TWITTER ON PACE FOR 7-DAY LOSING STREAK

Twitter shares were on pace Monday to decline for a seventh-straight day amid doubts about whether Elon Musk’s $61 billion deal to acquire the social media platform would go through.

Twitter (ticker: TWTR) was down 6.7% to $37.98 on Monday. Unless the stock stages an end-of-day rally, this would the Twitter’s longest losing streak since December, when it also fell for seven consecutive days. The shares have lost 23.5% over this seven-week stretch, their worst decline since March 19, 2020, when the stock lost 29.7%. The Nasdaq Composite was down 4.6% over the same period.

Musk tweeted last week that his acquisition of Twitter was on hold pending details on the number of fake accounts, or bots, that were active on the platform. Twitter has calculated that less than 5% of accounts are fake, but Musk said his team would be conducting a random sample to verify the calculation. Eliminating bots has been a key point for Musk, who said it will help make the platform more valuable.

In a flurry of tweets on Monday, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal defended the company’s spam-fighting policies, saying management had shared an overview of the process with Musk a week ago.

“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter,” he said in a tweet. “We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges.”

Musk responded to Agrawal’s thread with a “poop” emoji. The Tesla (TSLA) CEO said last week he was “still committed to [the] acquisition].”

Wall Street still seems to expect that the acquisition will go through, with some speculating it may be a way to renegotiate the price.

“While we believe this review likely delays the acquisition, we would be surprised if there are any material changes to the deal structure as a result of spam/false [daily active users],” wrote Citi analyst Ronald Josey.

Separately, Twitter last week announced it was suspending hiring and would be rescinding some offers. The company also laid off two senior executives.

May 18, 2022May 18, 2022

THE REBELLION AGAINST THE RETURN TO THE OFFICE IS GETTING SERIOUS

Some of the economy’s most in-demand employees are about to find out how much power they have over where and how they work.

After months of return-to-work starts and stops, many tech companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp., are telling remote workers it’s finally time to come back for good, or at least show up part of the week. Employees who fled the Bay Area and other high-cost tech hubs earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic—or who just prefer to work from home—now face hard choices: move back, try the super commute, or hold out for a concession or new job elsewhere.

How the emerging power struggles play out will be a telling indicator of how much leverage remote-work converts in other sectors have as more employers call staff back to offices. A competitive job market, plus the relative ease with which businesses adjusted to work-from-home over the past two years, has emboldened many professionals to try to say goodbye to offices permanently.

Two-thirds of the workforce said they would find a new job if required to return to the office full-time, according to a survey of more than 32,000 workers by ADP Research Institute. Of those who quit their jobs in 2021, 35% cited wanting to move to a different area, according to the Pew Research Center.

If highly skilled tech workers have trouble flexing their market value, though, it’s likely many other remote workers wanting to stay put will, too.

Some tech professionals have already thrown down the gauntlet. Ian Goodfellow, a director of machine learning at Apple, announced to staff this month that he was resigning, in part because of the company’s return-to-office policy. “I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team,” Mr. Goodfellow wrote in a goodbye note, according to a tweet from a reporter from the Verge. Mr. Goodfellow declined to comment. Apple didn’t comment.

A group called Apple Together says more than 1,400 current and former employees signed an open letter to company executives asking for them to reconsider the office-return policy, which requires employees to work in-person on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays as of last month. Apple employs more than 165,000 people.

“Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do,” the letter reads.

Office mandates are proving to be recruiting opportunities for some competitors: Airbnb Inc. last month announced employees could work from anywhere without taking a pay cut. In the three days following the announcement, the company’s careers page received around 800,000 visitors, according to a spokeswoman. Twitter Inc. and Zillow Group Inc. have said most employees can work from wherever they want and executives of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. are living all over.

Sean Regan, head of product marketing with software maker Atlassian Corp., moved to Lake Tahoe from the Bay Area this past November and is now using the company’s flexible work policies to lure new hires.

“My access to top talent has gone through the roof,” he says. “It takes me half the time to recruit great people when I tell them they can work anywhere.”

Mr. Regan says he’s currently trying to sign on someone he ran into while skiing who had also moved to Lake Tahoe from the San Francisco area. “She wants to stay in Tahoe. Her employer wants her to go back to the office,” he says. “I’m recruiting her to stay put and work for us.”

Workers in tech have long had the advantage: Their skills are highly sought-after in nearly every industry. As the pandemic has dragged on, flexibility started to become not a perk but something companies needed to offer in order to hang on to talent. Eager to stay competitive, companies have increasingly accommodated their workers and in some cases, walked back in-office requirements.

But there are signs the balance of power may shift. Netflix Inc., Lyft Inc. and other big names in tech have posted disappointing quarterly results—a signal that leaner times may be ahead, and skilled workers won’t be in such demand. Companies including Meta say they are slowing down hiring. Peloton Interactive Inc., Carvana Co. and others have announced layoffs.

Some of those called back have found jobs elsewhere. Christina Patterson, 30, was managing client partnerships for a clothing-rental startup. She says that by the time she got called back to her New York office in March, she had grown allergic to in-person work. Since the fall of 2020, she had been working for months at a time from Tulum, Mexico, and wasn’t ready to give it up.

Desperate to find a new role ahead of the March deadline to return to work, Ms. Patterson texted an executive she’s friendly with at a Chicago-based startup, offering to be her remote assistant. “She was like, ‘I’ll do you one better: We need someone in business development,’ ” Ms. Patterson says.

She took the role at the startup, Swaypay, which makes an app for consumers to earn cash for posting TikTok videos featuring recent purchases. The new job didn’t require a move or any commitment to come into the office. Her last day at the old job was the Friday before she was supposed to go back to her old office.

“I was like, ‘Phew, I missed that very narrowly,’ ” she says.

Adam Ozimek, an economist with the think tank Economic Innovation Group, estimates that, across the U.S. workforce, there have already been 4.9 million relocations as a result of remote work, according to data extrapolated from a survey of 23,000 workers. Mr. Omizek conducted the survey this past November, while working at another company. More than a quarter said they planned to move more than 4 hours from their current job in 2022—because of remote-work options, while 13% said they were looking at moving 2 to 4 hours away. Mr. Ozimek himself says he recently started commuting 2½ hours once a month from central Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., where his job with EIG, which he joined in March, is located.

Some tech workers who have relocated and don’t have permission to stay remote say they’re in a standoff with HR: They’ve been called back to the office but haven’t moved yet. They’re looking for remote-friendly roles both internally or elsewhere.

“If the time comes where they say: ‘Here’s an ultimatum, you show up in an office or you find somewhere else to work,’ I will find somewhere else to work because there are a lot of remote opportunities,” says one engineer who works for a North Carolina bank and bought a house earlier this year in New York’s Catskill Mountains, where he plans to stay.

Despite some signs of a downturn for the industry, tech workers who want to stay remote will have options if their employers won’t accommodate them, says Tim Herbert, chief research officer for CompTIA, a tech trade association. The number of U.S. employers posting tech jobs hit a record level last month, despite initial rumblings of a downturn.

“Especially in tech, you have companies that are simultaneously either slowing or transitioning workers or sometimes laying off workers in one area of the company and then they’re hiring in another area,” he says.

