James Chanos Quotes

Growing companies need commercial space, and their employees need to live nearby.

When we started out, we were among the first. Beijing had no and Shanghai had very few large buildings. At that time, it was all about building, building, building - and then selling, selling, selling. We were working like a manufacturer. Soon, however, we realized that land was running out in Beijing and Shanghai. So we started keeping our buildings, and managing and renting them out. We became landowners. That was the second act.

London changes because of money. It's real estate. If they can build some offices or expensive apartments they will, it's money that changes everything in a city.

Commercial real estate is really a black box: its super opaque, and it's hard to get the information.

In the commercial real estate business, brokers spearhead major accounts. But they wouldn't have customers without the people who oversee construction.

I work in the commercial real estate sector.

I want to make that a reality, ... The idea is to create office space in the unused portions of the station to be leased, hopefully by ING. That would provide a cash flow to Amtrak.

Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

A skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay.

Chinais a world class if not the world class property bubble, primarily high-rise buildings, offices and condos.

Don't go and invest across the country somewhere that you don't know. Invest in a market that you know, because there are great areas in every city.

I'm interested only in buying land in my native Hawaii so that one day I can live there and have the space to rescue animals.

In Manchester, you don't have proper tall buildings. Or in Munich.

We wanted a world that looked like our world. In the original 'Flintstones,' low flat buildings filled the city and suburbs. Now, high-rise buildings and apartments exist next to the family neighborhoods. Part of the 'Flintstone' fun remains its parallel of our world.

We're not really in the real-estate space so much as we are the community-building space.

Every man deserves a castle; doesn't matter how big your castle is.

I made my money in Iscar. I spend my money on the industrial parks.

For Kips Bay, I had a wonderful client, William Zeckendorf, who was willing to gamble with me on using concrete and not brick for a high-rise apartment building. That was very innovative at the time.

In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view.

A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential

I would see my hometown, Los Angeles, change. Green space and orange groves gave way to cement, freeways flooded with traffic, and air pollution, all in the name of "progress." I felt like I was losing my home. It had a profound effect on me, and I realized just how important nature was to my spirit, my soul, my point of view.

From this distance, in the dimness, the model looked surreal, made up of parts filled with buildings, bordered by long stretches of empty space. It reminded me of the way cities and towns look when you are flying at night. You can't make out much. But the places where people have come together, and stayed, are collections of tiny lights, breaking up the darkness.

Building is a sweet impoverishing.