WeWork, the nation’s second-largest provider of coworking spaces, has filed a motion in bankruptcy court to assume or keep its leases at the Triangle Building near Union Station in Denver and at Canyon 28 in Boulder. The two locations are among 16 the company indicated […]
BlogA Denver jury has awarded a small Washington company $20.3 million plus legal fees in its antitrust lawsuit against Johns Manville Corp., the Denver-based building products maker owned by Berkshire Hathaway Co. Thermal Pipe Shields Inc., or TPS, based in Stanwood, Wash., is a maker […]
BlogA big jump in new listings and a modest increase in closings helped drive up the number of listings available to buyers in metro Denver during the peak home-selling season, according to a monthly update from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors. A year ago, […]
BlogWeWork, the nation’s second-largest provider of coworking spaces, has filed a motion in bankruptcy court to assume or keep its leases at the Triangle Building near Union Station in Denver and at Canyon 28 in Boulder. The two locations are among 16 the company indicated […]
BlogWeWork, the nation’s second-largest provider of coworking spaces, has filed a motion in bankruptcy court to assume or keep its leases at the Triangle Building near Union Station in Denver and at Canyon 28 in Boulder.
The two locations are among 16 the company indicated on Monday that it wants to retain as it restructures its finances and emerges from bankruptcy. A judge must approve the request, and terms must be reached with landlords.
“These assumptions, which are subject to court approval, showcase WeWork’s progress in creating a more sustainable real estate portfolio to better invest in its offerings for the future,” the company said in a press release.
The Triangle Building is at 1550 Wewatta St. near Union Station in Denver. Canyon 28 is at 2755 Canyon Blvd. in Boulder. Both are dedicated coworking locations.
WeWork didn’t provide details on the fate of the remaining four locations, all in Denver, but the company did say its goal is to find a way to keep over 95% of its global, wholly-owned lease portfolio.
WeWork offers standard private offices hosting one to 20 people, office suites for 20 to 100 people and full floor offices with 100 or more people.
WeWork’s majority owner, SoftBank, pushed a valuation of $47 billion in early 2019 ahead of an initial public offering. But the company never achieved that lofty level and things quickly unraveled after years of poor management and a rapid expansion caught up with the New York-based company.
The pandemic, which kept workers at home and reduced demand for shared office space, caused the bottom to fall out. By November 2023, the overleveraged company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Last week the bankruptcy court approved an exit plan that shed $4 billion in debt and rejected a last-minute bid for control from the company’s founder Adam Neumann.
Even as it pushes to complete its restructuring, the competition isn’t standing still. Metro Denver saw an 8% jump in the number of co-working locations, bringing the total to 219 spaces in the first quarter, according to a report from CoWorking Cafe.
Denver moved ahead of Atlanta and Houston to claim the sixth most locations. Los Angeles, Manhattan and Dallas are the top three markets and Denver in comes after Chicago.
In terms of square footage, Denver ranks as the ninth largest market with 3.66 million square feet, according to CoWorking Cafe. Manhattan has the most coworking space, followed by Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
The average square footage of a coworking location is 16,697 square feet, up from 16,481 in the fourth quarter. The cost of a dedicated desk dropped $2 to $323 a month, while open workspaces were going for $175.
A Denver jury has awarded a small Washington company $20.3 million plus legal fees in its antitrust lawsuit against Johns Manville Corp., the Denver-based building products maker owned by Berkshire Hathaway Co. Thermal Pipe Shields Inc., or TPS, based in Stanwood, Wash., is a maker […]
BlogA Denver jury has awarded a small Washington company $20.3 million plus legal fees in its antitrust lawsuit against Johns Manville Corp., the Denver-based building products maker owned by Berkshire Hathaway Co.
Thermal Pipe Shields Inc., or TPS, based in Stanwood, Wash., is a maker of pipe support systems that previously had purchased calcium silicate or “calsil” insulation from Johns Manville, which controlled nearly the entire market for that product.
TPS in early 2018 announced it would make the insulation itself with the help of a Chinese manufacturer that Johns Manville had previously contracted with. The insulation is important in shielding pipes carrying hot liquids or gases, like in a petroleum refinery.
But sales didn’t go anywhere, despite what TPS claimed was its much lower-cost and higher-quality product. The company filed a federal complaint in March 2019 in Denver, alleging that Johns Manville had actively disparaged its industrial insulation and threatened building product distributors with retaliation if they carried it.
A federal trial court judge initially ruled in Johns Manville’s favor, but the 10th District Court of Appeals sent the case back to be tried on a narrower antitrust argument. When it finally went to trial, witnesses from five different building product distributors testified about the threats they had received.
On Friday, five years after the initial complaint, a federal court jury found that Johns Manville had a monopoly in the product, had made “anticompetitive” threats to withhold its products from distributors that carried TPS’s competing product and that its actions violated federal antitrust rules.
“This was a hard-fought victory for our client who had the fortitude and staying power to stand up for what’s right. We are grateful that the jury recognized Johns Mansville’s wrongful conduct. No matter how large or powerful, no company is above the law,” said Sean Grimsley, a partner with the Denver law firm Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray, which argued the case for TPS, in an emailed statement.
The jury awarded TPS $6.78 million, the estimated profit loss. Because it was an antitrust case, damages were tripled, resulting in an award of $20.3 million, plus legal fees.
“As a legal matter, we disagree with the verdict,” said Johns Manville General Counsel Katherine Albery in an emailed statement. “We will carefully evaluate our next steps.”