Companies with disappointing earnings can always scale back signing bonuses but continue to offer remote work as a perk for new hires, he added.

Google recently called its workers back on a hybrid schedule that requires most to be in the office three days a week. Some employees have complained that because the policy is implemented based largely on local managers’ discretion, it can feel arbitrary. “If you have a friendly manager and a friendly VP who support you, then your odds are pretty good,” says Andrew Gainer-Dewar, a senior engineer and member of the Alphabet Workers Union. “If you don’t, then things get tough.”

More than 14,000 of Google’s approximately 166,000 employees have requested to go fully remote or to transfer to a new location, and the company has approved 85% of those requests, according to a spokeswoman. “We know our employees have many choices about where they work,” she said. “So we continue to provide top of market compensation.”

Until August, Laura de Vesine was a senior engineer for Google living in San Jose, Calif., near the company’s offices. She jumped ship before officially being called back after growing tired of uncertainty surrounding when she’d have to return to work. She knew she wanted to move to a lower-cost city where she wouldn’t depend so much on a car, such as Philadelphia.

Such a move would have involved a 15% pay cut from Google, she says. “Is my work actually worth less?” she says she asked herself. If she wanted to keep her Bay Area salary, she worried she’d be required to report at least a few times a week to Google’s New York City office.

Instead, she made the move to Philadelphia and took a remote role with a New York-based cloud-computing company. She says she is now making around 20% more than her former salary and has the assurance she won’t have to give up her remote status.

“I could have confidence it wasn’t a temporarily remote offer,” she says.

May 11, 2022

ARE TIES REALLY DEAD?

IN 2019, Christian Conner was pondering buying a membership to Soho House, a social club in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The then-28-year-old media consultant showed up for a tour of this playground for the hipster elite in his classic “preppy with a twist” uniform—sport coat, trousers and one of his prized Gucci ties. All was going swimmingly, he recalled, until his guide turned to him and said, “Hey, you should take off your tie. We want to create a more casual atmosphere and discourage people from wearing ties.” Mr. Conner was gobsmacked. “I thought, this is crazy. This tie is cool as hell, so why would you tell me not to wear it?” (When asked for comment, a Soho House representative sent a link to the House Rules page of its website which requests that members and guests “keep it casual.”)

Interest in ties has been waning for some time, but the last two years of schlubby-comfy pandemic dressing have particularly dimmed their future. Business formal has taken on a near-death mien, and for many months, our collective dance card of tie-required events like weddings, bar mitzvahs and blowout birthday fetes was effectively erased. Even as we’ve approached a new normal, fewer and fewer back-to-the-office and party dress codes call for a smartly knotted tie. Can this once-essential accessory be saved?

Certain men feel strongly that it should, yet even some professionals who once wore ties daily now hesitate to sport them to work for fear of being teased. Investor George Birman, 33, of Shelter Island, N.Y., spent years building out his tie repertoire for business dinners, client meetings and the like. His prized collection now sits “neatly folded in its drawer,” lonely and dusty, he said. “And if I show up to the office with a tie these days, someone will make a joke and ask, ‘How was your interview?’”

Even so, the tie market isn’t quite catatonic. According to Macy’s men’s general business manager Sam Archibald, ties are having “healthier…momentum than what we expected” in 2022 so far. The days of widespread office-mandated ties may well be over, but “occasion-based” ties are moving. “You see less of what you would see as a ‘banker’s tie’ and much more business in what I would call ‘casual neckwear,’ said Mr. Archibald. “Brights and prints are definitely working. Floral neckwear is working for us.”

Smaller retailers also have noticed the shift to party-time ties. Larry Mahoney, longtime manager of the Andover Shop, a menswear store in Cambridge, Mass., remembers when ties were a “prominent part of any well-dressed man’s wardrobe,” and you wouldn’t dare head to the office, dinner or a professional engagement without one around your neck. “I would say that maybe 10 years ago, the tie started to begin its decline, although it did hold its ground for a while.” Today, the shop’s tie business, he said, is driven more by men heading to events than businessmen.

The tie can also still be found on the fringes of culture, in communities that historically haven’t worn ties. Leon Elias Wu, founder of Los Angeles gender-inclusive custom suiting brand SharpeHaus, sees the tie as less of a sober, wear-to-work proposition these days and more of a novelty fashion statement, especially when its traditional maleness—and its traditional function as a tool to help one fit in—is undercut. “Just throwing on a tie because it’s an occasion doesn’t work for everybody,” he said. “But look at what Avril Lavigne did with the tie 20 years ago—it can totally be used to make a statement,” whether you’re a formal guy, a female rocker or just a person trying to stand out.

Three Guys on the Ties They’ll Never Ditch

Ties aren’t just formal fashion accessories—they can hold sentimental value. Here, notable neckwear devotees shed light on the ties they’ll forever hold dear.

Ken Fulk

Interior Designer

“I’m a creature of my upbringing—of my preppy years growing up in Virginia when I had every color Izod shirt, every color Polo shirt, wore them religiously and washed all of them until they were pastels. I remember this beautiful ritual of my father standing behind me and showing me how to tie different tie knots—and I still have this blue and yellow repp stripe tie from Eljo’s in Charlottesville.”

Michael Strahan

Television Personality and former New York Giants Defensive End

“Most of my ties remind me of special moments. When I went up to space [with Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin in 2021] I got some space ties with spaceships and stars and rockets…That’s the great thing about a tie. It can have its own individual story. It’s something you can share or keep close to yourself…But the one tie I’ll never part with is a black tie. A straight-up black tie.”

Simon Kim

Restaurateur

“I have about 75 ties, and 90% of them are Hermès. But I have this one Hermès tie that my sister gave me. She is an art dealer with very meticulous taste. It has a red background with little blue-and-white turtles. She gave it to me when I was straight out of college and whenever I wore that tie to an interview, I had a 100% success rate in landing the job.”

May 11, 2022

‘BUY THE DIP’ BELIEVERS TESTED BY MARKET’S DOWNWARD SLIDE

This year’s stock market volatility has turbocharged a favourite strategy among individual investors: buying the dip. The dramatic plunge in major indexes will test their resolve.

On Thursday, when the stock market had one of its worst days of the year, individuals rushed in, setting a one-day buying record. In March, they invested the largest-ever monthly sum, according to Vanda Research data beginning in 2014, and continued to pour money into the markets in April.

Investors followed suit on Tuesday in a volatile session, a day after the S&P 500 fell to its lowest level this year. The broad stock-market gauge swung before edging up 0.2%, snapping a three-session losing streak.

Individuals’ willingness to backstop markets throughout this year’s selloff demonstrates that the group—for now—has been more resilient than analysts and trading professionals anticipated. Few were surprised when individual investors pounced on small dips as the market churned higher last year, helping the S&P 500 cruise to 70 records and rewarding those who waded in.

This year, the S&P 500 has fallen 16%, its worst start to a year in nearly a century, and the Nasdaq Composite has dropped 25%. Inflation is at a 40-year high, and the Federal Reserve has embarked on an aggressive monetary tightening cycle, enacting this month its biggest rate increase since 2000. That has fanned worries about a recession—periods when stocks have on average fallen as much as 29%, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Some of the wildly popular trades of the past two years have already crumbled. Many investors have soured on richly valued technology stocks. Newly minted public companies, which soared last year, have come back down to earth. Highly speculative corners of the market, such as Cathie Wood’s flagship ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund, have plummeted.

