you get a piano in there?" Shafer nodded. "Put the piano in before you finish the house," he told her. A guy and his son who were dressed like lumberjacks circled the house with a measuring tape and made notes on a clipboard until Shafer told them to knock it off.

Now and then, he stepped inside to demonstrate how a plastic pocket door closes off the bathroom. Several people asked to have their photographs taken with Shafer, and he obliged. A lanky young man whose head was shaved, so that he looked like a standing lamp, said, "I'm surprised there aren't more military people interested in this. It seems like a good idea for a few years." Another tall man banged his head on the doorframe, then said he should have known better. "I used to live on a submarine," he said. A few people got down on their knees and pointed their phones under the trailer platform and took photographs. They stood on Shafer's lawn in groups of two and three, and, when a light rain began, they opened umbrellas.

Tumbleweed Tiny House Company offers plans for seven tiny houses. In the past year, it has sold a thousand plans, but Shafer doesn't know how many houses have been built from them. The majority of the plans cost less than a hundred dollars, but a few, for the larger of the tiny houses, cost nearly a thousand. Shafer has sold about a hundred of those, and assumes that many of the people who bought them were serious about building. The tiniest house that Tumbleweed Tiny House Company sells is the XS-House, which is sixty-five square feet, and costs sixteen thousand dollars to build yourself, or thirty-nine thousand dollars if Tumbleweed or someone else builds it for you. Tumbleweed's most expensive house, the Fencl, is a hundred and thirty square feet; it costs twenty-three thousand dollars to build yourself and fifty-four thousand dollars to have built. Conventional houses cost about a hundred dollars a square foot (ones built by national builders can cost as little as fifty dollars a square foot, according to Rybczynski). Shafer says that his house cost three hundred dollars a square foot, because it is essentially handmade; it is probably the cheapest house in Sonoma County by volume, he says, but the most expensive proportionally.

Tumbleweed also sells plans for small houses on foundations, but the bulk of its business involves tiny houses. It builds about one house a month, then tows it to the owners. It makes most of its money from selling plans and from Shafer's self-published book, "The Small House Book," which costs about five dollars to print in China and sells for thirty dollars. Over the past year, Tumbleweed has sold ten thousand copies through its Web site.

Shafer knows that his occupation is the result of some daffy ideas' having found a toehold. He is one of those fortunate people whose obsession has led them to a territory they more or less have to themselves. In the pattern of his life, themes and impressions recur prominently, like repeats in wallpaper. To begin with, Shafer is a pragmatic subversive. "I guess you could say I'm very angry, and I'm trying to find creative ways to use it," he said. He believes that suburban neighborhoods of wide streets and big houses with false gables are cold and unsympathetic, even immoral, and his design philosophies are derived substantially in reaction to his upbringing among such lavish ideals.

Shafer was born in Iowa, but he was brought up in Orange County, California. His father was an airline pilot. While other kids played baseball, he and a friend built shrines to Athena out of bricks in the back yard and burned flowers as offerings. When he was fourteen, his parents decided to move back to Iowa, "to protect us from the corruption of California," he said. In Iowa, "we lived in a four-thousand-square-foot house, which they saw as a trophy house, a prestige thing. My sister and I did all the cleaning. I spent at least a full day a week vacuuming and taking out the trash."

Before long, his parents sold the house and bought one that they hoped to flip. The new house was so small that Shafer didn't have a bedroom. His parents told him he could sleep on the floor in the den, but he often spent the night in the cab of his father's pickup. His grandparents, who lived most of the time in Florida, spent four months a year in Iowa occupying an Airstream trailer.

Shafer went to the University of Iowa, where he lived briefly in a room with twelve other students, "trying to make this tiny space work." In 1989, he moved to New York to go to graduate school in art at City College. He expected to become a painter. "I figured the New York experience would be an education of its own," he said, "and I was pretty much terrified the whole time. My first month, I had a gun pointed at me. A month after that, a guy with a bullet in his head died on the sidewalk in front of our building, and the next month my roommate saved a guy on the subway who'd been stabbed, and he came home covered in blood. I was riding my bike once and a car backfired, and I dove behind a dumpster. Everyone was laughing, but I thought I was being shot at."