A big jump in new listings and a modest increase in closings helped drive up the number of listings available to buyers in metro Denver during the peak home-selling season, according to a monthly update from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors. A year ago, […]
BlogA big jump in new listings and a modest increase in closings helped drive up the number of listings available to buyers in metro Denver during the peak home-selling season, according to a monthly update from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
A year ago, buyers in metro Denver had 4,632 home and condo listings to choose from, and two years ago, only 3,204. At the end of last month, there were 6,990 active listings on the market.
Libby Levinson-Katz, chairwoman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee, expects the inventory will keep climbing in May and that sellers should account for that as they determine a listing price.
“Buyers on the hunt for their next property will likely choose the one priced at fair market value, with very little work needed. This is not the time to push the price or to place a home on the market to see if you can obtain the price you hope to achieve,” she said in comments accompanying the report.
The number of active listings was up 19.5% over March, about double the usual gain seen between the two months. It is up 51.3% from April 2023 and 118% from April 2022.
More new listings, which rose 21% on the month and 25.4% on the year to 5,980, contributed to the big jump in available inventory. The gain in new listings was also about double the amount usually seen between March and April.
The pace of purchases slowed as buyers coped with higher mortgage rates. Closings rose 1.7% on the month to 3,739 in metro Denver and are down 4.8% on the year. But pending sales, a measure of future activity, rose 8.3% in April from March and are 5.5% higher than in April 2023.
After rising for five weeks straight, rates on a 30-year mortgage reached an average of 7.22%, according to a rate survey from Freddie Mac.
“On average, more than one-third of home sales for the entire year occur between March and June. With two months left of this historically busy period, potential homebuyers will likely not see relief from rising rates anytime soon,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, in a release.
Khater suggests that buyers have become more acclimated to higher rates. One sign of that is the faster turnover in listings. New listings took a median of eight days to go under contract last month in metro Denver, compared to 11 days in March.
The median price of a single-family home sold in metro Denver was $665,000, an increase of 3.1% on the month and 3.9% on the year.
For condos and townhomes, the median sales price was $419,000, which was down $950 from March’s median price and up 2.2% from the median price a year ago of $410,000.
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NEW YORK — Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of social networking site Truth Social, has fired a Colorado auditor that federal regulators recently charged with “massive fraud.” The former president’s media company dismissed Lakewood-based BF Borgers as its independent public accounting firm on […]
BlogNEW YORK — Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of social networking site Truth Social, has fired a Colorado auditor that federal regulators recently charged with “massive fraud.”
The former president’s media company dismissed Lakewood-based BF Borgers as its independent public accounting firm on Friday, according to a securities filing — which also notes that Trump Media engaged with Arizona-based accountant Semple, Marchal & Cooper as BF Borgers’ replacement over the weekend.
BF Borgers’ dismissal arrived on the same day that the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the firm and its owner Benjamin F. Borgers with “deliberate and systematic failures” in more than 1,500 audits.
The charges, which include failing to abide by accounting rules and fabricating documentation to cover up its shortcomings, do not involve any work that BF Borgers performed for Trump Media. To settle the charges, BF Borgers and Borgers agreed to pay a combined $14 million in civil penalties as well as permanent suspensions effective immediately, set to prevent them from handling SEC-related matters as accountants.
BF Borgers’ time with Trump Media was brief. It named the Colorado firm as its auditor on March 28, according to a recent annual report filing. At the time, Trump Media disclosed that BF Borgers had also handled its audits before it went public by merging with shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp.
Trump Media had previously cycled through at least two other auditors — one that resigned in July 2023, and another that was terminated by its board in March, just as it was re-hiring BF Borgers.
In its regulatory filing, Trump Media said that “the decision to change independent registered public accounting firms was made with the recommendation and approval of the Audit Committee of the Company.” The Associated Press reached out to the company for further comment Monday, including on whether Semple, Marchal & Cooper would review BF Borgers’ previous work for Trump Media.
BF Borgers and Semple, Marchal & Cooper did not immediately respond to requests for a statement.
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Amacon Upton Residences is the name that Canadian developer Amacon has assigned to its 461-condo project in downtown Denver. This is a rendering of what the two-tower project on the former site of the Shelby’s Bar & Grill will look like. (Provided by Amacon) Canadian […]
BlogCanadian developer Amacon has given its mixed-use condo project along Broadway at 18th Street and Glenarm Place in downtown Denver a name — Upton Residences.
Previously called Block 176 for city planning purposes, two towers are rising on the site of a former parking lot and building that housed the Shelby’s Bar & Grill restaurant close to Holy Ghost Catholic Church.
Upton Residences, with 461 condos, will be Denver’s second-largest condo project once completed, trailing only the 42-story, 496-unit Spire building at 891 14th St. that hit the market in late 2009.
Developers have largely avoided building condos in Colorado, citing persistent construction defects lawsuits they say have left construction insurance either unavailable or at such high premiums that coverage is untenable. Condos, which once accounted for one in five new homes built in Colorado, are down to fewer than one in 20, depending on the year.
Amacon has constructed thousands of condos over the past 55 years and remains confident it can avoid the legal headaches other builders have faced. The developer, based in Vancouver, B.C., also expects strong demand from those looking to own rather than rent in central Denver.
“While downtown Denver has no shortage of rental units, Upton Residences is opening up new doors for homeownership in the heart of the city,” Stephanie Babineau, vice president of marketing and sales at Amacon, said in a release.
The project will consist of a 38-story tower and a 32-story tower, along with 12,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and more than 500 parking spaces. The “Upton” name reflects the project’s proximity to the busier Downtown neighborhood and the quieter Uptown neighborhood and is specific to the Denver project, Amacon said.