Despite the turning tides, many individual investors said they have relished the chance to buy stocks at a discount. Many said the calculation is simple: History has shown that stocks eventually go up.

Small investors ploughed US$114 billion into U.S. stock funds through March as the S&P 500 tumbled into a correction, falling at least 10% from its high, according to Goldman Sachs Group. That marks a sharp shift in the group’s strategy for much of the past two decades. Typically, individual investors have sold about $10 billion in the 12 weeks after a market peak when the S&P 500 has tumbled that much.

In the month of March alone, individual investors bought about $28 billion of U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds on a net basis—the total amount after subtracting the amount sold—the largest monthly sum on record, according to Vanda, and another net $24.4 billion in April. On Thursday, when the S&P 500 tumbled 3.6%, individual investors bought a net total of nearly $2.6 billion of stocks and ETFs, a one day record, according to Vanda.

John Case, a 71-year-old retired engineer in Las Vegas, said he has tried to follow famed investor Warren Buffett’s advice to be “greedy only when others are fearful” and to hold stocks for long periods of time.

He said he has often stepped into the market during times of volatility and learned this lesson the hard way when he sold some of his shares during the 2008 financial crisis. That plunge was followed by an 11-year bull market during which the S&P 500 surged roughly 400%. Now, he said he is more confident in his strategy.

“When the market zigs, I zag,” Mr. Case said.

He has steadily increased his exposure to stocks since he stepped out of the workforce, he said. About two-thirds of his portfolio is in stocks, up from around half when he retired.

Mr. Case recently picked up shares of software company Adobe Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which have both recorded double-digit losses this year. Since he bought the shares, though, they have fallen even further, weighing on a retirement portfolio that has already slid in value this year.

Many individual investors who bought the stock-market dip are sitting on losses. Through April, the S&P 500 fell an average 0.2% during the session after it notched a loss, according to Jason Goepfert at Sundial Capital Research, making 2022 one of the worst years for buying the dip since 1974.

Unlike the crash of early 2020, which lasted just 23 trading days, investors are weathering a more prolonged selloff that could worsen as recession risks grow. The Fed’s move to raise rates and shrink its $9 trillion asset portfolio has already triggered a selloff in the government-bond market, sending the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note jumping past 3% to its highest level since 2018. Higher yields typically chip away at the stock market’s allure by giving investors another attractive place to park their cash.

Individual investors’ appetite for stocks diverges from the behaviour of professional investors, who have collectively sold stocks during the turbulence. JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimates that institutional investors have pulled $199 billion out of the stock market this year, according to an analysis of public order flow data through Friday. Meanwhile, pros keep ramping up bearish bets against major U.S. equity indexes through the futures market, analysis from Citi Research shows.

That hasn’t stopped many individual investors from wading in. Their allocation of stocks in their portfolios crept up to nearly 70% last month, hovering around the highest levels since early 2018, according to a survey by the American Association of Individual Investors. Many individual investors whittled their exposure to bonds, sending fixed-income allocations to a 14-year low.

Some market strategists say that retail investors’ appetite for buying could continue to help support stocks, blunting the impact of severe down days. Goldman analysts forecast that U.S. households will buy $150 billion in stock in 2022, following last year’s record of roughly $390 billion.

Demand could deteriorate if the economy sours. Households have pulled around $35 billion from stock funds since early April, as the selloff accelerated, the firm said.

The rising value of their stockholdings and homes over the past two years has made some investors feel more comfortable taking bigger risks, financial advisers said. Home prices logged a record jump in 2021, while the S&P 500 has still soared almost 80% from its March 2020 low, thanks in part to the Federal Reserve’s Covid-19 stimulus measures that led to a boom in asset prices world-wide.

Pandemic-era stimulus checks and a reprieve from student-loan payments also helped some people stockpile cash. Some are also beginning to reap the benefits of the greatest wealth transfer in modern history, with older generations expected to hand down trillions of dollars in the coming decades.

“They just have more money,” said David Sadkin, a partner at Bel Air Investment Advisors, who oversees about $4.6 billion for high net-worth clients. “We did not see the kind of ‘hit the exit, hit the eject button’ that we’ve seen in the past.”

Mr. Sadkin said his clients have seemed concerned about the latest leg of the selloff but that there hasn’t been any “panic selling.”

Concerns about inflation and Fed policy have already led to sharp stock plunges this year. So far, several of those selloffs have been followed by some of the most dramatic rebounds of the past decade.

On Feb. 24, investors dumped stocks as the Ukraine crisis intensified, sending the Nasdaq Composite down by more than 3% intraday. As stocks hit their lows during the session, a familiar pattern emerged: Investors piled in, helping the index claw back its losses and sending it up to close 3.3% higher than the previous day.

Investors purchased nearly $1.5 billion of U.S. stocks and ETFs that day on a net basis, according to Vanda, higher than the 2022 daily average of nearly $1.3 billion. This year, individual investors’ 10 biggest buying days by dollar volume have occurred when the S&P 500 has fallen rather than risen.

The strategy of picking up stocks and other investments on sale has grown so popular that the term “buy the dip” has mushroomed into an online sensation, garnering millions of mentions on social-media platforms. The growing entanglement of investing and social media means that even sharp plunges can bring on calls of FOMO—fear of missing out.

In January, when stocks suffered their worst month since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and prices of assets including stocks, bonds and bitcoin slid, many investors turned to platforms such as Twitter and Reddit to tout the strategy, leading to more than 200,000 mentions across social media, according to social-media management company Hootsuite. That’s more than 30 times the figure three years ago.

On Monday, as the S&P 500 finished its worst three-day stretch since March 2020, the term started trending on Twitter again.

Chris Johnson, a 30-year-old individual investor who runs an online trading community called The Wealth Squad, has been among those encouraging small traders to remain steadfast. “Every asset class has a down cycle,” he tweeted in April, on a day when the S&P 500 dropped 1%. “Those who survive the down cycles come out of the cycle much wealthier.”

Mr. Johnson, an army veteran turned full-time trader who splits his time between Houston and Las Vegas, has taken advantage of recent market swings to scoop up shares of companies he plans to hold for the long haul. That has helped him amass large positions in companies such as Roblox Corp., Coinbase Global Inc. and Shopify Inc.

Each of the stocks has fallen much further than the broader market, with all three down at least 70% this year. His Roblox and Coinbase positions are now worth about $185,000 and $30,000, respectively. Still, he said he isn’t worried because he believes the companies are industry leaders and the stocks will eventually rebound.

He said he has used the more recent market turmoil to double down on cryptocurrencies, which have tumbled alongside stocks, to help bring down the average cost of tokens in his portfolio. At the moment, he said, “I see opportunities in crypto that I’m not seeing in the stock market.”

Mr. Johnson said he has been trying to be more diligent in taking profits in his own portfolios. In addition to stocks and cryptocurrencies, he said he also has a portfolio of real-estate properties.

Some strategists say buying the dip is a risky way to invest because it is so difficult to gauge whether the market is going to keep falling. Vanda estimates the average individual investor portfolio peaked late last year and has since tumbled, giving the average individual a paper loss of about 28%.

