Norouz and the Rising Sun on Fifth Avenue

My Haft Seen this year, a traditional table set for the Persian New Year. It’s a quiet arrangement of symbolic objects marking renewal, health, and new beginnings. Norouz, the Persian New Year, is celebrated by millions at the exact moment of the vernal equinox. This year it was on Friday at 10:46am.

A new year on the first day of spring.

Earlier this week, a small group of us gathered in a friend’s garden in New York and jumped over small bonfires, chanting:

“Zardiye man az to, sorkhiye to az man.”

Translated: “Give me your vibrant red glow and health, and take from me my sallow pallor and sickness.” This is Chaharshanbeh Suri, an ancient ritual of renewal dating back to the time of Zoroaster.

Norouz Pirouz to all who celebrate.

In This Week’s Issue:

What I’m Watching — The Strait of Hormuz, NYC’s tech rise, the new face of retail, a pocket of silence, Dubai’s open door
National Market Insights — Insurance costs, The Fed
The Artist — Monira Al Qadiri and the Rising Sun on Fifth Avenue
Manhattan Market Update — Spring arrives on the ground

What I’m Watching

The Strait of Hormuz

Commanding More Attention Than AI

Interest in Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman continues to surge. Mentions of it across all sources on the Bloomberg Terminal have now surged past even those of the AI revolution — a striking measure of how completely geopolitical risk has moved to the center of global markets. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes through that strait. The effects ripple into oil prices, inflation expectations, interest rates, and ultimately into the cost and psychology of every real estate transaction. (Bloomberg)

Strait of Hormuz

New York’s Second Act

The City’s Rise As A Tech Bub

New York City is now the second-largest tech hub in the United States, just behind the San Francisco Bay Area. It is home to roughly 9% of the nation’s AI workforce and tens of thousands of AI-related job postings. The city also supports one of the country’s largest startup ecosystems, with thousands of active companies across sectors.

That growth is increasingly visible in the housing market, where a new generation of tech-driven wealth is becoming a meaningful and growing source of demand across Manhattan, particularly in neighborhoods like Hudson Yards, Flatiron, and the West Village.

The New Retail

Why Your Block Looks Different

For the first time in recorded history, service-oriented tenants — salons, spas, yoga and Pilates studios — leased just over 50% of total retail square footage in 2025, outpacing goods-based retail. Fifteen years ago, service tenants accounted for just 40% of leasing. Today e-commerce handles 16.4% of all retail sales, up from roughly 8% in 2016, and apparel brands are actively shrinking their store footprints. The corner that used to be a clothing boutique is now a Pilates studio. The data has finally caught up with what we’ve been watching happen in real time. (WSJ)

Silence as a Feature

Apple’s AirPods Max 2

In a year that has felt relentlessly loud, the ability to create a pocket of quiet is not a small thing. Apple’s AirPods Max 2 bring meaningfully better Active Noise Cancellation, elevated sound quality, and features worth knowing about — Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, and even Live Translation!

Dubai’s Open Door

UAE Recalibrates Residency Rules

The UAE has signaled it will allow expats to spend more time abroad without losing their tax residency status — a direct effort to bring back residents who left following the outbreak of the Iran conflict. British Airways has canceled all flights to Dubai through June. (FT)

National Market Insights

Three things converging right now that every buyer and homeowner should understand.

Insurance costs now represent a record 9% of the typical American homeowner’s monthly payment, and rates are expected to rise another 8% this year on average. That is no longer a footnote in the cost of homeownership. It is a line item reshaping affordability calculations, particularly in coastal and climate-exposed markets.

The Fed is unlikely to lower rates at its next session. With oil prices volatile, ranging between $81 and $119 per barrel in recent weeks, and geopolitical uncertainty still hanging over global markets, the central bank is unlikely to move. The 30-year conforming rate around 6.19% continues to keep pressure on buyers who need financing.

The spring market is here, but carefully. Demand is real. The math is harder for those who need financing. For cash buyers, the advantage is real.

The Artist: Monira Al Qadiri and the Rising Sun

It was at that same Chaharshanbeh Suri gathering, in a garden lit by fire, on the last Tuesday of the Persian year, that I met Monira Al Qadiri.

Kuwaiti by origin, born in Senegal, educated in Tokyo, time in Germany, and now in New York. She has lived across continents and absorbed all of them. She is strong, defiant, and has a sense of humor. A true artist in the fullest sense: someone whose work carries the weight of real ideas and delivers them with the confidence of someone who has nothing to prove.

She told us it is her work that is currently installed at one of the most iconic corners in this city. At Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, at the entrance to Central Park, stands her sculpture First Sun (photo below). It’s a monumental, iridescent aluminum figure of a hybrid human-scarab, a reimagining of Khepri, the ancient Egyptian deity of the rising sun. Androgynous, luminous, and impossible to walk past without stopping. It is her first public art exhibition in North America, and it is on view through August.

Inside the newly expanded New Museum — which reopened this weekend following a $92 million expansion designed by OMA — her work Alien Technology (Tower) is featured in New Humans: Memories of the Future, an exhibition exploring how technology is reshaping what it means to be human. It is exactly the conversation this moment demands.

Monira Al Qadiri, First Sun

Manhattan Market Update

Against that broader backdrop, it’s worth looking at what we’re actually seeing on the ground here in Manhattan as the spring market begins to take shape.