Residences will range from suites to “opulent” Penthouse collections. All the units will have premium finishes and floor-to-ceiling windows and most suites will have a private exterior balcony or patio, Amacon said.
Construction on the two towers started in the spring of 2022 and should wrap up in the middle of 2025. The company purchased the lot back in 2018.
Davis Partnership Architects designed the exterior of large glass walls with polar white facade that Amacon promised would be distinctive enough to serve as an “architectural anchor within Denver’s urban landscape.”
“Upton will be a game-changing landmark that will redefine the Denver skyline,” Steve Featherston, vice president of construction and development at Amacon said in the release. “It will stand as a tribute to the city and set a new standard for luxury living.”
West + Main Homes, based in Lakewood, is marketing the condos.
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By MARIA SHERMAN (AP Music Writer) With some help from artificial intelligence, country music star Randy Travis, celebrated for his timeless hits like “Forever and Ever, Amen” and “I Told You So,” has his voice back. In July 2013, Travis was hospitalized with viral cardiomyopathy, […]
BlogBy MARIA SHERMAN (AP Music Writer)
With some help from artificial intelligence, country music star Randy Travis, celebrated for his timeless hits like “Forever and Ever, Amen” and “I Told You So,” has his voice back.
In July 2013, Travis was hospitalized with viral cardiomyopathy, a virus that attacks the heart, and later suffered a stroke. The Country Music Hall of Famer had to relearn how to walk, spell and read in the years that followed. A condition called aphasia limits his ability to speak — it’s why his wife Mary Travis assists him in interviews. It’s also why he hasn’t released new music in over a decade, until now.
“Where That Came From,” which released Friday, is a rich acoustic ballad amplified by Travis’ immediately recognizable, soulful vocal tone.
Cris Lacy, Warner Music Nashville co-president, approached Randy and Mary Travis and asked: “’What if we could take Randy’s voice and recreate it using AI?,’” Mary Travis told The Associated Press over Zoom last week, Randy smiling in agreement right next to her. “Well, we were all over that, so we were so excited.”
“All I ever wanted since the day of a stroke was to hear that voice again.”
Lacy tapped developers in London to create a proprietary AI model to begin the process. The result was two models: One with 12 vocal stems (or song samples), and another with 42 stems collected across Travis’ career — from 1985 to 2013, says Kyle Lehning, Travis’ longtime producer. Lacy and Lehning chose to use “Where That Came From,” a song written by Scotty Emerick and John Scott Sherrill that Lehning co-produced and held on to for years. He believed it could best articulate the humanity of Travis’ idiosyncratic vocal style.
“I never even thought about another song,” Lehning said.
Once he input the demo vocal (sung by James Dupree) into the AI models, “it took about five minutes to analyze,” says Lehning. “I really wish somebody had been here with a camera because I was the first person to hear it. And it was stunning, to me, how good it was sort of right off the bat. It’s hard to put an equation around it, but it was probably 70, 75% what you hear now.”
“There were certain aspects of it that were not authentic to Randy’s performance,” he said, so he began to edit and build on the recording with engineer Casey Wood, who also worked closely with Travis over a few decades.
The pair cherrypicked from the two models, and made alterations to things like vibrato speed, or slowing and relaxing phrases. “Randy is a laid-back singer,” Lehning says. “Randy, in my opinion, had an old soul quality to his voice. That’s one of the things that made him unique, but also, somehow familiar.”
His vocal performance on “Where That Came From” had to reflect that fact.
“We were able to just improve on it,” Lehning says of the AI recording. “It was emotional, and it’s still emotional.”
Mary Travis says the “human element,” and “the people that are involved” in this project, separate it from more nefarious uses of AI in music.
“Randy, I remember watching him when he first heard the song after it was completed. It was beautiful because at first, he was surprised, and then he was very pensive, and he was listening and studying,” she said. “And then he put his head down and his eyes were a little watery. I think he went through every emotion there was, in those three minutes of just hearing his voice again.”
Lacy agrees. “The beauty of this is, you know, we’re doing it with a voice that the world knows and has heard and has been comforted by,” she says.
“But I think, just on human terms, it’s a very real need. And it’s a big loss when you lose the voice of someone that you were connected to, and the ability to have it back is a beautiful gift.”
They also hope that this song will work to educate people on the good that AI can do — not the fraudulent activities that so frequently make headlines. “We’re hoping that maybe we can set a standard,” Mary Travis says, where credit is given where credit is due — and artists have control over their voice and work.
Last month, over 200 artists signed an open letter submitted by the Artist Rights Alliance non-profit, calling on artificial intelligence tech companies, developers, platforms, digital music services and platforms to stop using AI “to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.” Artists who co-signed included Stevie Wonder, Miranda Lambert, Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Peter Frampton, Katy Perry, Smokey Robinson and J Balvin.
So, now that “Where That Came From” is here, will there be more original Randy Travis songs in the future?
“There may be others,” says Mary Travis. “We’ll see where this goes. This is such a foreign territory. There’s likely more on the horizon.”
“We do have other tracks,” says Lacy, but Warner Music is being as selective. “This isn’t a stunt, and it’s not a parlor trick,” she added. “It was important to have a song worthy of him.”
___
This story has been updated to correct one instance of the song title “Where That Came From,” instead of “What That Came From.”
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In the past few days, you may have noticed something new inside Meta’s apps, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp: an artificially intelligent chatbot. Within those apps, you can chat with Meta AI and type in questions and requests like “What’s the weather this week in […]
BlogIn the past few days, you may have noticed something new inside Meta’s apps, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp: an artificially intelligent chatbot.