This year’s turmoil has spurred some individual investors to pull back on trades that have soured. After years of investing in index funds, Do Kim, a 45-year-old accountant near Philadelphia, began actively investing in stocks and options in spring 2020, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the market. He won big through options trades and buying dips in technology stocks, and he said his portfolio swelled.

The wild swings in the market this year have tested his belief in the strategy. He has sold some of his losing bets, which include personal-finance company SoFi Technologies Inc. and insurance firm Lemonade Inc., which have both lost more than half of their value this year. At times, he bought the dip in stocks only to have them tumble further.

He said he has recently backed away from the strategy, wary that stocks could fall much further and that there may be a recession on the horizon. “I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights for sure,” he said. For now, he is still holding his Tesla Inc. and Nvidia Corp. shares.

Online brokerages including Robinhood Markets Inc. have reported a slowdown in customer trading activity in recent weeks.

Chief Executive Vlad Tenev said on the firm’s April earnings call that it faced a “challenging macro environment, one most of our customers have never experienced in their lifetimes,” noting that for most of its history, “Robinhood has operated in a period of low interest rates, low inflation and rising markets.” He said that while larger customers are still remaining active, many other customers have become more cautious with their portfolios and are trading less frequently.

Some traders are still looking to make bold bets. At brokerage Webull Financial, traders are flocking to some of the riskiest products designed to profit from market volatility. Trading in exchange-traded funds offering leverage, or turbocharged exposure to stocks and other assets, makes up around half of all ETF trading on the platform, Chief Executive Anthony Denier said.

Matt Wyskiel, who manages money for several individuals at Skill Capital Management in Baltimore, has sought to magnify his exposure to the stock market in his personal portfolio through derivatives and ETFs that profit if volatility edges lower, he said. Those bets stand to win big if stocks rise and volatility falls—and they can also backfire if market turbulence rises.

“I’m calling it a stocks-plus strategy,” Mr. Wyskiel said. He said market volatility this year hasn’t triggered a shift in his strategy. “The best course of action often is to buy and hold and ride it out.”

May 5, 2022

Why Buy a Multimillion-Dollar Home When You Can Live Aboard a Yacht?

David Akellian planned to spend his retirement traveling the world. But that required getting on a plane. When the Covid-19 crisis hit, he quickly pivoted to a different mode of travel and bought a 16-metre yacht.

Mr. Akellian, 61, the former head of global wealth management for Refinitiv, a financial market data firm, always had a penchant for sailing and had planned on buying a boat anyway. As a child growing up in northern New Jersey, his family had a sailboat and spent a lot of time on the Long Island Sound. He just never imagined he would be spending this much time aboard.

During the pandemic, Mr. Akellian, who had been living in a three-bedroom home in Wyckoff, N.J., with his wife, Susan Akellian, has been spending weeks or even months at a time living on the yacht, he said, cruising to the Bahamas and frequently docking at a marina in Jupiter, Fla. He’s currently planning to spend a few weeks in the Bahamas, then cruise back up the East Coast for the summer, making stops on the coastlines of Georgia and South Carolina, weaving through Chesapeake Bay and eventually docking in Connecticut. The $1.9 million yacht he bought last July is a Navetta 52, built by the yacht maker Absolute Yachts, and has three bedrooms, a large terrace, a main salon with 360-degree views and an outdoor galley with a dining table. It is built for cruising, with high ceilings and large windows. The motor yacht is small enough that Mr. Akellian can operate it without a crew.

“I figured I could buy a US$2 million home in Jupiter or I could buy a US$2 million boat and go different places and explore different areas,” Mr. Akellian said. “Economically it just felt right.”

Spending long periods living on board a yacht has long appealed to superrich business titans such as DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen. Now, as the pandemic drags on, it has gained popularity among a subset of people fortunate enough to be able to afford it and looking for a low-risk way to travel. “A lot of our clients have wanted a safe haven, a private domain where they could be away from other people and feel safe with their families,” said Jim Dixon of Winch Design, an international design firm that works on yacht projects.

The proof is in the numbers, which show three years of consistent order-book growth in the yacht sector, according to Boat International. The yachting trade publishing company found that, at the end of December 2021, there were 1,024 boats on order and in production for the following year, up almost 25% from the tally at the end of the 2020. The surging numbers of new and would-be yacht owners have left marinas packed and global shipyards with lengthy order backlogs, compounded by supply-chain issues brought on by Covid and the war in Ukraine.

“The clients without yachts are desperately searching for a slot or a production boat already in build, which has a shorter lead time,” said Mr. Dixon, noting that while he’s constantly in communication with shipyards about their capacity, many of his new projects now won’t be completed until 2026 or 2027.

When the pandemic hit, Florida developer Gil Dezer, 47, best known for condos such as the Bentley Residences in Sunny Isles Beach, was fortunate enough to already own his 84-foot motor yacht, a Sunseeker Predator retrofitted with a special engine package that achieves 45 miles an hour. He bought it for US$7.7 million in 2010. At the height of the early pandemic, he and his then-girlfriend were occasionally traveling 200 to 250 miles a day. Sometimes, his two children would join them, doing Zoom school aboard, he said.

“It used to be, we would go out once a month for three days or so, but during Covid it was a savior because it meant we weren’t stuck at home,” he said. “We took it out for months at a time and went up the East Coast to Martha’s Vineyard. We got to see the United States.”

The expeditions came with a price. Mr. Dezer said his boat’s superfast engines burn about 220 gallons of diesel per hour, whereas a typical boat of that size burns about 60. Mr. Dezer said his then-girlfriend occasionally felt some cabin fever but he never did. With four bedrooms and often just two people aboard, he said there was plenty of room to grab a moment of privacy.

But even those who already have a yacht can’t avoid the supply-chain issues. Mr. Akellian said he recently ran around for weeks trying to buy a small inflatable tender for his boat, but with at least one large tender manufacturer based in Ukraine, it was next to impossible. When he finally found one, manufactured in Turkey, he was told it wouldn’t arrive for more than a month, he said.

Vural Ak, 54, a Turkish entrepreneur and speed enthusiast whose interests include a rental car company, agricultural businesses and a motor sport racetrack, completed his superyacht, the roughly 280-foot motor yacht Victorious, last year. Superyachts are generally defined by brokers as those over 25 meters in length. Mr. Ak, who normally lives in Istanbul, said he intends to spend four or five months a year on the boat and, as such, like many other yacht owners, is looking to maximize its autonomy.

The long-distance Victorious has a range of about 15,000 miles and enough refrigerated food storage and freezers to provision for six months at sea. It has a gentleman’s club with a wood-burning fireplace, a beach club, a gym, a massage room, a beauty salon, a hammam, a children’s playroom for Mr. Ak’s three children and a flexible workspace that can be transformed into an entertainment area. The cost: roughly $100 million.

Elaborate heating and air-conditioning systems mean the boat can operate easily at almost any temperature,” Mr. Ak said. “It can be in Saudi Arabia or in Antarctica,” he said.

Mr. Ak’s journey to build Victorious predates the pandemic but it still influenced the design. He included a space that could be used as either an isolation or hospital room with its own separate HVAC system in case someone on the boat is required to quarantine.

He purchased the incomplete yacht from Graeme Hart, New Zealand’s richest man, in 2016, he said. Then, struggling to find a shipyard that could complete the boat to his desired specifications, he eventually resorted to starting his own shipbuilding company in Istanbul. His wife, Nur Ak, and friends thought he had lost his mind, he said.