He got his degree in 1992, and moved back to Iowa City, where he worked in the grocery department of a natural-foods co-op and taught painting and drawing as an adjunct at the university. At the co-op, he carved delicate archetypal forms into the skins of bananas and put the bananas out for sale. For an art show in Cedar Rapids, he wrote sayings from philosophers in soy ink on crackers like Communion wafers, and stacked them so that they made little towers. In a friend's garage, he built a small dome out of pine, just large enough for one person to fit into while crouching. It was covered with spiritual sayings and was an attempt to describe a religion for one person. He had meant the dome to be burned "from the moment it was created," he said, "but I couldn't find a place to do it, and I got impatient and took it to the dump and watched a tractor run over it. I was moving, and I didn't want to store it."

As a painter, Shafer began to care less about subject matter and more about form and proportion. Finally, he gave up painting and decided to try to live artfully. He surreptitiously made a copy of his building key, gave up his apartment, and moved into the basement. He slept on a mattress, under a piece of plastic that he hid during daylight. Marty Shafer described this behavior, along with her husband's habit of sleeping in cars, as his "esoteric sleeping arrangements." Shafer said, "I thought you should just be able to fall asleep wherever you felt tired."

Shafer eventually bought a 1964 Airstream, which had a lime-green Formica counter and an orange shag rug. "It was made to be renovated," Shafer said. He did it over in wood, with spare aluminum highlights, then moved it to a trailer park, "and the day two weeks later when a neighboring trailer got a bullet hole in the side was the day I thought I should leave," he said. He moved it to a friend's organic hayfield. "I have a severe grass allergy," he said, "and I would get welts on my legs when I went out in shorts." In the winter, ice formed on the walls. "That's how I began to figure out what I needed," he said. "I definitely needed insulation."

Shafer designs by subtraction. He began drawing imaginary houses, and they grew smaller as he started "to figure out what I could get rid of-mostly square footage, because a lot of space wasn't used that efficiently," he said. "If there's elbow room for the activities you need, it's good, but anything beyond that is not good." His galvanizing imperative came when he learned, around 1999, that the houses he was drawing and not showing to anyone would violate building codes, which tend to be adapted from recommendations made by the International Code Council, a domestic trade group. The codes usually specify that a house must have at least one room of a hundred and twenty square feet, and that no habitable room be smaller than seventy square feet. The smallest a house can be and still conform to the codes is about two hundred and sixty-one square feet.

Until then, Shafer hadn't really thought of building a tiny house. Designing houses was a diversion, a pastime. "Once I found out it was illegal to live in a small house, though, I had to do it," he said. "It couldn't be a trailer, either. It had to be very houselike." From the Airstream he had the example of a structure on wheels, and he realized that if he built a house on a trailer bed it wouldn't be a house; it would be a trailer load and housing codes wouldn't apply. Michael Janzen, who writes the Tiny House Design Blog, describes this insight as one in which Shafer "thumbed his nose at the rules and took the concept of the trailer house and a stick-built house and mashed them together and made a solution that's compelling and technically illegal, which appeals to a lot of people."

Shafer's first house was fourteen feet long and eight feet wide, with a porch in front. A novice carpenter, he built it in a contractor's back yard. "He'd come out every three days and tell me what I was doing wrong, and I'd tear it apart," he said. The design was based on sacred and church architecture, which his interest in form and proportion had led him to. "I had the heater right on the central axis," he said. "You walked in the door and saw it, like an altar. I was also into an open plan, so you could see everything from the entrance-kitchen, bathroom, and living room."

Iowa City law allows someone to have an accessory building that is smaller than a hundred and forty-four square feet, and while the law doesn't say what the building must be used for, it doesn't prohibit his sleeping in the place now and then. Shafer bought land with a house already on it, told the city he was living in the house, then rented the house, and bent the law for five years by living in the back yard in his tiny house. Then he decided to move to northern California. Through an ad on the Internet, he sold his tiny house to the filmmaker in New Hampshire. He built another one, which was seven feet by ten feet-small enough to parallel park if he had to live on the street. To protect it on the road, he wrapped it in plastic.