Within those apps, you can chat with Meta AI and type in questions and requests like “What’s the weather this week in New York?” or “Write a poem about two dogs living in San Francisco.” The assistant will come up with responses immediately, such as “The corgi was short, with a butt so wide, the lab was tall, with a tongue that would glide.” You can also instruct Meta AI to produce pictures — like an illustration of a family watching fireworks.
This is Meta’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot that upended the tech industry in 2022, and similar bots including Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Bing AI. The Meta bot’s image generator also competes with AI imaging tools like Adobe’s Firefly, Midjourney and DALL-E.
Unlike other chatbots and image generators, Meta’s AI assistant is a free tool baked into apps that billions of people use every day, making it the most aggressive push yet from a big tech company to bring this flavor of artificial intelligence — known as generative AI — to the mainstream.
“We believe Meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use,” Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, wrote on Instagram on April 18.
The new bot invites you to “ask Meta AI anything” — but my advice, after testing it for six days, is to approach it with caution. It makes lots of mistakes when you treat it as a search engine. For now, you can have some fun: Its image generator can be a clever way to express yourself when chatting with friends.
A Meta spokesperson said that because the technology was new, it might not always return accurate responses, similar to other AI systems. There is no way to turn off Meta AI inside the apps.
Here’s what doesn’t work well — and what does — in Meta’s AI.
Meta announced its chatbot as a replacement for web search. By typing queries for Meta AI into the search bar at the top of Messenger or Instagram, a group of friends planning a trip could look up flights while chatting, the company said.
I’ll be blunt: Don’t do this. Meta AI fails spectacularly at basic search queries like looking up recipes, airfares and weekend activities.
In response to my request to look up flights from New York to Colorado, the chatbot listed instructions on how to take public transportation from the Denver airport to downtown. And when I asked for flights from Oakland, California, to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, the bot listed flights departing from Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
When I asked Meta AI to look up a recipe for baking Japanese milk bread, the bot produced a generic bread recipe that skipped the most important step: tangzhong, the technique that involves cooking flour and milk into a paste.
The AI also made up other basic information. When I asked it for suggestions for a romantic weekend in Oakland, its list included a fictional business. And when I asked it to tell me about myself — Brian Chen the journalist — it said I worked at The New York Times but incorrectly mentioned a tech blog I’ve never written for, The Verge.
Bing AI and Gemini, which are hooked directly into the Microsoft and Google search engines, did better at these types of search tasks, but clicking on a link through an old-fashioned web search is still more efficient.
AI chatbots work by looking for patterns in how words are used together, similar to the predictive text systems on our phones that suggest words to complete a sentence. All of them have struggled with numbers.
Unsurprisingly, Meta’s assistant stinks at counting. When you ask it for a five-syllable word starting with the letter w, it will respond with “wonderfully,” which has four syllables. When you ask it for a four-syllable word starting with w, it will offer “wonderful,” which has three syllables. Gemini and ChatGPT also fail at these tests.
Like other chatbots, Meta’s performed better the more information you gave it.
It excelled at editing existing paragraphs. For example, when I fed Meta AI paragraphs that felt verbose and asked for the paragraph to be tightened, the chatbot trimmed all the unnecessary words. When I asked it to improve a sentence written in passive voice, the bot rewrote it in active voice and added more context. When I asked it to remove jargon from a paragraph written by a tech blog, it rewrote highly technical terms in plain language.
Because Meta AI is better when it works with existing text, it can be helpful for studying. For instance, if you’re taking a history class and studying World War II, you can paste a website with information about the war into the search bar and then ask the bot to quiz you. The chatbot will read the information on the website and generate a multiple-choice test.
The most compelling aspect of Meta AI is its ability to generate images by typing “/imagine” followed by a description of the desired image. For instance, “/imagine a photograph of a cat sleeping on a window sill” will produce a convincing image in a few seconds.
Meta’s AI is much faster than other image generators like Midjourney, which can take more than a minute. The results can be very weird — images of people occasionally lacked limbs or looked cross-eyed.
Ethics experts have raised concerns about the implications of generating fake images because they can contribute to the spread of misinformation online. But in the context of using AI while chatting with friends and family in WhatsApp and Messenger, Meta AI is a positive example of how generating fake images can be fun — and safe — if we treat it as a new form of emoji.
In a group conversation with my in-laws, I mentioned I was shopping for a robust baby stroller that could withstand the crooked roads of my neighborhood. In seconds, my wife used Meta AI to generate an image of a stroller with enormous wheels that made it resemble a monster truck, stamped with a helpful label that said, “Imagined with AI.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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Builders are finally making a dent in the state’s housing shortfall, especially for apartments. But home prices and mortgage rates continue to outpace income gains, and affordability is worsening rather than improving. “The story with interest rates is that they are only exacerbating the problem,” […]
BlogBuilders are finally making a dent in the state’s housing shortfall, especially for apartments. But home prices and mortgage rates continue to outpace income gains, and affordability is worsening rather than improving.
“The story with interest rates is that they are only exacerbating the problem,” said Steven Byers, chief economist with the Common Sense Institute in Denver. “The fact is that wages aren’t keeping up with these huge jumps in home prices.”
For the first time since July 2022, home prices in all major U.S. metros, including Denver, rose year-over-year, reports brokerage firm Redfin. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index for Denver has home prices up 2.7% the past year through February.
After five weeks of increases, the average interest rate charged on a 30-year loan reached 7.22%, the highest level since Thanksgiving, according to Freddie Mac.
