Apartment City

Uptown Newport Village will replace two industrial buildings with a walkable neighborhood of shops, restaurants, parks and upscale housing. Newport Beach, one of Southern California's most affluent cities, is about to transform an industrial area near John Wayne Airport into a distinctly urban community of homes and shops. Uptown Newport Village will replace a pair of aging industrial buildings on 25 acres near the airport with a walkable neighborhood of shops, restaurants, parks and upscale homes and apartments, according to Shopoff Group, an Irvine developer. Mayor Rush N. Hill, who is an architect, said he is excited about the project and pleased that it will be a dense neighborhood by local standards. "It's a relatively new kind of product for us with respect to density and height," he said. "We look at this as a great stride forward in walkable communities. We think it's very appropriate for the area." The first phase of the project will cost ...

Amazon’s extraordinary growth has turned Seattle into the biggest company town in America. Amazon now occupies a mind-boggling 19 percent of all prime office space in the city, the most for any employer in a major U.S. city, according to a new analysis conducted for The Seattle Times. Amazon’s footprint in Seattle is more than twice as large as any other company in any other big U.S. city, and the e-commerce giant’s expansion here is just getting started. The swarms of 20-somethings crowding into South Lake Union every morning represent an urban campus that is unparalleled in the United States — and they have helped transform Seattle , for better or worse. Amazon’s rapid rise has fueled an economy that has driven up wages and lowered unemployment, but also produced gridlock on the roads and sky- high housing prices . And while Seattle’s booming economy is often attributed to a wide variety of factors, increasingly, it’s all about one company. Amazon now occupies more office space t...