Envy Apartment

Patricia Partida and two of her grandchildren outside her home near East Colfax. (Andrew Kenney/Denverite)" width="1000" height="667" /> Patricia Partida and two of her grandchildren outside her home near East Colfax. (Andrew Kenney/Denverite) Patricia Partida has lived near Colfax Avenue in the eastern reaches of Denver for nearly 15 years. She leaned against the black garbage bin outside her apartment door, thinking about the question she’d just been asked: What was this neighborhood’s name? “Oh, shoot,” she said. “If there is a name, it’s a bad name. They don’t say anything good about this place.” Kandyce Neal, 17, was also unsure what to call the place where she lives. Pausing in her walk down Colfax, where the most visible businesses include motels and occasionally a strip club, she composited the names of better-known places. “Right after Park Hill, just before Aurora,” she said. “It’s the in-between.” Flor Mira, 16, had a more cynical name for the...

Two brothers are at war over one of Victoria's biggest real estate empires , worth more than $500 million, four decades after their Italian family founded the dynasty. Former Carlton Football Club director and developer Colin De Lutis lives in a Toorak mansion three doors from younger brother Paul , who has taken him to the Supreme Court over how their property and business assets will be sliced up. Colin and Paul De Lutis are battling each other in the Supreme Court .  Photo: Supplied Paul has wanted out of the family business since 2014 but an acrimonious argument is playing out in the Supreme Court  over the break-up. Together with their mother Anna the brothers own 38 properties worth more than half a billion dollars, amassed since the family bought a Smith Street, Collingwood, shop in 1973. There, the family founded Westco Jeans and grew it into a chain of 160 retail outlets. It sold in 1999 for $85 million. That money was sunk into property and the De Lutis portfolio ...

Juan Parras gives one hell of a tour of Houston’s east side. He’s charming and funny. Wearing a beret, he strikes an old-world look, like he might lead you to a cafe on a plaza. He doesn’t charge a fee for his services. After all, you’re on a “toxic tour,” and Parras is on a mission. Parras grew up in 1950s West Texas . He remembers segregated schools, the restaurants that wouldn’t serve him, the unpaved roads, and the people who lived closest to the local refinery . Those experiences led him to a career as a social justice advocate . The resident of Houston’s heavily industrial east side has worked in a city housing department , for a union, for a law clinic, and on a campaign that stopped a PVC factory from being built in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” For the last decade, he has served as executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (better known as t.e.j.a.s.). Part of his work is leading tours past the heaping piles of scrap metal along Houston’s Buffalo Ba...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...