Purchasing a home was hard before, and it is only getting harder. In 2011, a buyer in Colorado could expect to work 44 hours a month on average to cover the mortgage payment. That bar moved up to 96 hours last year, a 118% increase, according to CSI’s Colorado Housing Competitiveness Index, which Byers co-authored.
Things are only slightly better for renters. They had to work 45 hours on average to cover the monthly rent in 2011. Now they have to work 87 hours. Colorado tenants devote more hours of work a month to meet the rent than do residents of any other state, according to the CSI report.
After the Great Recession, metro Denver became a hot spot for young professionals and tech workers looking to relocate. Demand for housing outstripped supply, causing home prices and rents to rise. Net domestic migration has fallen the past two years, as more people pick up and leave and fewer move in, Byers said. Higher housing costs have made the state less attractive.
That is both good and bad. Slower population growth should reduce pressure on the housing market and give builders time to catch up, stabilizing home prices and rents over time. But it also leaves employers and the larger economy, long dependent on importing the talent it needs, vulnerable. If the economy stalls, those struggling with higher living costs could pay the price.
Of the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, only six have median home prices that align with median incomes, according to a study from Clever Real Estate. Denver had the 8th biggest gap between in the amount of income needed to attain a median-priced home.
Zillow places the typical home value in metro Denver at just shy of $561,000 in December. Assuming a 20% downpayment and at current mortgage rates, an annual income of $167,562 would be required to buy that home, according to the Clever Real Estate study.
But here’s where it gets painful. The median income for metro Denver households is $98,975 a year, resulting in a shortfall of $68,587. Denver residents earn above-average incomes, but the higher pay isn’t enough to cover way above-average housing costs.
Wages tend to be lower in other parts of the state, and the affordability “gap” statewide is a little larger at $69,587. Colorado’s median home price is $531,900, not too far behind the metro Denver median price. With 20% down, that requires an income of $158,889, according to Clever Real Estate. The median household income statewide is $89,302.
Absent outside help, first-time buyers are often hard-pressed to put 20% down. That would require $112,200 on the typical home in Denver. What could someone putting 10% down and making the median income in Denver afford after the recent jump in mortgage rates? Clever Real Estate puts that amount closer to $270,000 to $280,000.
Good luck finding that. Out of 6,458 single-family home closings in metro Denver in the first three months of the year, only 50 involved a home priced below $300,000, according to the Denver Metro Association of Realtors.
Buyers of condos and townhomes face better odds, with 452 out of 2,343 sales this year below $300,000. But even there, only 20% of listings are affordable to households earning a median income. Only 5.7% of sales, homes or condos, were attainable.
The hurdle is even higher for new home buyers. The median new home price in Colorado is about $650,000, according to a study from the National Association of Homebuilders. Only one in five households in the state can afford something at that price point. Two million households in the state can’t afford to purchase a new home at the middle price point.
Most renters have limited options when it comes to buying in metro Denver. But in their favor, renting offers a substantial discount over buying right now, according to a separate analysis from Bankrate, the personal finance website.
The typical monthly payment for the median-priced home is around $3,627 in metro Denver, including the mortgage payment, property taxes and insurance. By contrast, the typical rent is $2,027 when looking at a rent index from Zillow that combines apartment, condo and home rents.
Renting was cheaper than buying in all 50 metros studied, but Denver had the ninth largest gap at $1,600. That 79% premium was much larger than the 36.6% premium to own nationally.
“I wouldn’t say rent is affordable, but between buying and renting, renting is the lesser of the two evils,” said Alex Gailey, lead data reporter at Bankrate and the author of the analysis.
In an ideal world, renters would sock away that extra money as emergency savings. After that, savings would be invested in the stock market, which has provided a higher return than owning a home over time. If an employer matches a retirement plan contribution, that would translate into an automatic 50% return off the bat.
But most renters probably won’t follow that strategy, leaving them vulnerable long-term, Gailey acknowledges. If an area isn’t losing population, homes should rise in value even after accounting for repairs and maintenance.
That equity can be poured into buying a bigger home down the road, or it can help fund expenses in retirement or be passed onto children and heirs, building inter-generational wealth. Also, mortgage payments can be locked in, while a rent payment can’t.
“You are building equity for yourself rather than for someone else,” said Jen Ankrum, director of sales for KB Home in Colorado, when asked about the message the company shares with renters looking to buy.
First-time buyers account for about half of the sales at KB Home, which strives to provide a high-quality, energy-efficient home priced below the competition. Even with the heavy focus on first-timers, about a third of buyers make under $100,000, a third make $100,000 to $150,000 and a third make more than that amount.
Normally, the housing market tries to find an equilibrium, offsetting rising interest costs with slower price gains or even price declines. But demographics have prevented that from happening. Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, are now the nation’s largest generation at 72 million. They are behind schedule compared to prior generations when it comes to buying homes and pushing hard to acquire them even if the conditions aren’t favorable.
Markets where more millennials relocated to have housing markets under the most pressure. A little more than six in 10 homebuyers in metro Denver are millennials — only San Francisco and San Jose in California and Boston have a higher share of millennial buyers, according to a study from loan portal LendingTree.
None of those markets would be considered affordable. In Denver, millennial buyers on average made a downpayment of $70,710 and borrowed $456,805 to purchase a home, LendingTree reports.
“A big reason why millennials concentrate in expensive housing markets is because those areas often have robust and relatively high-paying job markets,” said Jacob Channel, a senior economist at LendingTree and author of the report.
Large tech companies are reducing their headcounts and a recession, when it comes, could accelerate layoffs. What happens if those high-paying jobs go away but the high mortgage payments don’t? But Channel doesn’t see a systemic risk to the housing market.
