An excellent interactive map of New York City with income levels for various neighborhoods in reference to affordable housing. Don’t even click on the Upper East Side. [Source: Envisioning Development: What is Affordable Housing?]
Pfizer said it would pull 1,400 jobs out of New London within two years and move most of them a few miles away to a campus it owns in Groton, Conn., as a cost-cutting measure. It would leave behind the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of dozens of homes to make room for a hotel, stores and condominiums that were never built.
This decision by Pfizer to Leave New London, Connecticut is going to profoundly impact future eminent domain cases and gives a major boost to libertarians. The landmark SC ruling was unique in the sense that it acquired private land that included a built home to hand over to another private party for the “public good”. Without conditions to ensure that Pfizer would indeed add 1,400 jobs to the New London as promised, its decision to leave after just eight years is not surprising. Pfizer’s decision to move away puts paid to New London’s hopes of revitalizing the area around Kelo’s home by building an “urban village” to attract shoppers and tourists. So in effect, is Pfizer really responsible for making the city assume that they would stay forever? But Susette Kelo’s pink house still stands after it was moved across town by preservationist Avner Gregory who bought it for $1.
Dare you to sit. The World’s 13 Most Uncomfortable Chair Designs.
The nation’s sprawling suburbs may have been a good place to grow up, but they’re a tough place to grow old. Here’s how towns are beginning to ‘retrofit’ their neighborhoods—and what your community might look like in the future [source].
Interesting on how changing demographics are making retrofitting suburbia almost necessary. However, this could also mean increased focus on developing communities in alternative locations with different characteristics. Housing coming a full circle?
In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution
Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com is hosting the first ever Reburbia competition: a design competition dedicated to re-envisioning the suburbs and have just announced the finalists.
…the company boasts of illuminating its stores with low-wattage lightbulbs but positions outlets far from city centers, where taxes are low and commuting costs high—the average IKEA customer drives 50 miles round-trip. Cleverly, IKEA transfers transport and energy costs onto consumers, who are then handed the additional burden of assembling their purchases [source].
I’m a self-professed fan of Ikea but everything cited in this article is true. Consumers often fail to judge the true cost of their purchases; just because it is cheap doesn’t mean it costs less. Even to the consumer (assembling time is an opportunity cost).
Researchers discovered homeowners, on average, outweighed renters by 12 pounds. In addition to excess weight, female homeowners were also carrying around more aggravation, making less time for leisure, and were less likely to spend time with friends.
“Neighbors can hear the alarm so they call us, but when we get up to the home, it's vacant, locked up and we're unable to access them,”
Such calls are distracting firefighters from other more important calls in inhabited homes and putting a strain on the public emergency system.
via ABC15 News.
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic “shrink to survive” proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.
It is not as ominous as it sounds but is based on a experiment radical nevertheless that focuses on concentrating the dwindling population of dying cities into a smaller more viable area.
via Telegraph.
If you took out a mortgage in 2007, there's an over 20 percent chance you'll default on it.
Urban Studies Conference Alerts provides a useful list of opportunities to present your research. But the list is dominated by international events. Can we create (crowdsourcing?) a similar list focused only on the conferences in the United States? Does such a list already exist? By being focused on the U.S., the list can feature even student symposiums and smaller events.
Point: The idea that descendants of African slaves are the only people in the history of our species to be done in by the configuration of architectural blueprints is mistaken.
It was much, much more complicated than that: the culprit was aspects of social history in America starting in the late sixties, not merely how housing projects were constructed and how far their doors happened to be from the street.
John McWhorter at the New Republic argues against the commonly held perception that crimes and social conditions are worse off in taller public housing than low-rises. I don’t understand the Sonia Sotomayor connection though and it seems forced in order to attract eyeballs.
As the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most-populous state, Lucknow has attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural areas, swelling the city’s population. Yet the city hasn’t completed any major new sewage infrastructure since before the country won independence in 1947. As much as 70% of residents don’t have sewage service, leaving much of the waste to flow directly into the main river, the Gomti, which has become a stinking cesspool.
Wall Street Journal has an article on India’s megacities with the tagline that they are choking India. But is that really what is happening in India? There is an inherent understanding that there is a conflicting dichotomy between urban and rural regions. But even if it does exist, quotes in the WSJ article itself contradict its byline:
Shami Shafi, a 35-year-old laborer in Lucknow, has seen his daily income drop by half in recent months to 50 rupees, or about $1, for carrying bags of potatoes and other goods in a local market. But “I’m not going back to my village,” he says. If work gets harder to find, “I’ll just go to another city.”
Atanu Dey, noted economist and widely-respected proponent of urban India points at the real culprits of urban problems.
Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community.
An innovative experiment is current in progress in Vauban, Germany where residents of an upscale community, no less, are learning to live without cars in a suburb.
This first-of-its-kind learning conference will help you identify policies that have been successful in other communities and could work in yours.
National Housing Conference (NHC) and its research affiliate, the Center for Housing Policy is hosting the “Solutions for Working Families” Learning Conference from June 28th to 30th.