But the new venture has given Mr. Ak a front-row seat to the frenzied state of the yachting world. After taking his boat to a yacht show in Monaco earlier this year, he entered contract talks to build four yachts, a striking wave of demand for such a new company. Meanwhile, he’s finding that “the logistics chain is nearly broken,” he said. “You order something and it comes only after many, many months,” he said.

Zaniz Jakubowski, a London-based designer who goes by the name Zaniz and who recently designed a roughly 350-foot yacht, said she’s also seeing an uptick in new owners looking to make their yachts more efficient, asking about the latest innovations in fuel efficiency and in wastewater treatment systems, which can reduce the volume of waste over long passages. They are also more focused on fast connectivity and solid Wi-Fi, so owners can work remotely more reliably, she said.

“I have clients who now live aboard three to four months of the year,” she said. “I think people have realized how wonderful it is to be on board for extended periods, which then changes the design slightly.”

She said clients looking to maximize their time on board are asking for spaces that can be used in several different ways. On one of her most recent projects, a luxury superyacht, Zaniz said she included an office with a personal assistant’s office attached. The project also included a “touch-and-go” helipad immediately outside the office so that clients could come in for a meeting without moving around the whole yacht to get to the main helipad. She also designed a series of cold rooms, including a flower storage room and freezer space for ice cream.

“If you’re out in the middle of the water and you want to dress your boat with flowers, and you’re going to get a delivery every two or three weeks from Holland, you need to store the flowers in the correct environment with the correct temperature,” she said. “If you have a craving for a certain ice cream from America, you need your coolers to be there.”

Mr. Dixon said he recently had a client who wanted to grow his own fruits and vegetables on board.

There are, of course, drawbacks to spending long stretches of time on the water, Mr. Akellian said, especially if one’s yacht doesn’t fall into the superyacht category. For one, Mr. Akellian said he doesn’t have a dishwasher on board, so he has to hand wash everything and minimize the pots and pans he is using. He also has no oven, so he relies on a stove top and microwave. For laundry, he mostly heads out to a laundromat since the washer on board doesn’t have sufficient capacity. “I’ve never been one to separate the whites from the colours,” he said. Mrs. Akellian, 61, still works in New Jersey and visits periodically.

Another inevitable part of yachting is wear and tear on the boat. Mr. Dezer said he had to put his boat, which had been getting battered, in the shop for repairs late last year. It is slated to be back in the water next month.

In the superyacht market, there is also some growing anxiety around the confiscation of a number of superyachts owned by Russian oligarchs, as governments around the world hunt down the luxury real estate, private jets, yachts and other assets of Russian elites located around the globe amid the war in Ukraine. Many in the yacht market expect that if these confiscated yachts start hitting the market, it could cool prices in the booming boat market.

“It’s natural it’s going to have an effect,” said Richard Lambert, senior partner and head of sales for yacht brokerage Burgess Yachts, though he noted that the American market accounts for about 30% of the global market, while Russian superyachts only make up about 10% to 12% of the total market.

Another factor could cause choppier waters for yacht owners: the volatile price of fuel. On a Facebook group for yacht enthusiasts, Mr. Akellian said he has noticed more people worrying about the price of fuel.

“When I burn my engines for the full day and then go to the dock to refuel, they say ‘That’ll be $800.’ You’re thinking, ‘Oh, my God. That’s more than my first car cost.’ ”

Mr. Dezer said he would like to upgrade to a new boat, but most shipyards are no longer manufacturing superfast boats with engines such as the ones on his Sunseeker Predator. He said most companies are now trying to be more sensitive about the environment.

“If you have to worry about gas, you shouldn’t have one of these boats. That’s my answer,” Mr. Dezer said.

May 5, 2022

Stressed by Smart Tech? Consider These ‘Dumb’ Devices

Illustration of couple communicating through tin-can phones against colored background

ONCE, a broken bathroom scale just displayed the wrong weight. In 2022, it won’t even do that.

“My scale stopped connecting to Wi-Fi, which for some reason means it won’t even show the weight,” said Chris Hoffman, editor in chief of How-to Geek, an online magazine devoted to helping people understand their tech. In short, he’s an expert at troubleshooting broken gadgets. But when Mr. Hoffman’s scale went on the fritz, it just sat stubbornly broken on his coffee table, even after he’d read the entire manual, researched whether others had experienced the same problem, hounded customer support and coaxed the device through a complete factory reset. “I was left thinking ‘Where did I go wrong with my life?’” he said.

“Smart” spins on common home appliances have been available for many years. These clever refrigerators, televisions and air conditioners perform their base functions, but also use their ability to connect to the internet to unlock additional conveniences—letting owners, for instance, remote-control them from miles away. Generally, that level of interactivity was something you would opt into, by buying a robot vacuum, smart speakers or an Alexa-enabled microwave. But it wasn’t the default.

That’s changing. While some brands are aggressively bucking the trend and producing intentionally untethered devices, it’s getting harder to purchase appliances and gadgets that don’t need an internet connection merely to function properly. “I’ve gotten so many emails from readers who are looking for a ‘dumb’ TV,” said Mr. Hoffman. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist.”

While a TV that can’t access Netflix in the age of cord-cutting isn’t very useful, the trend has taken hold outside the living room too. Increasingly, said Jerry Beilinson, technology editor at Consumer Reports, “you can’t buy a high-end washing machine or dishwasher or dryer without it having Wi-Fi connectivity.”

When it comes to smart appliances beyond TVs, the benefits are less obvious. While it is convenient to zap your popcorn without pressing any of a microwave’s buttons, either via a phone app or through a voice assistant, when every device is, on some level, a computer, there are downsides. We’ve all heard stories about some household object that, a la Mr. Hoffman’s confoundingly sophisticated scale, stops working because the “smart” technology inside it breaks. Mr. Hoffman says he’s encountered washing machines that won’t let you clean your clothes until you’ve downloaded and installed a firmware update. “It is just annoying,” he said.

The problems aren’t always due to glitches or necessary security updates. Sometimes companies disable features intentionally. Mr. Beilinson said data collection offers a simple way for companies to make devices more profitable: “Adding Wi-Fi connectivity to appliances is extremely cheap and the data companies get out of it is extremely valuable.” Requiring that people connect to Wi-Fi in order to use features means more will connect. The brands are nudging, or arguably forcing, you to accept the intrusion.

For example, GE has engineered some of its ovens so that you can’t use the convection roast feature unless you connect them to Wi-Fi and download an app to your phone. This despite the fact that many residential ovens have had convection features since 1945, when the Wi-Fi in most homes was, shall we say, spotty. (A GE Appliances spokesperson said the company makes plenty of appliances that do not require Wi-Fi connectivity, but also wants to give customers the option of increased technological capability.)

The story is the same in the living room. Roku, for example, might be best known for its streaming sticks and smart televisions, but the company actually earns most of its money from the streaming platform it designed. According to its 2021 earnings report, the company actually lost $52 million from sales of hardware. The model works because of how effectively the company has been able to monetize its platform through licensing and advertising. Roku identified “targeting using first-party data” as its fastest-growing ad product last year, by which it means leveraging the information it gets from tracking your viewing habits to serve you new shows to watch or products you can buy directly from your TV. (Roku declined to comment for this article.)