“While there are doubtlessly some millennials who are currently stretched too thin and must contend with the prospect of downsizing or, in the worst case, foreclosure, the number of people struggling isn’t large enough for there to be a serious risk to the broader housing market,” Channel said.
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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — On a Monday morning last month, tech executives, engineers and sales representatives from Amazon, Google, TikTok and other companies endured a three-hour traffic jam as their cars crawled toward a mammoth conference at an event space in the desert, 50 miles […]
BlogRIYADH, Saudi Arabia — On a Monday morning last month, tech executives, engineers and sales representatives from Amazon, Google, TikTok and other companies endured a three-hour traffic jam as their cars crawled toward a mammoth conference at an event space in the desert, 50 miles outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The lure: billions of dollars in Saudi money as the kingdom seeks to build a tech industry to complement its oil dominance.
To bypass the congestion, frustrated eventgoers drove onto the highway shoulder, kicking up plumes of desert sand as they sped past those following traffic rules. A lucky few took advantage of a special freeway exit dedicated to “VVIPs” — very, very important people.
“To the Future,” a sign read on the approach to the event, called Leap.
More than 200,000 people converged at the conference, including Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon’s cloud computing division, who announced a $5.3 billion investment in Saudi Arabia for data centers and artificial intelligence technology. Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, spoke of what a government minister called a “lifetime friendship” with the kingdom. Executives from Huawei and dozens of other firms made speeches. More than $10 billion in deals were done there, according to Saudi Arabia’s state press agency.
“This is a great country,” Shou Chew, TikTok’s CEO, said during the conference, heralding the video app’s growth in the kingdom. “We expect to invest even more.”
Everybody in tech seems to want to make friends with Saudi Arabia right now as the kingdom has trained its sights on becoming a dominant player in AI — and is pumping in eye-popping sums to do so.
Saudi Arabia created a $100 billion fund this year to invest in AI and other technology. It is in talks with Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and other investors to put an additional $40 billion into AI companies. In March, the government said it would invest $1 billion in a Silicon Valley-inspired startup accelerator to lure AI entrepreneurs to the kingdom. The initiatives easily dwarf those of most major nation-state investments, like Britain’s $100 million pledge for the Alan Turing Institute.
The spending blitz stems from a generational effort outlined in 2016 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and known as “Vision 2030.” Saudi Arabia is racing to diversify its oil-rich economy in areas like tech, tourism, culture and sports — investing a reported $200 million a year for soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and planning a 100-mile-long mirrored skyscraper in the desert.
For the tech industry, Saudi Arabia has long been a funding spigot. But the kingdom is now redirecting its oil wealth into building a domestic tech industry, requiring international firms to establish roots there if they want its money.
If Crown Prince Mohammed succeeds, he will place Saudi Arabia in the middle of an escalating global competition among China, the United States and other countries like France that have made breakthroughs in generative AI. Combined with AI efforts by its neighbor, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia’s plan has the potential to create a new power center in the global tech industry.
“I hereby invite all dreamers, innovators, investors and thinkers to join us, here in the kingdom, to achieve our ambitions together,” Crown Prince Mohammed remarked in a 2020 speech about AI.
His ambitions are geopolitically delicate as China and the United States seek to carve out spheres of influence over AI to shape the future of critical technologies.
In Washington, many worry that the kingdom’s goals and authoritarian leanings could work against U.S. interests — for instance, if Saudi Arabia ends up providing computing power to Chinese researchers and companies. This month, the White House brokered a deal for Microsoft to invest in G42, an AI company in the UAE, which was intended partly to diminish China’s influence.
For China, the Persian Gulf region offers a big market, access to deep-pocketed investors and a chance to wield influence in countries traditionally allied with the United States. China’s form of AI-powered surveillance has already been embedded into policing in the region.
Some industry leaders have begun to arrive. Jürgen Schmidhuber, an AI pioneer who now heads an AI program at Saudi Arabia’s premier research university, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, recalled the kingdom’s roots centuries ago as a center for science and mathematics.
“It would be lovely to contribute to a new world and resurrect this golden age,” he said. “Yes, it will cost money, but there’s a lot of money in this country.”
The willingness to spend was front and center last month at a gala in Riyadh hosted by the Saudi government, which coincided with the Leap conference. Hollywood klieg lights blazed in the sky above the city as guests arrived in chauffeured Maseratis, Mercedes-Benzes and Porsches. Inside a 300,000-square-foot parking garage that had been converted two years ago into one of the world’s largest startup spaces, attendees mingled, debated opening offices in Riyadh and sipped pomegranate juice and cardamom-flavored coffee.
“There’s something happening here,” said Hilmar Veigar Petursson, the CEO of CCP Games, the Icelandic company behind the popular game Eve Online, who was at the gala. “I got a very similar sense when I came back from China in 2005.”
Crown Prince Mohammed’s Vision 2030 project, unveiled eight years ago, seems taken from a science-fiction script.
Under the plan, new futuristic cities will be built in the desert along the Red Sea, oriented around tech and digital services. And the kingdom, which has piled billions into tech startups like Uber and investment vehicles such as SoftBank’s Vision Fund, would spend more.
That drew Silicon Valley’s attention. When Crown Prince Mohammed visited California in 2018, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, escorted him through a tree-lined path at the company’s campus. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, showed him the company’s products. The prince also traveled to Seattle, where he met with Bill Gates of Microsoft; Satya Nadella, the company’s CEO; and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
It was a key moment for Saudi Arabia’s tech ambitions as Crown Prince Mohammed presented himself as a youthful, digitally savvy reformer. But enthusiasm dimmed a few months later when Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and critic of the crown prince, was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The prince denied involvement, but the CIA concluded that he had approved the killing.
