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Of the various ways developers have created and exploited the high demand for condominium living, there is little empirical research identifying and analyzing the growing influence of condominium developers over condominium governance and living as a means to increase profit margins. Drawing from survey and interviews with condominium owners, board members, and industry representatives in Ontario and New York state, this paper explores how developers maintain control and influence in condominium affairs long after construction is completed. Our research reveals that developers may desire this influence to extract further value from development and sway major governance decisions in their favor, depriving owners and other residents of the right to shape their collective living arrangements. Examining regulatory environments in Ontario and New York, we suggest there are few regulations that adequately deal with developer influence. We conclude by arguing that developer influence undermines prospects for democratic, collective governance that is essential to the sustainability of condominium tenure and to the success and livability of urban regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful implementation of Housing First requires a good supply of affordable housing. Since 2002, the Canadian Mental Health Association, Ottawa Branch, has purchased 40 condominium units in regular buildings scattered across Ottawa, Canada, to rent to their clients with severe mental illnesses who have a history of homelessness. Seeking to share their experience of this approach that creates affordable housing for Housing First tenants, researchers conducted a case study of the program, documenting its implementation and client outcomes. Thirteen tenants and 24 key informants (staff, management, board members, property managers, and funders) participated. Tenants reported housing stability, improved mental and physical health, decreased substance use, and community integration. Key informants echoed these positive outcomes. Participants also identified program challenges, including aging clients, loneliness, experiences of exclusion, and a vulnerability to home takeovers. At the program-level, challenges included unanticipated program costs, heavy case manager workloads, managing repairs, some eviction cases, and the high prices of condos in central, accessible areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mismatch between the fast-growing urban population and limited urban infrastructure has become a challenge in many emerging cities. The lack of affordable housing leads to burgeoning informal settlements and Manohara informal settlement in Kathmandu is not an exception. This study aims to investigate the current situation in Manohara informal settlement and examine the feasibility of floor area ratio (FAR) incentive in providing affordable housing. A household survey in Manohara informal settlement and simulation analyses of FAR incentive found the followings. Firstly, given the limited budget and little control over the land of Kathmandu by the government, a planning tool focusing on development gain is a suitable option for housing provision for low-income households. Secondly, FAR incentive simulation of land size of 50,000 sq. ft. in Kathmandu shows that 50%p incentive allowance can add 33–93% extra profit to the developers in a housing project, which can be secured for affordable housing for public interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-unit developments have been a feature of Australian cities for decades, particularly Sydney. As these buildings age, commercial and planning drivers promote redevelopment, but renewing private multi-unit housing poses significant and unique problems, as this housing is typically under multiple ownership (e.g., strata title). Jurisdictions worldwide have responded by changing laws to allow redevelopment with less-than-unanimous consent of all unit owners, meaning a majority of owners can vote their neighbours out of their homes against their will. In New South Wales, legislation introduced in 2015 enabled the redevelopment of strata titled property with the consent of 75% of owners. Research conducted at the time highlighted a range of risks, especially for vulnerable groups like lower-income and elderly residents. With the legislation now due for a statutory 5-year review, it is timely to revisit the research findings and examine subsequent developments, to identify key issues for policymakers when assessing the impact of the law's first five years. These issues should be of interest not only in NSW, but in all three Australian jurisdictions with less-than-unanimous renewal laws, as well as many international cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Condominiums are assumed in enabling statutes, related regulations, and statutory reforms to resemble 'self-governing communities' of owners whom collectively undertake numerous governance responsibilities to manage and sustain their buildings and living arrangements. Drawing from intensive interviews with condo owners and condo industry representatives in Ontario and New York State and a large qualitative survey of condo owners from Ontario, we outline five overlapping and longstanding governance issues that challenge the notion of self-governance and reveal it to be more illusion than reality. This disjuncture stems not only from common dilemmas of collective governance, but also from the growing influence of external and mostly commercial interests in condominiums broadly consistent with neo-liberalization. We also consider more recent reform attempts by Ontario and New York State and discuss statutory limitations in addressing these issues. We express doubt that condo statutory reform alone can successfully remedy the governance problems facing condo housing and proffer remedies including moving beyond the perception of condominiums as autonomous, self-governing realms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates housing financialization processes in low-income countries (LICs). Considering housing as both capital and commodity, the article excavates the roots of housing financialization in LICs since the 1960s, and shows how financialization has been used, since the 1990s, to circumvent long-standing obstacles to the marketization and commodification of LICs' housing markets. Focusing on the recent development of the condominium market in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia, the article then investigates the role of various stakeholders (e.g., development agencies, public institutions, foreign and international