Explore Explainers & Weekly Insights

New York City’s City of Yes  is the clearest live example of a zoning supercycle in a major global market: a multi-year rewrite of citywide rules that turns “a little more housing in every neighborhood” into a structured, long-horizon pipeline of density, mixed-use, and infrastructure investment. In December 2024, the City Council approved City of Yes for Housing Opportunity , billed by state and city leaders as the most pro-housing zoning proposal in NYC history. The plan is

The World Bank approved a $1.5 billion Infrastructure Modernization Development Policy Loan (DPL) for South Africa—concessional budget support designed to attack the country’s most binding growth constraints: failing freight rail, congested ports, and a power system still digging out from years of rolling blackouts. Structured as a development policy loan, the financing is not tied to a single megaproject. Instead, it backs a package of structural reforms that can unlock priv

The 2026 real estate story isn’t “distress” in the Hollywood sense. It’s something more operational and more widespread: capital stacks that were optimized for a different rate regime now need surgery. Owners who treat refinancing as a single transaction will lose time and optionality. Owners who treat it as a reconstruction —sequencing liability management, incentive layering, and covenant redesign—will create a new basis and a viable hold. The maturity problem is not abstra

Resilience used to be a design conversation. In 2026 it’s a financing conversation—because insurers, lenders, and buyers are pricing climate volatility into terms and valuations. FEMA’s BRIC program has been a key resilience funding channel historically, but recent reporting has underscored significant uncertainty. In December 2025, AP reported a federal judge ordered the restoration of billions of dollars in canceled disaster mitigation funding connected to BRIC, after the a

Big infrastructure projects change cities slowly. Citywide zoning text amendments can change cities overnight—because they rewrite the feasibility baseline everywhere at once. That’s why “City of Yes”-style packages have become one of the most investable policy signals in real estate: they’re not a single development approval, they’re a system upgrade . New York City offers a timely case. In late 2025, the city pointed to the adoption of City of Yes for Housing Opportunity  a

In cities with building emissions mandates, carbon isn’t an ESG concept—it’s a line item. New York City’s Local Law 97 (LL97) established emissions limits for large buildings, with financial penalties for exceeding limits. One widely cited figure is $268 per ton of CO₂e over the limit  tied to 2024 energy usage and emissions. That means LL97 is not merely a compliance obligation. It is a capital event —because it changes operating costs, capex needs, tenant negotiations, refi

The industrial economy is reorganizing around reliability: resilient supply chains, domestic manufacturing, and lower-carbon logistics. That puts ports and rail back at the center of U.S. growth—and makes freight corridors a serious capital markets story. On ports, the Maritime Administration’s Port Infrastructure Development Program (PIDP) continues to deploy major funding, with FY2025 funding availability framed at $500 million .   The scale matters because port upgrades ar