A report from the Milwaukee Biz Times in Wisconsin. "Barrett Lo Visionary Development, the real estate development firm that has been working for years to build a 44-story luxury apartment building at a site near the lakefront in downtown Milwaukee, on Friday paid its delinquent property tax bill for the site. Barrett Lo’s tax bill of $353,796.57 for the site was due on Jan. 31 The firm has been charged $47,762.54 in interest since then, bringing the total amount owed to $401,559.11."

"In a statement issued earlier this week, Barrett Lo described the property tax delinquency for the site as 'an oversight on our part that we were made aware of on (Oct. 4),' the statement said. Barrett has said publicly that his firm needs to secure $15 million in financing to get construction going for The Couture. When asked by BizTimes for an update on efforts to obtain the final financing for The Couture, Barrett said, 'We’re working on it. We’re doing really well.'"

The Davis Enterprise in California. "In April, a housing agency leasing apartments mainly to UC Davis students from China quietly stopped forwarding the students’ rent to heir apartments, setting off a chain of events a lawyer would later call the 'most interesting case' she has ever worked on."

"After the agency, WeHousing, neglected to give the students’ April rent money to the apartments, property managers at nine Davis apartment complexes served a total of about 100 students eviction notices. 'It was a big shock,' said Guanlin Li, a computer science student from China who had paid that month’s rent to WeHousing as usual."

"According to WeHousing founder Alan Gao, the company went into debt after failing to fill about a third of their units for the year. The company leased apartments in Davis as well as in several other college towns across the country. In April, some of those loans came due. 'For April and May, we used most of the rents collected to pay off loans,' Gao said."

"Gao told media outlets and apartment managers the company wanted to get out of its contracts with the apartments to limit future losses. However, accounts by students, property managers and lawyers indicate that Gao did everything in his power to prevent the apartments from terminating the contracts, thereby forcing the property managers to 'evict' the company in order to get their units back."

"'If he wanted to walk away, he could,' Kevin Schultz, the onsite manager at the Drake Apartments. 'Instead, he’s demanding the residents continue to pay him while he doesn’t intend to pay us.'"

"While the terms are clearly stated in the WeHousing contracts, students said they had no idea they were entering into an unusual type of housing agreement and signing away their rights. 'WeHousing didn’t explain anything about license versus landlord,' said Kang Sheng, a UCLA student from Singapore. 'I don’t think any of us expected anything more complicated.' Many of the students signed the contracts before arriving in the U.S."

"Several months after moving in, Sheng said, he realized there was something odd about the housing agreement. 'WeHousing rented out the living room. Then there were situations where people would come and stay for a night and then leave. We didn’t know who they were,' Sheng said. 'We felt personally unsafe.'"

The West Side Rag in New York. "Duane Reade will be closing its three-level store at 325 Columbus Avenue on 75th Street, the company said in a sign on the door. The news comes after two other chains closed on the same block — Starbucks shuttered its cafe across the street earlier this year, and Chase Bank announced in September that it was closing its branch on the north half of the Duane Reade block."

"Locals are getting nervous — if the big guys can’t pay the rent, or don’t want to, who will move in? Our tipster Kevin, who sent the photo above, worried that few business can make it in the area anymore. 'If Duane Reade, Chase, and Starbucks all can’t operate profitably here, how can anything survive? I’m not sure what the landlords of these addresses are planning on for the future, but these are very large spaces with massive rents and I imagine they’ll need to subdivide it. If it wasn’t for Asset opening and Da Capo, this block would look post-apocalyptic.'"