Envy Apartment

For the first time in 40 years, Detroit’s famed Lafayette Park has a new addition. Designed by Detroit- based McIntosh Poris Associates , DuCharme Place is a 185- unit apartment community comprised of four midrise buildings. Adding to the Mies van der Rohe–designed historic district, the new development plays liberally with many of Mies’s original concepts. The long history of Lafayette Park includes the “slum” clearing urban renewal of postwar urban centers , the rise of modernist housing blocks in the U.S., and the realization of one of Mies’s largest housing projects . The first projects to be completed in the development were the Mies- designed Pavilion Apartments and a series of townhouses that are most often associated with the neighborhood. After those initial buildings, a handful of architects, including Gunnar Birkerts and John Macsai, added a school, shopping center, and more housing, with the last major project finishing in 1967. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Alfred Caldwell,...

House-flipping hit its highest levels last year since before the recession as investors seek to capitalize on rising home prices and a seller’s market with tight inventory. But the process is nothing like what you see on TV, where it looks like a home can be bought, gutted, renovated and resold in less than an hour – not including commercial breaks . The truth is often much messier, real estate professionals in Charlotte said. “It’s a lot easier to lose money in this business than it is to make it,” said Jeff Johnson, owner of NewPath Properties , which specializes in buying and rehabbing distressed properties . Still, that’s not deterring people from giving it a try in Charlotte. First-quarter figures from Attom Data Solutions show flips – defined as the same property selling twice in a 12-month period same year – made up more than 6 percent of sales in the Charlotte region, or 540 sales. House-flipping increased almost 4 percent from a year ago, though it remains well below the cit...