Jay King had never heard of Shafer, but he is building a tiny house in a garage in Danbury, Connecticut. Until recently, King had been using the garage to build a sports car called a K-1 Attack from components manufactured in the Czech Republic.

King is small and lean, with the focussed manner of the Army sergeant he has been. He had got divorced, and had lost his house in the mortgage crisis. "I was looking for apartments, and I have a dog and a son, and it was such a pain to get an apartment for a dog," he said. "I saw a little ad for a little house. I'm a carpenter, and I thought, I'm going to do this on my own and be able to move this wherever I want to. After having a five-hundred-thousand-dollar house and being dumped by this economy to where they doubled my payments, that inspired me. I didn't need all the fancy stuff anymore. Simplicity is what I wanted."

King had been working on the house for six months and was about half done. The shell was complete, but it didn't have siding yet. The house had a pitched roof, and he had built a bedroom on a track so that it extended out from one side of the house like an alcove, and could be drawn inside the house when he moved. On the front, he planned to build a deck that he could lower like a drawbridge or raise so that it would cover the front door, making the house more or less impenetrable. The house was bolted together in the middle and came apart in five pieces. "It's a modular type," he said, pointing out the bolt holding the walls together. "Within twenty minutes, I can take it apart."

King showed me where he planned to put the kitchen, beneath his son's loft bed, and said that he was going to make the kitchen black. "I'm very much into being different from everybody else," he said. We stepped over to the living room, where there was a big leather armchair facing a propane fireplace that looked like a small TV. "My goal is to have a 3-D Yankee Stadium wall, an eight-by-twelve mural, which will make the room much bigger-looking," he said. "A guy gets divorced, and he loses everything, and this is all he needs."

The house had so far cost about three thousand dollars.

"You know what this is about?" he asked. "It's about the passion you feel about what you think you can do," he said.

I asked if he thought it would be difficult to find women to go out with, living in a tiny house.

"If you're going to date me, you're going to be off the deep end anyway," he said.

Farther up I-95, in New Haven, there is a tiny house that was built by a young woman named Elizabeth Turnbull, a graduate student at Yale who is interested in sustainable architecture. In 2008**,** she took a seminar with Jay Shafer in Manhattan, and then went to a two-week home-design-and-build class at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School, in Vermont. Turnbull, who is tall and long-limbed, with light-brown hair and blue eyes, told me that the course taught her "all the basic problems you would encounter-here's how to frame a wall, here's how to frame a window, here's why diagonal bracing is important." She looked at layouts of Airstreams and houseboats to learn how to manage small spaces. When she was accepted in the environmental-management program at Yale, she decided that she didn't want to live in an apartment or a dormitory, and she used the money she would have spent on rent to build a tiny house.

Drawing plans, Turnbull said, "I couldn't picture what it would look like. I just had faith that the drawings would finally become something I liked."

Turnbull's house is a hundred and forty-four square feet, with a pitched roof and a sleeping loft, a living room and a kitchen-no bathroom. It is parked in the back yard of a house belonging to someone affiliated with Yale, a couple of miles from the campus.

In her living room, we drank tea and ate strawberries and pistachios from bowls arranged on a little table like a still-life. I asked what sorts of concerns she had in mind as she designed her house, and she said, "People like us have a few numbers that constrain us. One is eight and a half feet wide. Wider than that, you need a police escort and a wide-load permit. Eighteen and half feet long is the maximum length and ten thousand pounds is the weight limit. Before I was finished, I towed the house to a sand-and-gravel pit where people were loading gravel, and took my place in line and had it weighed. I was just under ten thousand. That's why my ceiling is made from canvas sails, which were given to me by a woman who makes handbags from them. Wood would have been too heavy. The fourth number that's sort of a holy number is thirteen feet six inches. You start to kiss bridges if you're much taller than that. I'm thirteen-two."