Sometimes, it is still possible to opt out of this kind of tracking. Mr. Beilinson owns a garage door opener that could be controlled with an app, but he hasn’t connected the device to Wi-Fi. “I don’t feel like I need to tell a company every time I open the garage door.”

But more often than not, avoiding the downsides of smart tech requires awkward, costly workarounds. Mr. Hoffman said some people avoid connecting their TVs to Wi-Fi to ensure their viewing habits cannot be tracked. But then they must purchase an extra device to watch their top shows. “People who are really into privacy prefer the Apple TV box,” he said, pointing out that Apple considers its customer’s privacy a high priority. Others might rightfully bristle at the idea of spending an extra $180 to ensure a new TV doesn’t track their behaviour.

Deciding which devices you want to connect to the internet is a balancing act. But some signs suggest that people are seeking actively unconnected “dumb” devices. For example, in an earnings report last year, Fujifilm, the Japanese camera company, said it has made more money in each of the last five years from its line of Instax instant film cameras and accessories than it has from selling digital cameras and their lenses.

The analog trend is also manifesting in gaming. Wizards of The Coast, which makes the dice-rolling, pen-and-paper-based Dungeons & Dragons series and the card game Magic: The Gathering, saw a revenue increase of 24%, up to US$816 million, from 2019 to 2020. Even when Pandemic-induced lockdowns made in-person gaming impossible, many chose to invest in games that they could play in person, once restrictions were lifted. “There is a subset of people who are looking for ways to reduce the role of technology in their lives, to not always be so connected,” said Mr. Beilinson, “people looking for physical experiences.”

Startups are emerging specifically to cater to such people. One is reMarkable, which makes tablets for writing that might look, at first glance, like an iPad. The difference: no extra apps and a black-and-white e-ink screen. It is as close as you can get to a digital piece of paper, which is exactly the point. “When you’re writing and thinking your best thoughts, it is really important that you don’t get an email or a notification that takes you out of that,” said Henrik Gustav Faller, vice president of communication at reMarkable. “That stream of thought is something that we really try to focus on and really cherish.”

The 300-person reMarkable team, based in Norway, spent years developing the tablet before launch—reducing the latency on the screen and contemplating how much the pen should weigh. The end product has a few smart features—one gives users access to files on Dropbox and Google Drive—but not many. It appears the approach is working: As of 2020, reMarkable has sold over half a million devices. A company representative said sales increased in 2021, but they declined to release specific numbers.

The Light Phone II is a tiny brick with a similar black-and-white e-ink screen—and a similar philosophy. Designed by a 13 person team in New York City, it supports calls and texts, but no social media. Kaiwei Tang, co-founder and CEO, said that is because he believes our phones currently do way too much. That’s why there is no Light Phone app store; you can, however, download a few “tools” that let you do simple things like get directions or listen to podcasts. The phone, which launched in 2019, saw a 150% increase in sales from release to 2021 according to Mr. Tang. Investors include Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky.

These kinds of devices are made by and for people who are contemplating their relationship with technology and intentionally opting for simpler, less distracting devices. They offer a reminder that we should be able to choose how we interact with our technology, and how it interacts with us.

Everyone has a different threshold for what is and isn’t useful—and some smart devices might do enough to make the odd annoyance worth bearing. But since no company will make this calculation for you, Mr. Hoffman said it’s important to consider what you actually want: “Even if you love smart technology, not everything needs to be smart.”

The Best Dumb Tech

Eight pieces of gear that make the case for a future of less-connected devices

Light Phone II

It lets you make calls and send texts, but not much else. It’s designed to be used as little as possible, though you can add optional “Tools” like GPS navigation and podcasts.

The Mohu Leaf Plus Amplified TV Antenna

Free broadcast TV still exists, and it has been in HD for over a decade now. Cheap, powerful indoor antennas like this one allow you to rediscover the experience.

Mighty

Like the iPod Shuffle for the streaming age, this device lets you sync songs over from Spotify or Amazon Music to listen offline. It’s great for working out, when picking the perfect playlist can easily become an excuse to dawdle near a squat rack.

Kindle Paperwhite

Thanks to a crisp, responsive screen and light body, the Kindle is a superior e-reader. Cheaper Kindles like the Paperwhite include some bloat like ads and a web browser. Both are easy to ignore, especially since the browser is harder to use than “Ulysses” is to read.

reMarkable 2

As close as you can get to a digital pad of paper. This thin tablet comes with a realistic-feeling pen, which you can use to mark up documents and sync notes to your phone or computer.

Freewrite

This digital typewriter—nothing more than a mechanical keyboard with an e-ink screen—lets you draft without distraction. To edit, you can send text to your computer.

The Fujifilm Instax 11

An instant camera like the Polaroids of old, it prints an actual physical photo that you can share with a friend by handing it to them. What a concept.

BN-LINK Mini 24-hour Mechanical Outlet Timer

Decades after the servers for smart plugs currently on the market shut down, this little mechanical timer will keep on ticking—and you can get two for 12 bucks.

Even a sceptic can appreciate some smart tech. Three winners…

Adaptive Central Air

The Google Nest Learning Thermostat can, by some estimates, reduce your heating and cooling bills by 10 to 15% by not using energy when it’s not needed. If you’re going to introduce smart tech to your house, it might as well be saving you money (and reducing your carbon footprint).

Secure Streaming

Apple TV is one of the few visual entertainment platforms that doesn’t track and monetize your viewing habits, according to privacy experts. Plus, these boxes will continue getting security updates much longer than your run-of-the-mill smart television.

Flexible Fixtures

The Wyze Bulb Color is an affordable LED smart bulb that can make any lamp or sconce colourful. Customize the colour or intensity with your phone at any moment or schedule the bulbs to turn off and on at specific times then forget about them completely.

April 20, 2022

5 Tips to Make the Most of a Small Home

Brad Swartz and his eponymous architecture studio have garnered a heady reputation for making the most out of small homes. The studio is focused on a sustainable future for city development and works towards reformatting small inner-city dwellings and, simultaneously, removing all notions of compromise attached to present liveable homes. So, here at Kanebridge News, we though who better to pen a guide to designing a small home.

Here, five things to consider maximising your small space stylishly.

Case The Place

When looking to purchase a smaller unit or dwelling pay close attention to the windows and the external aspect. Often what makes a small dwelling feel bigger is what surrounds it or what it looks out to. A small unit with multiple windows — especially on either side — will make it feel larger, bring in better ventilation and better light.

Get Your Priorities Right

Figuring out what matters to you before designing your home is an essential first step. Whether you want a place to entertain, or you need space for an office, or lounging — having a clear understanding of what you want from your home will help you more efficiently organise and design your home.

Find Balance Between Storage And Space

Creating ample storage in a small home is always an uphill battle. The key to creating a comfortable and liveable space with little room is to find the balance between having the necessary storage without comprimising the sense of space. In a nutshell, this means making sure that you can see the full width of the room by not taking cupboards to the ceiling or leaving a gap under cabinets that exposes the flooring for a sense of continuity. These small things trick the eye and when combined with good aspect and lighting can make the home feel much bigger than it really is.

