Sandy Smith wrote:
Oddly enough, the carless apartment community now rising on 17 acres next to a light-rail station there is called Culdesac. Set to open in 2022, the $170 million Culdesac Tempe is being billed by its developer, also called Culdesac, as “the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the U.S.” Residents wh...
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Daniel Herriges wrote:
Most Americans, as I said, have only ever lived in a time in which the suburban development pattern was the subsidized, heavily incentivized, all but mandated default. More Americans than not grew up in single-use residential communities, where trips to work, school, shopping or dining out were almost always made by car...
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Tiffany Owens wrote:
It was not until Europe that I realized how unused I was to seeing older people out in the city. On street after street in Rome, Munich, Madrid, Paris, I saw 70-, 80-year-old citizens participating in daily life: grocery-shopping, riding the metro, shopping with friends. Often dressed snazzier than me, they wer...
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Diana Ionescu wrote:
"The Blue Line would be the template for a much-needed economic boost for Prince George’s County that simultaneously helps the environment and maintains affordable housing." The plan "emphasizes business and economic development, crucial in a county with plenty of housing but relatively few jobs." Its authors hope it will attract large, institutiona...
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Kea Wilson wrote:
Take a second and think about where you live right now. Think about your street, your yard, your neighborhood, your city. Now, imagine you were a child.
Where would you play? Is there a park or are there woods within walking distance, or would you have to ask your busy parents t...
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Diana Ionescu wrote:
There is much for urbanists to critique about Florida's master-planned community the Villages–currently "the fastest-growing metropolitan statistical area in the country." But one thing the Imagineer-designed retirement community got right, argues Alissa Walker, is their enthusiastic support of golf carts as a transportation mode.
"Those golf carts, in fact, make a lo...
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Oscar Perry Abello wrote:
The acronym “CSO” stands for “combined sewer overflow,” and CSO points like these are a feature of combined sewer systems designed and built mostly more than a century ago. In combined sewer systems, storm drains capture rainwater runoff — and any pollutants it picks up along the way — and send...
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Rohit Naimpally (Op-Ed) wrote:
Randomized evaluations have shown the effectiveness of Housing First. For decades, most housing services required people to meet employment or sobriety requirements in order to be housed. Housing First programs do literally what they say: provide housing first, with no preconditions.
Several randomized evaluations tested Housing First programs and found tha...
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Frances McMorris wrote:
When Bloomington, Indiana, was looking to fund a recent affordable housing project, they looked outside their city — and even their state — to secure financing. A single-family home on West 9th Street near downtown Bloomington, Indiana, was renovated by Bloomington Cooperative Living to create 18 new, affordable units with funding hel...
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Charles Marohn wrote:
In the work that Urban3 has done modeling the financial productivity of different places, there is one correlation that stands out above all others. Wherever development patterns are most productive, wherever the highest value per acre is measured, those are the places where people will be found outside of a motor vehicle...
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