yes, "flop houses" in london are a vanishing breed i think. in london round 2004ish you could find a room to live in for 60 quid a week if you weren't too fussy. now that's impossible. and everyone is too fussy. the trendy area in my living memory went from camden to notting hill / portobello to shoreditch to dalston and didn't go anywhere after that as far as i can tell. they tried to do it with peckham but it didn't really catch on. possibly because of the river.brooklyns mostly an economic product. manhattan is too expensive. no more flop houses in greenwich. I dont know about London but I imagine it was historically less segregated? the river separating brooklyn from manhattan also probably has a bit to do with it.
What's wework?those grotesque and offensive photographs reminds me of when wework pulled me into a few branches to do my act,
Your act? Did you teach them deep meditation therapy?
That's a truly impressive loss. There is something really I dunno, what's the word I'm looking for here, really funny about massive huge losses.WeWork is at it again – or rather SoftBank, its primary investor and bail-outer. WeWork disclosed in documents shown to prospective investors that it had lost $3.2 billion in 2020, on top of the $3.5 billion it had lost in 2019, for a two-year loss of $6.7 billion, and this isn’t a net loss under GAAP, but based on adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. The actual net loss under GAAP would be much higher.
The $3.2 billion loss in 2020 also excludes WeWork’s China business whose majority stake it had sold in September 2020.
The occupancy rate at its offices across the globe had plunged to 47% at the end of 2020, down from 72% during the Good Times at the beginning of 2020. And this happened despite WeWork’s walking out on landlords and abandoning office leases around the world, including in San Francisco and New York City.
To survive, WeWork cut its capital expenditures from $2.2 billion in 2019 to just $49 million in 2020, according to the documents, which the Financial Times has reviewed.
With this illustrious performance under its belt, WeWork is trying to raise $1 billion in new funding and engineer a public listing through a merger with a SPAC at a valuation including debt of $9 billion.
That $9 billion is still a huge amount of money for a company that loses huge amounts of money, but a big step down from its $47 billion “valuation” obtained in a round of funding from SoftBank in January 2019.
In the summer of that year, the super-ballyhooed IPO of WeWork collapsed into chaos, followed by massive rounds of layoffs and cost cuts, and SoftBank stepped in with a big package of rescue funding to keep the outfit out of bankruptcy.
A bankruptcy filing is the avenue competitor Knotel has chosen in February this year to deal with its fate. It didn’t have the endless billions to burn through that WeWork got.
And a bankruptcy filing is also what RGN-Group Holdings chose last year. The US subsidiary of IWG (“International Workplace Group,” previously known as Regus), the global coworking giant that predated WeWork by many years, operates the brands Regus, Spaces, HQ, and Signature by Regus.
And now WeWork needs new investors, namely retail investors, whose cash it can burn through. And this time it’s talking with a star-spangled SPAC, namely BowX Acquisition Corp, according to sources familiar with the matter and to the documents, cited by the Financial Times.
The influx of hipsters and their boutiques drove up prices in many buildings of their “holy Jewish city” well beyond what the average Hasid could afford. But the wealthiest members within Satmar benefited, as they were actively engaged in gentrification themselves.
Satmar influencers told their followers not to sell to non-Jews, but it was no use. The gentrifiers’ decidedly secular way of life, which some Hasidim described as the “worst of all the nations,” was flooding in. Compromises had to be made. A widely distributed map detailed precisely where Hasidim were permitted to rent apartments to non-Hasidim short-term, if no community buyer could be found, and the areas in which they were absolutely prohibited to do so. And this touched an important legal and psychological nerve. Restrictive covenants that allow private owners to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, or religion were deemed illegal by the Supreme Court in 1948, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act prohibits refusing to sell or rent on the basis of membership in a protected class. But in this case, it was the protected class doing the discriminating.
Is Brooklyn expensive?
Yeah the other day I was looking up Long Island cos i was watching a documentary set there and I wanted to get a bit of a handle on the geography and stuff, and I got the impression that, similarly to what you're saying here, when people say "Long Island" they are not really meaning the whole island but tend to be referring to parts of it which don't fall under other names and haven't been claimed by other places. Is that correct?brooklyn as leo says is huge, something like a few million people, and encompasses everything from uber expensive fancy areas to bits which are mostly haitian expats. but there is also a bit of a weird thing where quite a lot of people i know are only really referring to the fancy bits of brooklyn when they say 'brooklyn'.