For a brief period, it was seen as untoward to associate with Saudi Arabia. Business executives canceled visits to the kingdom. But the lure of its money was ultimately too strong.
AI development depends on two key things that Saudi Arabia has in abundance: money and energy. The kingdom is pouring oil profits into buying semiconductors, building supercomputers, attracting talent and constructing data centers powered by its plentiful electricity. The bet is that Saudi Arabia will eventually export AI computing muscle.
Majid Ali AlShehry, the general manager of studies for the Saudi Data and AI Authority, a government agency overseeing AI initiatives, said 70% of the 96 strategic goals outlined in Vision 2030 involved using data and AI.
“We see AI as one of the main enablers of all sectors,” he said in an interview at the agency’s office in Riyadh, where employees nearby worked on an Arabic chatbot called Allam.
Those goals have permeated the kingdom. Posters for Vision 2030 are visible throughout Riyadh. Young Saudis describe the crown prince as running the kingdom as if it were a startup. Many tech leaders have parroted the sentiment.
“Saudi has a founder,” Ben Horowitz, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, said last year at a conference in Miami. “You don’t call him a founder. You call him his royal highness.”
Some question whether Saudi Arabia can become a global tech hub. The kingdom has faced scrutiny for its human rights record, intolerance to homosexuality and brutal heat. But for those in the tech world who descended on Riyadh last month, the concerns seemed secondary to the dizzying amount of deal-making underway.
“They are just pouring money into AI,” said Peter Lillian, an engineer at Groq, a U.S. maker of semiconductors that power AI systems. Groq is working with Neom, a futuristic city that Saudi Arabia is building in the desert, and Aramco, the state oil giant. “We’re doing so many deals,” he said.
Situated along the Red Sea’s turquoise waters, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology has become a site of the U.S.-Chinese technological showdown.
The university, known as KAUST, is central to Saudi Arabia’s plans to vault to AI leadership. Modeled on universities like the California Institute of Technology, KAUST has brought in foreign AI leaders and provided computing resources to build an epicenter for AI research.
To achieve that aim, KAUST has often turned to China to recruit students and professors and to strike research partnerships, alarming U.S. officials. They fear students and professors from Chinese military-linked universities will use KAUST to sidestep U.S. sanctions and boost China in the race for AI supremacy, analysts and U.S. officials said.
Of particular concern is the university’s construction of one of the region’s fastest supercomputers, which needs thousands of microchips made by Nvidia, the biggest maker of precious chips that power AI systems. The university’s chip order, with an estimated value of more than $100 million, is being held up by a review from the U.S. government, which must provide an export license before the sale can go through.
China and the United States want to keep Crown Prince Mohammed close. AI ambitions add a new layer of geopolitical significance to a kingdom already key to Middle East policy and global energy supplies. A 2016 visit to Saudi Arabia by Xi Jinping, China’s leader, paved the way for new tech cooperation. Accustomed to top-down industrial policy, Chinese companies have expanded rapidly in the kingdom, forming partnerships with major state-owned companies. The United States has pushed Saudi Arabia to pick a side, but Crown Prince Mohammed seems content to benefit from both nations.
Schmidhuber, the researcher leading KAUST’s AI efforts, has seen the jostling up close. Considered a pioneer of modern AI — students in a lab he led included a founder of DeepMind, an innovative AI company now owned by Google — he was lured to the desert in 2021.
He was reluctant to move at first, he said, but university officials, via a headhunter, “tried to make it more attractive and even more attractive and even more attractive for me.”
Schmidhuber is awaiting the completion of the supercomputer, Shaheen 3, which is a chance to attract more top talent to the Persian Gulf and to give researchers access to computing power often reserved for major companies.
“No other university is going to have a similar thing,” he said.
Some in Washington fear the supercomputer may provide researchers from Chinese universities access to cutting-edge computing resources they would not have in China. More than a dozen students and staff members at KAUST are from military-linked Chinese universities known as the Seven Sons of National Defense, according to a review by The New York Times. During the Trump administration, the United States blocked entry to students from those universities over concerns that they could take sensitive technologies back to China’s military.
“The United States should quickly move to deny export licenses to any entity if the end user is likely to be a PRC actor affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., said in a statement.
A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the default U.S. policy was to share technology with Saudi Arabia, a critical ally in the Persian Gulf, but that there were national security concerns and risks with AI.
The Commerce Department declined to comment. In a statement, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “We hope that relevant countries will work with China to resist coercion, jointly safeguard a fair and open international economic and trade order, and safeguard their own long-term interests.”
A KAUST spokesperson said: “We will strictly comply with all U.S. export license terms and conditions for the full life cycle of Shaheen 3.”
Schmidhuber said the Saudi government was ultimately aligned with the United States. Just as U.S. technology helped create Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, it will play a critical role in AI development.
“Nobody wants to jeopardize that,” he said.
Aladin Ben, a German Tunisian AI entrepreneur, was in Bali, Indonesia, last year when he received an email from a Saudi agency working on AI issues. The agency knew his software startup, Memorality, which designs tools to make it easier for businesses to incorporate AI, and wanted to work together.
Since then, Ben, 31, has traveled to Saudi Arabia five times. He is now negotiating with the kingdom on an investment and other partnerships. But his company may need to incorporate in Saudi Arabia to get the full benefit of the government’s offer, which includes buying hundreds of annual subscriptions to his software in a contract worth roughly $800,000 a month.