Turnbull graduated in May, and isn't sure what she will do with the house. "It's such a part of my identity that it's difficult to think about living elsewhere," she said. "There's something very satisfying about using your body to build a house. You're channelling into something very human. It's the same sort of ancient pleasure as growing food." She looked around, then said, a little mournfully, "It feels really big, but when someone else is here it feels very small."

One evening, I was having an early dinner with the Shafers and their infant son, Emerson, in a restaurant not far from their house. Outside, it poured rain and people arrived in the restaurant stamping their feet and leaving little trails of water as they made their way to their seats.

There were plates on our table from the salads we'd ordered and glasses for water and wine, and when the waitress arrived with our entrées there was no room for her to set them down. Shafer, who had been leaning over Emerson's high chair to entertain him, sat suddenly upright and began briskly combining plates and moving glasses, as if solving a puzzle.

"I'll make this work," he told the waitress earnestly. "This is what I do." ♦

Alec Wilkinson, a regular contributor, is the author of ten books, including "The Protest Singer" and "The Ice Balloon."
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As a rule, people in New York wish for smaller places to live about as often as people on airplanes wish for smaller seats. I used to dream sometimes that I had found rooms in my apartment that I didn't know were there, and, as I explored them, I felt a serenity that I did not feel in my waking life.

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I am interested in new construction methods. I like the construction industry because new methods are always being introduced into jobs. The day I start working out in industry will have methods and products that won't be used when I retire.

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It's been used since the Roman times, but concrete has never been more popular than today, with China using more of the stuff in the last three years than the United States in the last century. Concrete is one of the most widely used materials in the world, but at some point, no matter how it is mixed, it will crack and deteriorate.

It was to this problem that microbiologist Hendrik Jonker set his mind. Whilst thinking about how the body can heal bone through mineralization, he looked into whether a similar method could be used with concrete. By mixing it with limestone-producing bacteria, he found that any cracks that formed in the concrete were patched over. For this invention, Jonker is now a finalist for the European Inventor Award 2015.

The bacteria, either Bacillus pseudofirmus or Sporosarcina pasteurii, are found naturally in highly alkaline lakes near volcanoes, and are able to survive for up to a staggering 200 years without oxygen or food. They are activated when they come into contact with water and then use the calcium lactate as a food source, producing limestone that, as a result, closes up the cracks.

He calls the material "bioconcrete" that can "self-heal." In order to keep the bacteria dormant until it is needed, it is placed in small, biodegradable capsules containing the nutrient. When the concrete cracks, and water enters the gaps, it comes into contact with the bacteria and the food source, setting the healing process off. The bacteria then feed on the calcium lactate, joining the calcium with carbonate to form limestone, fixing the crack.

The process has been proven to work effectively, and can even be added to a liquid that could then be sprayed onto existing buildings. The problem, however, as always is the price. It is currently twice the cost of traditional concrete, but Jonker says that this is mainly due to the price of the calcium lactate, and if they can get the bacteria to use a sugar-based nutrient instead, the price would be dramatically reduced.

If they can sort out the pricing, then little would stop the incredible self-healing material from being used in bridges, tunnels, roads and other buildings, with the bacteria laying dormant for centuries and only 'coming to life' when needed.

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Self-Healing Concrete Repairs Its Own Cracks

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It's been used since the Roman times, but concrete has never been more popular than today, with China using more of the stuff in the last three years than the United States in the last century. Concrete is one of the most widely used materials in the world, but at some point, no matter how it is mixed, it will crack and deteriorate.

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I want to make money. I want to work ten years buy home in a neighborhood before a hipster invasion and rent the top 2 floors of a three story home. Then have the renters pay my mortgage.

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I started working for Cascade Builder when I was 17 and 2 summers as a labor has made me work harder at school so, I don't have to do that ever again. I want to do estimating in a nice air conditioned room with a window and a flower in pot on the window sill.

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I was curious if their was a wooden skyscraper. So I googled it and this came up. A 13 story building built by a Russian gangster. I taught it was so cool that he had the knowledge to go and make some thing like that. I want to know all their is to know about construction.

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When I buy my land and build my tiny house I want it to be self efficient. I want to have solar panels, collect its rainwater, and wood stove.

