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November 19, 2004
A CoolTown block in Ohio (Part 2)
Continuing Ben Ezinga's story from yesterday:
"It's a sustainably-designed mixed-use building with some great retail and restaurants lined up for the first floor, and 49 mixed-income condos and apartments for rent, a mixture of live/work and loft-style.
Oberlin's a funny little creative, artsy college town with a lot of great history, architecture, and ideas, way out in the middle of northeast Ohio farmland. Every year it's refilled with bright, idealistic young people, but until recently very few of us have seemed to stay here after graduating to apply what we'd learned. There's some real progress starting to be made here, and it's fascinating to be involved in the organic emergence of a cooltown while reading about how other cities are trying to plan to become cooltowns."
Posted by Neil | Link to Article
November 18, 2004
A CoolTown block in Ohio (Part 1)
The following is a story from an emerging progressive developer in Ohio, Ben Ezinga. We need a lot more people like him...
"My name is Ben Ezinga.
I'm a young developer/entrepreneur working in Oberlin, Ohio. I graduated from Oberlin College three years ago and stuck around Oberlin with two of my friends to start a real estate development firm. (Actually, we were planning on starting a community center for local youth, centralizing a bunch of innovative programs that we'd been involved in while we were students. Then the development just sort of seemed to make sense as we figured out what it would take to change a town.) We began what was in retrospect a fantastically foolish endeavor, but over the last three years have cobbled together a mix of public, private, and philanthropic funds and are moving through predevelopment architecture and legal work.
Check out our website here to see what we're up to..." (to be continued)
Posted by Neil | Link to Article
November 17, 2004
Legalize this
The neighborhoods we really want our illegal. Really.
Yesterday's blog touched on how creative people can take charge in building their own neighborhood. ChangeThis is a national forum for change, publishing daily manifestos and guides to improving one's quality of life and purpose. One of their most recent publications is Legalize Neighborhoods Again!
City governments control the way our streets and buildings are laid out through zoning. The worst part is that this zoning mandates an auto-oriented built environment, not people-oriented. How did this happen? Read this brief.
The Legalize Neighborhoods manifesto is a call for changing these outdated zoning laws. The best way to do that, in my opinion, is to focus on building a model urban village by which new standards are made from.
Posted by Neil | Link to Article
November 16, 2004
Blank slate for a CoolTown beta community in Detroit
Some people in Detroit got tired of seeing more strip malls, subdivisions and parking. So, they formed their own group to voice their opinions and establish a new vision and direction for their future in Detroit. Now with the help of CoolTown Studios, they're establishing a beta community to help design, build and live in their own urban village! Their motto? Say it. Build it. Live it.
This is an image of the site where they're going to craft their vision, and the process begins next week Tuesday with their first charrette, an intensive design process resulting in a complete plan. Find out more on their Detroit Synergy Build web site.
More beta communities are coming. Interested in starting one? Contact us!
Posted by Neil | Link to Article
November 15, 2004
Bookstore? Ice cream shop? Art gallery? Coffeehouse?
How about a bookstore, ice cream, art gallery coffeehouse. That properly describes the Market Street Cafe in Frederick, Maryland, the second largest city in Maryland that's enjoying a bit of a renaissance.
These mutiple-venues-in-one are a growing trend in retail, and a good one too. At the Market Street Cafe you can browse through a carefully selected stock of used books, enjoy a great cup of coffee and ice cream for dessert, peruse the local art for sale on the walls, run into your neighborhood friends, then stay for open mic poetry.
The cafe opened four years ago, at the same time houses began doubling and tripling in value - that's what happens when a downtown hits the tipping point. The best is yet to come, as they're working on a San Antonio Riverwalk-type scene on their canal - then Frederick will have an active nightlife too.
Posted by Neil | Link to Article