investors, transnational developers, brokers) in the contemporary financialization of local housing markets. Detailing their strategies, discourses, and actions, I argue that in economic contexts where the financial sector remains underdeveloped, local and international developers and brokers act as agents of financialization by creating specific channels of real estate capital circulation and landing. I argue that the case of Phnom Penh reveals how foreign and transnational stakeholders, mainly originating from Asia, have created a specific regime of capital accumulation through housing financialization, which I name the foreignization of housing markets. This regime emphasizes the significant capacity of financialization to penetrate markets that have long remained out of its reach by establishing capital extraversion mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a sample consists of 3367 actual condominium sales transacted in resale market from May 2012 to April 2015 from the Singapore Urban and Redevelopment Authority, a hedonic pricing model is used to investigate for the presence of floor-level premiums in the private housing market, condominium, in District 23 of Singapore. Unit size, types of land tenure and the distance to the nearest mass rapid transit (MRT) station are also used as other independent variables. The estimated coefficient of each of these independent variables is statistically significant. Each of these independent variables also has positive estimated coefficient, suggesting that they have positive effects on condominium resale prices. Main findings are (a) there is a presence of floor-level premium; (b) the condominiums with a distance more than 400 m to the MRT station get higher resale prices; and (c) there is an increasing effect of floor level on condominium price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its independence in 1975, Angola’s capital Luanda has been going through deep processes of demographic, economic, social and physical transformations. In this article, apart from introducing the case study of private condominiums in the general discussion on urban studies in the Global South, we focus on the dynamics of transformations regarding housing for the mid/upper strata, providing the background for the emergence and recent expansion of gated communities/condominiums, a phenomenon that has acquired major importance in the recent decades in Luanda. The specialised literature relates the demand for and multiplication of these residential structures in Africa with issues such as the search for safety associated with demonstrations of exclusive lifestyles. In the case of Luanda, the authors found--through a case study and qualitative data collected among residents and non-residents of condominiums--that, contrary to the results from other studies, condominiums in Luanda are essentially sought after primarily for functional reasons such as access to infrastructure and better living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments in urbanising Latin America encourage low-income homeownership. In practice, this means that low-income urban families become owners of units in condominium properties. While the homeownership dream may thus be achieved, difficulties with maintenance can lead to deterioration. This paper considers condominiums as collective action arenas and applies the Institutional Analysis and Development framework of Ostrom (2005) to explore the links between the characteristics of (1) the communities, (2) governance and (3) the physical environment with the perceived level of maintenance (PML). Using data from a survey of 414 households carried out in 2014, we compare the circumstances of low-income condominiums in Bogota (Colombia) and Quito (Ecuador), two cities with similar housing policies but different horizontal property laws. Our central hypothesis is that the more modern law in Colombia enforces self-organisation and therefore better maintenance outcomes. In line with our hypothesis, the results demonstrate that the maintenance level in Bogota is higher than in Quito. Contrary to our hypothesis, participating in self-organisation in Bogota had a negative effect on PML, while in Quito the effect was positive. This indicates that the law matters but the relationship between the formal arrangements required by law, self-organisation and maintenance outcomes is more complicated than expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether homeowners' association (HOA) fees are capitalized into condominium sales prices in San Diego, California. Prior work has found evidence that HOA fees are generally positively capitalized into housing prices, although the investigations have focused on single-family housing and have been conducted on the East Coast or the Midwest of the United States. Using sales of 1,087 condominiums in downtown San Diego, the results suggest that HOA fees do appear to have a marginally positive effect on sales price. We use a condominium data set to test whether the relative HOA fee (i.e., compared to other fees in the same condominium building) matters. We find that condominium units with below-average HOA fees sell at a premium relative to the average and units that pay above-average HOA fees sell at a discount relative to the average condominium. The differences are capitalized into sales prices using a capitalization rate of approximately 3.5%. These results suggest that buyers dislike the possibility of cross-subsidizing other condominium owners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the programme of land surveying and registration that was undertaken by the British-led administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the period 1898–1914. The Legal Secretary, Edgar Bonham Carter, stated that programme was the most important project of his division in this period. Scholars have shown that the programme, known as land ‘settlement’, was used to build alliances with elites and to clarify title for European investors in the new irrigation scheme at Gezira. This article argues that, as such, the ambitions of land settlement were relatively limited. In many other colonies, and in Britain itself, politicians and administrators across the political spectrum saw the reform of private property in land as the key for addressing structural problems in agricultural labour. One might have thought that, the Sudan, land settlement might have provided a means of addressing the dependence on slave labour in agriculture. The article demonstrates that, except for a small number of administrators (including Bonham Carter), this was not the case. The general indifference to slavery itself carried through to an