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I like the classic log cabin. my family used to go every summer for weeks to Tupper lake and we would live in a small log cabin. When I have the money I want to buy a piece of land in Lake Placid and make a tiny house that looks like a log cabin.

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I love tiny homes. When I was younger I use to try and keep everything in my room. I loved living in a small space. Now with the tiny house movement I want to make one when i am out of school.

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These buildings came up in the neighborhood next to me Willamsburg. Growing up it was a bad neighborhood. Then came the hipsters with their money and transformed the place. Then the rent in 4 years went from 1,100 to 2,500. The people that had homes watched its value jump 12 times its worth.

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I grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Where ever you are in Greenpoint you can see Manhattan and all of the skyscrapers. I wanted to be a person who helped build them. I always wanted to point out a skyscraper and say "yeah I helped build that."

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After watching Bob the builder I would try to recreate some of the stuff he made with legos. Then as I got older i would make more complex building or starships.

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I grew up watching Bob the builder. I love the show so much I wanted a tool belt just like Bob. At this age is when my fascination with Construction started.

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My dream home

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Tiny House Boat & Cruise UK Canals Full-Time

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Super High Spec Professionally Built Tiny House

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This incredible off-the-grid Tiny Home, constructed by boat builder and cabinet maker Jeff Hobbs really has taken Tiny House construction to the next level. It's packed with clever design features, high quality materials and sustainable technologies.

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V-9
Brick laying machine

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Faux Stone Panels | Natural Look of Stone

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Tiger stone machine SY6-400 with best german technology / Champion Tiger Stone Paver Brick Machine

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E-mail:kevin@nilemachinery.com | www.block-machinery.com Skype: block7777 MSN: block7777@outlook.com TEL:0086-13791520600 . QQ:2538334640 Our engineers would come and help with the installation and usage skills, please rest assure. kevin lee from china Shandong Shengya Mchinery Co.Ltd.

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The tallest building in the world.

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The Tallest Building in The World (Burj Khalifa) http://top-tallest-buildings.blogspot.com

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2nd Avenue subway line

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Drone explores long-awaited 2nd Avenue NYC subway line

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Bomb shelters

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Secret Passageways | Creative Home Engineering

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Inside a Bomb Shelter with Atlas Survival Shelters by Equip 2 Endure

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Like this video and the information E2E has to offer? Donate here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=KW369X2EE9C8N With uncertain times, Be Prepared! Bomb Shelter from Atlas Shelters protect you from Nuclear, Biological and Chemical protection. If You're Not Always Prepared, You're Never Prepared! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Product Specs Made from corrugated pipe, this model is 32 feet in length and 10 feet in diameter.

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V-5
Energy efficiency

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Couple Builds Energy Efficient Passive Solar Home - Green Building

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In this video we meet Casey & Natasha, a conscious couple who built a passive solar home near Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. In addition to orienting their house to face south, they installed overhangs that block the sun to keep it cool during summer months and allow the sun to enter and heat the house during winter months.

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Self healing concrete

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The 'living concrete' that can heal itself It's the world's most popular building material, and ever since the Romans built the pantheon from it some 2,000 years ago, we've been trying to find ways to make concrete more durable.

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Solar Panel technology

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Please visit our Indiegogo page at http://igg.me/at/solarroadways We're offering some very unique perks!

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V-2
Living a simple life in a cabin

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Living off the Grid: Building an off the Grid Cabin for Winter

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View the full blog post here: http://purelivingforlife.com/building-a-cabin-for-winter/ Enjoy our videos? Want to see more? Learn how to support our channel here: http://purelivingforlife.com/support/ Just three months ago we purchased 5 acres of land in the Pacific Northwest where we will be working to develop our off grid homestead 100% from scratch.

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V-1
Tiny house movement

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David Latimer is the founder of New Frontier Tiny Homes. In this video he shared his 2nd tiny house build named "The Alpha Tiny House." Like the title says, this tiny house has it all. Huge kitchen, full-sized jacuzzi tub, sliding overhead glass door, king bed, stow away dining.