Find Opportunities For Multi-Use Items

Small homes require a sense of creativity, so where possible, find opportunities for things to have multiple uses. Foldable desks that become clothes racks, murphy beds, or screens like the one I used in The Boneca [pictured above] building I used to delineate the two spaces help to add functionality to a room without sacrificing space or light.

Add a Touch Of Luxury

Just because you’re living in a smaller space doesn’t mean you have to forgo life’s luxuries. And, as the spaces are smaller – a little bit goes a long way. Opt for a splash of marble, or other luxurious stone finishes, or build in a drop-down projector — whatever it is is, that’s going to make the home more comfortable and liveable for you. Ultimately these are home and you want to feel comfortable in them and want them to be a space you want to live in.

bradswartz.com.au

April 13, 2022April 20, 2022

Wooden Skyscrapers Are on the Rise

Guests at a new 20-storey hotel and cultural centre in Skellefteå, a former gold-mining community in northeastern Sweden, don’t have to step outside to feel immersed in the natural world. The floors, ceilings and support beams of the building—which also houses a museum and other facilities—are made almost entirely of spruce and pine harvested from nearby woodlands.

“When you come inside, the smell of the timber is almost like you enter a forest,” Robert Schmitz, a partner at an architectural firm in Stockholm and the building’s lead architect, says of the Sara Cultural Centre and Wood Hotel. “This is a really small city, and timber is something that everyone in this community has a connection to. They understand the material.”

The 30,000-square-metre complex is part of an emerging trend as architects, developers and builders turn to so-called mass timber, wood that is glued and pressed in special ways to make it similar in strength to concrete and steel and thus capable of replacing those building materials even for skyscrapers and other massive edifices.

Advocates of mass-timber construction maintain that it can be more environmentally friendly than conventional construction. The carbon footprint of a building constructed with sustainably harvested mass timber, which is made from trees that are selectively cut rather than clear-cut, can be half that of a similar building made of concrete and steel, according to an assessment of mass timber construction published recently in the journal Sustainability.

“If you look at the carbon impact of harvesting trees and turning them into buildings, it gives you a much better number than you get from concrete or steel,” says Stephen Shaler, a professor of sustainable materials and technology at the University of Maine. “As long as you have sustainably managed forests—and we have that capacity—it is a clear winner on the carbon footprint.”

The number of multistorey mass-timber buildings being built in the U.S. rose 50% between July 2020 and December 2021 to more than 1,300 structures, according to the wood trade group WoodWorks. Among the projects are an eight-storey office building in Charlottesville, Va., a new Google five-stoery office building scheduled to open in August in Sunnyvale, Calif., and a 25-storey residential-retail complex rising in Milwaukee. The International Building Code permits wooden buildings of up to 18 stories, but the developers of the Milwaukee project say they obtained a variance after submitting data to city officials showing it was as safe as a conventional building.

Even more ambitious projects may appear: A Japanese timber company has proposed a 70-story wood building for Tokyo, while a U.K.-based architectural firm has plans for an 80-story skyscraper in London.

To meet the demand for mass timber, 18 manufacturing plants have been built in the U.S. and Canada since 2014, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The global market for mass timber was estimated at $956 million in 2020 and is expected to grow at an annual rate of 13.6% from 2021 to 2028, according to a December 2021 report by Grand View Research.

In addition to potential environmental benefits, construction experts say mass-timber buildings can cost less than concrete-and-steel structures—especially if they’re sited near a manufacturing plant where pieces of the building are cut to order. With mass timber, for example, builders don’t have to pour concrete and wait for it to set. Mr. Schmitz and the team behind the Sara Cultural Centre say they saved a year in construction and labor costs as the wood panels and beams were made at a nearby plant.

Using mass timber cut the timeline for the Milwaukee complex, called Ascent, by about four months, says Tim Gokhman, managing director of the Milwaukee-based New Land Enterprises and the project’s manager. Because wood is lighter, only 100 support piles had to be driven into the site’s soft soil rather than the 200 that would have been needed for a similar concrete-and-steel building. And whereas pouring concrete floors might require 30 to 40 workers, he said, only 10 workers were needed to install the cross-laminated timber, or CLT, panels for each floor.

CLT is made by laying down and gluing together multiple wooden pieces oriented at 90-degree angles to one another and is commonly used for floors and walls. Another key type of mass timber, called glulam for glue-laminated timber, is commonly used for support beams.

“Each piece of wood is measured and has a designated place,” Mr. Gokhman says. “So as the building is built, you’re literally updating its progress in a digital world. Without that technology, you don’t have the same efficiency and schedule gains.”

Some point to limitations of mass timber, saying that buildings made with both conventional and mass-timber construction can have advantages over those made solely of wood or solely of steel and concrete.

“In a tall building, you really do want the base of it to be concrete, and as you go up in the building it gets lighter, and makes more use of wood,” says University of Oregon architecture professor Judith Sheine, who has designed buildings using both mass timber and concrete and steel. And conventional construction might be better in coastal areas, she says, adding, “If you’re in a flood zone, the base should still be concrete because getting wood wet is not that great.”

Some fear the mass-timber trend could spur timber companies to cut down old-growth forests that contain large amounts of carbon rather than selectively harvesting younger forests. They argue that calculations of the carbon footprints of mass timber buildings must include roots, branches and other parts of trees that are often burned as well as the fossil fuels consumed to cut down the trees, fabricate the wood products and transport them to construction sites.

“We’re not going to log our way out of the climate crisis,” says Jason Grant, manager of corporate engagement, forests, for the World Wildlife Foundation in San Francisco. “There are objective limits to how much timber we can produce and consume. We need to bear in mind the constraints that we need to operate in if we want to avoid climate disaster and stem nature loss.”

Seismic testing of a 10-storey tall wooden building scheduled to take place in California this fall could give a boost to the mass-timber trend. “We need to find a way to make these buildings earthquake-resistant, since it’s a new building type, and nobody’s ever done this before,” says Shiling Pei, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and the project leader for the shake test.

To minimize the risk of fire, builders and architects are incorporating precautions into mass timber buildings, says David Barber, a Washington, D.C.-based fire safety engineer with the multinational design, engineering and architectural firm Arup. He points to covering CLT wall and floor panels in taller mass timber buildings with fire-rated drywall rather than leaving them exposed, for example, and checking the fire rating for connection points between the timber panels as well as the glue connecting the panels and laminated timber.

“We want to make sure that the buildings are done in very conservative ways, so they are being designed to a very high level of safety,” says Mr. Barber, who has worked on both the Ascent building in Milwaukee and the eight-storey Apex building in Charlottesville.

Tests of a two-storey mass timber apartment conducted in 2017 at a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms facility in Beltsville, Md., showed that it took longer to catch fire and retained its structural integrity longer than a similar wood-frame structure.

April 13, 2022April 20, 2022

A Science of Buildings That Can Grow—and Melt Away

While the pandemic heightened speculation about what the city of the future will look like, architect Neri Oxman says she is sticking with a blueprint based on a core principle of her work: In years to come, buildings will be grown, not built.

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab from 2010 to 2021, Ms. Oxman founded and directed the Mediated Matter group, a team researching in areas including computational design, digital fabrication, materials science and synthetic biology. There, she created a field she calls material ecology.