indifference to the transformative potential of land law. The article examines the proposals of this minority of administrators, and contrasts their views with the majority’s focus on land settlement as demonstration and opportunity to enhance state power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tourism is a strong business sector in Spain. In terms of tourist accommodation, in addition to hotels, guesthouses and rural housing, more and more private dwellings are increasingly being transformed into tourist dwellings. Thus, in 2014, lodgings offered by these tourist dwellings were nearly twice the lodgings offered by hotels: 2.7 million compared to 1.4 million. This phenomenon is being greatly facilitated by new online platforms known as ‘collaborative economy’ – e.g. Airbnb or HomeAway. Barcelona, in particular, experiences a high concentration of tourist dwellings in certain neighbourhoods, as it is the fourth-ranked destination in terms of Airbnb guests. And in addition to the positive economic impact on the city and households, this phenomenon has also brought some negative side effects, even more in a country where 66.5% of the population live in flats (the highest amongst EU Member States), which are normally organised as condominiums. The aim of this article is twofold. First, to present the main negative impact of the abrupt growth concerning the transformation of private dwellings into tourist dwellings: the effects on the housing market in general on the liveability and security in neighbourhoods and also in condominiums. Second, to address the policies affecting both at public and private levels in order to protect and preserve neighbourhoods and condominiums without hindering the tourist development in the city. Measures such as the suspension on the concession of tourist dwellings licences, the approval of a new special urban planning and the regulation of a room rental scheme will be mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, structured cultural heritages were investigated mainly in the light of three-dimensional (3D) cadastre and secondarily e-governance in the name of handing them down safely to future generations. The aim of the study is to give examples of cultural assets/heritages, 3D cadastre, condominium for realising 3D cadastre both legally and technically, and expectations of 3D cadastre, e-governance in Turkey, land management implementations and what the situation for normal buildings is and also what should be done for immovable cultural heritages. Some cultural assets to be protected have been utilised as both trade centres and tourism centres from the past to the present. These buildings, which were generally built in Ottoman times, have been used or occupied owing to repairs and restoration projects in Turkey. The registration of immovable cultural assets, which are immovable properties that are accepted and registered as cultural heritages on the land registry as 3D land objects is extremely important for providing information about drawing projects with details, floors, structural types, the number of independent units, and common areas and documents about building(s) and parcels. The registration status of the hans known as Bedesten, Taşhan, and Gönhan in Trabzon in the Çarşı District owned by fused foundations will be examined in terms of ownership in this study. Deficiencies for these hans’ constructions on 3D registration will be detected by analysing the current registration situation. The way this type of real estate is required to be legally registered from land to completed building will be presented. This study will be completed with suggested solutions in 3D and e-governmental terms at least for immovable cultural heritages. For example; if the italic ‘no’ in the table at the end of the study is transferred into ‘yes’, cultural assets can be known and managed and sustained and also handed down to the future generation not only for Turkish people but also for tourists and all mankind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending over nearly one million square miles and being the biggest country in Africa in terms of geography, the Sudan occupies a middle position in the Nile Basin, between the upstream countries and Egypt. All of the Nile countries except Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, are neighbours of the Sudan. Other Sudan non-riparian neighbours are the Central African Republic, Chad and Libya. The purpose of this article is to explain the factors related to the Nile waters that developed during the colonial period, the post-independence era and the present, that prevented the Sudan from playing a crucial central role in the Nile Basin. The article argues that the 1959 bilateral Nile Waters Agreement between the Sudan and Egypt, in addition to civil wars and the economic and political instability that the Sudan has witnessed since independence in January 1956, has prevented it from playing a crucial role as a middle-stream country. The article takes the form of a description of a historical process with analytical insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home ownership comes in a variety of forms. Owners of single-family dwellings generally enjoy a high degree of control and autonomy. Many home owners, however, are in circumstances which involve greater collective interest, medium and high-rise environments and significant state involvement and regulation. In such situations, tensions and conflicts can arise among residents and others stakeholders in relation to a range of management and maintenance issues and between owners and the wider public interest. This involves constraints on individual freedom and the necessity for co-operation. This paper discusses these and related issues with a particular focus on owners' corporations in Hong Kong. In the Hong Kong context, home owners are most typically in large scale, high rise and often technically complex environments. The particular form of the owner corporation is explored in relation to its history of development, its significance in the home ownership sector and its legal structure. Owner corporations raise a number of issues of participation and democracy. These include the anti-democratic organisational arrangement of owners' corporations which tends to limit rather than enhance participation of ordinary owners, the impact of owners' corporations in reinforcing class and income gaps as well as debates on individualism/collectivism and public/private dimensions. In policy terms there are important questions of regulation and the nature of urban management in high rise and high density environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]