What are we reading? Stuff about housing — and beards:
3-Flat Future: The Boston Globe takes a look at the role of three-flats in Beantown (called "three-deckers" there) and says they could be an affordable answer to future housing needs — if the singles would only scram. The Globe story says three-deckers make up about a quarter of all housing in Boston — tops in the nation; Chicago is at No. 2 with 15 percent of housing being three-flats. But most were built 50 or more years ago. Like our own three-flat history, three-deckers started as owner-occupied on the first floor while the second and third floors were rented out, often to relatives.
But while they were designed for families, three-deckers are now the place of choice for singles in Boston, often groups of millennials sharing rent in a single unit. “You get three or four people in their twenties who pool incomes and can outpay every working family around,” said one Boston housing expert. “You’re seeing the displacement of working families out of housing that was built for them.” The city is looking for ways to get developers to build more.
The Billionaire Next Door: According to Dennis Rodkin of Crain's Chicago Business, not all of Chicago's billionaires live in the Gold Coast. Koch Foods CEO Joe Grendys, who is worth $1.8 billion, still lives in the a "modest brick trilevel near O'Hare Airport" that he grew up in. Worth $275,000, Grendys' home costs a fraction of the primary residences of 14 other Chicagoans who made the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, released in late September.
When a Beard Is More Than a Beard: There are hipster beards, ironic beards and covering-up-a-weak-chin beards. Now add to that the "achievement beard," so dubbed by the New Yorker's Nathan Heller. Exhibit A, according to Heller: David Letterman, who recently stepped out in NYC looking like he parted ways with his razor at the same time he exited "Late Night." Exhibits B and C: Stephen Colbert, post "Colbert Report," and Al Gore post-hanging chads. "It is not a bohemian power beard, as worn by ZZ Top ... and it also shouldn’t be confused with the beard of disaffection, à la Ted Kaczynski," Heller writes. "Rather than saying, 'I have given up on the world,' the achievement beard declares, 'I am away, but not gone.'"
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