The result? A body of work that includes a pavilion spun by 6,500 silkworms (with the help of a robotic arm), a series of 3D-printed sculptures filled with liquid channels of the pigment melanin (which she envisions could be used in the façades of buildings to protect against ultraviolet rays), and a collection of artifacts constructed using materials derived from shrimp shells and insect exoskeletons.

Since leaving academia, Ms. Oxman, 46 years old, has focused on Oxman, the New York-based design and technology company that she founded in 2020 with the aim of applying her design philosophy to real-world projects. A retrospective of her work is on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Wall Street Journal spoke to Ms. Oxman about the future of urban architecture and how she thinks design can be used as a tool to fight climate change.

You created a new term to describe your approach to design: material ecology. What does it entail?

The idea behind material ecology is to enable total synergy between grown and built environments by deploying new digital technologies that allow us to augment bio-based materials for large-scale construction.

How do you decide which natural materials to use in your designs?

It comes down to ethics and availability. We work with the most abundant biopolymers on the planet which include cellulose, found in plant cell walls; pectin, found in apple and lemon skins; and chitin, found in the shells of crustaceans.

You’ve talked about wanting to create buildings that naturally decay when they are no longer needed. How would that work?

Using technology, we can program biomaterials to degrade in response to changing environmental conditions. At MIT, we built three biopolymer pavilions [the Aguahoja pavilions] which, instead of concrete, were built using shrimp shells, fallen leaves and apple skins. We programmed the pavilions to decay at a certain point when exposed to rainwater. This, in turn, nurtures soil microorganisms to fuel new growth.

It’s a circular economy of material that could be used to create biodegradable refugee camps, for example. Once the refugees find a safe haven, the camps would be programmed to melt away in the rain.

What does “programmed” mean in this context?

It’s complex. When we combine biopolymers including chitosan, pectin and cellulose, the material’s ability to absorb water varies based on its composition. Chitosan, for example, is naturally water-resistant and doesn’t readily dissociate when submerged, while pectin is hydrophilic and dissolves rapidly. By choosing how we blend these components, we can access a spectrum of hydrophilicity—otherwise known as a material’s affinity to water—and this lets us tune or program the speed at which a material breaks down. In essence, we are designing the architectural equivalent of metabolic rate.

How many years are we from grown buildings becoming a reality in cities across the world?

For grown buildings to appear in towns and cities, we need to rethink mass production, and this will take five to 10 years to happen in a meaningful way. However, the development of products made from biological materials—cars, for example—could begin within the next year.

What role will existing buildings made from concrete and plastics, for example, play in your vision for the city of the future?

The architect and professor Carl Elefante says that “the greenest building is one that is already built.” That’s because the carbon emitted during construction is vast compared to the operating emissions of a given building. We therefore need to find new ways to augment the pre-existing built environment rather than trying to completely rebuild our cities from the ground up.

How does one do this?

We need to look at a range of interventions. One is the creation of bioengineered façades for existing buildings. An example: in the U.S. alone, hundreds of billions of square feet of glass façade components are produced every year. As part of our research at MIT, we 3D-printed glass augmented with synthetically engineered microorganisms to produce energy [from the sun]. This allows us to develop solar-harnessing glass façades that can act as a skin for pre-existing buildings.

We must also think about whole-building recycling. A current example is Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The campus was built by Norman Foster using materials from old buildings that used to be on the same site. Rather than simply destroying structures when we no longer have use for them, we must look for ways to augment them using new technology and intelligence.

Which skills would you encourage future generations of architects to develop?

The architect of the future is interested in formation, as much as she is interested in form. She is a systems thinker, interested in building relationships between objects rather than seeing them as standalone. She invents new technologies with which to design, manufacture and build. She is a gardener, not a master planner

April 13, 2022April 13, 2022

Crypto Mortgages Test Home Buyers’ Appetite in Digital-Currency World

Some Miami developers have enabled buyers to purchase homes in cryptocurrency since at least 2021. Now a pair of Miami lenders is going one step further by offering home mortgages in digital currencies.

Milo, a fintech company in the lending business, made the first crypto home loan in March, when it provided a 30-year mortgage in bitcoin for a Miami duplex.

The firm says the early response among other crypto-oriented home buyers has been so enthusiastic that it is already looking to double the size of its Miami office to 100 employees to handle the anticipated demand.

XBTO, another cryptofinance company with offices in Miami, said it is also gearing up to offer crypto mortgages this year, in partnership with a traditional Miami-based mortgage lender.

“Between crypto millionaires who don’t want to sell their cryptocurrency and foreign buyers who have trouble entering the market, we see a huge demand,” says Joe Haggenmiller, head of markets for XBTO.

Kieran Gibbs is one of the newcomers to the city who has expressed interest. The professional soccer player from the U.K. moved to South Florida last year to play for the local Inter Miami CF. He said that he has been receiving half of his salary in bitcoin since January and that he is in talks with XBTO to secure a crypto mortgage.

“I’m renting my property at the moment and I’d like to buy,” Mr. Gibbs said. “The trouble is I haven’t been here for long enough to get enough credit, so it’s difficult for me at the moment to get a mortgage.”

Crypto mortgages are structured much like traditional mortgages and are lent out to home buyers in dollars but are meant to appeal to people who have large crypto holdings they don’t want to convert to dollars.

These mortgages require additional collateral in the form of a cryptocurrency, and the agreements allow the lender to take ownership of the home and the additional collateral in the event of default. If the value of crypto falls, the borrower may have to put up more crypto or other collateral.

Many traditional lenders are sceptical that loans in digital currency will ever gain scale, and analysts list numerous risks and complications when lending in crypto.

For one, they point to the legal pitfalls of engaging in a space that is still largely unregulated. Volatile fluctuations in the price of digital currencies could mean that lenders may require a borrower to put up additional collateral if the crypto price drops significantly.

“Anyone in the digital asset space should proceed with a great degree of caution,” says Richard Levin, an attorney and chair of the fintech and regulation practice at the law firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP.

Even proponents of these loans say that the new companies are already encountering logistical issues.

“Integrating the legacy mortgage system with the new crypto environment is an operational nightmare,” says Lorenzo Delzoppo, an attorney who specializes in disruptive technology and who is consulting XBTO as they finalize their mortgage product.

Still, he adds, “It’s all incredibly exciting.”

Crypto mortgages are only the latest way that Miami businesses have experimented with the nexus of real estate and digital currencies, a trend that is on display this week during Miami’s bitcoin conference and other crypto-related gatherings.

Propy, a property-tech company whose chief executive resides in Miami, made headlines in February for being the first to process a U.S. real-estate transaction as a nonfungible token, or NFT.

Real-estate developer PMG, in a partnership with the crypto-derivatives exchange FTX, said it has accepted more than $20 million in cryptocurrency payments toward preconstruction purchases of about 60 condo units at its E11even Hotel & Residences.

Lofty, a condo project in Miami’s Brickell district, is providing a digital NFT art piece as an amenity along with the purchase of a unit.

Milo, meanwhile, is offering interest rates for crypto mortgages between about 4% and 6%, which skew a bit higher than what banks tend to charge for dollar-based loans. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 4.67% last week, according to mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac.

The crypto lender allows borrowers to take out loans of up to 100% of the purchase price by pledging their bitcoin as collateral. XBTO will require purchasers to put down 10%.