“If you want a serious deal, you need to be here,” Ben said in an interview in Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia was once viewed as a source of few-strings-attached cash. Now it has added conditions to its deals, requiring many companies to establish roots in the kingdom to partake in the financial windfall.
That was evident at GAIA, an AI startup accelerator, for which Saudi officials announced $1 billion in funding last month.
Each startup in the program receives a grant worth about $40,000 in exchange for spending at least three months in Riyadh, along with a potential $100,000 investment. Entrepreneurs are required to register their company in the kingdom and spend 50% of their investment in Saudi Arabia. They also receive access to computing power purchased from Amazon and Google free of charge.
About 50 startups — including from Taiwan, South Korea, Sweden, Poland and the United States — have gone through GAIA’s program since it started last year.
“We want to attract talent, and we want them to stay,” said Mohammed Almazyad, a program manager for GAIA. “We used to rely heavily on oil, and now we want to diversify.”
One of the biggest enticements for AI startups is the chance to make the deep-pocketed Saudi government a customer. In one recent meeting, Abdullah Alswaha, a senior minister for communications and information technology, asked GAIA’s startups to suggest what they could provide for the Saudi government, including for megacity projects like Neom. Afterward, many of the companies received messages introducing them to state-owned businesses, Almazyad said.
“I would say this process at the first stages is not organic,” he said. “You don’t find this in Silicon Valley. Eventually the process will be organic.”
Deciding to set up in Riyadh comes with challenges. There’s the heat, reaching more than 110 degrees in the summer, as well as the adjustments of moving to a deeply religious Muslim kingdom. While Saudi Arabia has loosened some restrictions in recent years, freedom of speech remains limited and LGBTQ+ people can face criminal penalties.
Almazyad, who hopes to eventually study in the United States, said cultural differences could make it hard to recruit international AI talent. But he cautioned against underestimating Saudi Arabia’s resolve.
“This is just the beginning,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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A high school athletic director in Maryland has been accused of using artificial intelligence to impersonate a principal on an audio recording that included racist and antisemitic comments, authorities said last month. Authorities said the case appears to be among the first of its kind […]
BlogA high school athletic director in Maryland has been accused of using artificial intelligence to impersonate a principal on an audio recording that included racist and antisemitic comments, authorities said last month.
Authorities said the case appears to be among the first of its kind in the country and called for new laws to guard against the technology. Experts also warned that artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly powerful, while the ability to detect it may lag behind without more resources.
Dazhon Darien faked the voice of Pikesville High School’s principal in response to conversations the men had about Darien’s poor work performance and whether his contract would be renewed, Baltimore County police said.
Concerns included allegations that Darien paid his roommate $1,900 in school funds under the false pretense of coaching the girls soccer team, police said.
Darien forged an audio clip in which it sounded as if the principal was frustrated with Black students and their test-taking abilities, police wrote in charging documents. They said the recording also purported to capture the principal disparaging Jewish individuals and two teachers.
The audio clip quickly spread on social media and had “profound repercussions,” the court documents stated, with the principal being placed on leave. The recording put the principal and his family at “significant risk,” while police officers provided security at his house, according to authorities.
The recording also triggered a wave of hate-filled messages on social media and an inundation of phone calls to the school, police said. Activities were disrupted for a time, and some staff felt unsafe.
“Teachers have expressed fears that recording devices could have been planted in various places in the school,” the charging documents stated.
Darien, 31, faces charges that include theft, disrupting school activities, stalking and retaliating against a witness, according to court documents.
Scott Shellenberger, the Baltimore County state’s attorney, said the case appears to be one of the first of its kind nationwide involving artificial intelligence that his office was able to find. He said Maryland’s Legislature may need to update state laws to catch up with the nefarious possibilities of the new technology.
For example, the charge of disrupting school activities “only carries a 6-month sentence,” Shellenberger said.
“But we also need to take a broader look at how this technology can be used and abused to harm other people,” the prosecutor said.
Baltimore County detectives had asked experts to analyze the recording made by Darien, according to the charges against him.
A professor from the University of Colorado-Denver told police that it “contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact, which added background noises for realism,” court records stated.
A second opinion from a professor at the University of California-Berkley told police that “multiple recordings were spliced together,” according to the records.
A Baltimore County detective found that Darien had used Large Language Models, such as OpenAI and Bingchat, which can “tell users what steps to take to create synthetic media,” court documents stated.
Online court records for Darien show that he posted $5,000 bond April 25. The records did not list an attorney who might be able to speak on his behalf.
Darien was arrested April 24 before he was to board a plane at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said. Darien was stopped because of how he had packaged his firearm for the flight, leading officers to learn he had a warrant for his arrest, according to McCullough.
McCullough said he didn’t know why Darien was catching a flight to Houston and did not suggest that he was trying to escape.
The Baltimore County school system is recommending Darien’s termination, superintendent Myriam Rogers said Thursday.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly powerful and yet “very easy to use,” said Siwei Lyu, director of a media forensics lab at the University at Buffalo.
“You can basically upload any subject’s voice up to this platform,” Lyu told The Associated Press on Thursday. “And then you can give it text and you can start creating voices of that person.”
A recording of someone talking for a minute or two can be gleaned from social media and used to recreate someone’s voice, Lyu said, noting that it’s not always perfect.
Lyu’s research focuses on identifying AI-generated voices and images. He said the models are becoming more powerful, while detection methods are trying to catch up.
“It’s kind of like a perpetual cat-and-mouse game,” Lyu said. “But if I project the speed of development based on today’s situation, detection will lag behind because we have less resources and are not getting as much attention as the generative side.”
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