If you’re an entrepreneur, artist and/or associated with the creative class in the SF Bay Area, you may want to check out the neighborhood surrounding the Jack London Square waterfront. The area has already attracted a number of architects, consultants and media-related firms.
Oakland’s Mayor Jerry Brown and former presidential candidate was a pioneer in helping transform what was a dormant, underutilized industrial district (much of it centered on produce) into an emerging hip destination.
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Not a surprising headline yesterday coming from the NY Times, unless… the story is about a project in Los Angeles!
That’s right, Pasadena is getting a 347-apartment transit-oriented development, bisected by and situated above L.A.‘s light rail line. The award-winning new neighborhood, Del Mar Station. It makes sense, since studies show U.S. ‘households in transit zones own an average of 0.9 cars, compared with 1.6 cars for metropolitan regions’ and ‘California state residents living near
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The timing is right for pedestrian streets. While just a vision for now, this could become a built reality if Roanoke, Virginia’s leaders have their way…
“It’s stunningly cool,“ said Ford Kemper, a lawyer and board member of Downtown Roanoke Inc., a tax-supported entity that oversees the city’s historic center.
Regarding the proposals… “They’re right on. They’re revolutionary, they’re bright, they’re fresh... They could completely change the face of our downtown,“ said Downtown Roanoke
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It shows you have to be patient to be progressive. A year and three months since we first introduced you to Upper Rock District, a proposed ‘CoolTown’ in Rockville, MD, it received formal city approval to be built. More here.
Municipalities take note, not many developers are this patient, and serious institutional investors (like this one) will not wait more than six months, and certainly not fifteen. Even then, the developers did not expect approvals to take this long, as it seems the
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Much of the plan for San Francisco’s Treasure Island, a 403-acre man-made former military base below the Bay Bridge, is already laid out. However, what if the progressive idea of the beta community; future residents and tenants visioning their own neighborhood into reality in partnership with developers and investors, was in full motion today?
We’d perhaps get the proposal for Treasure Island similar to that of urban design students at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design - 20,000
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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
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Wayne State University announces CoolTown plans
Wayne State University press release:
Wayne State University took another significant step in the development of its campus and the redevelopment of Midtown Detroit Wednesday with the selection of developers for four properties on the south perimeter of the university’s main campus.
The Woodward location, currently a parking lot adjacent to WSU’s University Tower Apartments, will be the signature complex in an area to be known as South
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It’s slowly starting to happen - people are gradually getting the opportunity to take part in shaping the kinds of communities they really want to live in.
The small town of LaGrange just signed an agreement with a private sector group, along with a to-be-established CoolTown pre-tenant community to build CoolTown neighborhoods on strategic sites in the city.
Meanwhile, Wayne State University (first mentioned here) has selected The Town Builders Collaborative as the investment/development
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Here’s the result of the ‘entrepreneurial village’ charrette being covered since the beginning of this week (scroll down to blog entries below): The new Upper Rock District.
The highlight of the proposed project is a two-story entrepreneurial marketplace designed for the utmost in affordability (buildings on right side of leftmost image). Simple in design with an open floor plan to save costs, and positioned as a cultural amenity by the developer to keep rents below market, this unique
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“Intelligent City of the Year 2000” by the World Teleport Association. The first City in the world to offer free internet access to all its connected residents. Home to more Fortune 500 companies per capita than any other city its size. America’s Greatest Little City?
Yesterday I met with the city government’s leaders (along with the founder of The Kentlands Initiative), and found them unlike any I’ve ever met. They not only understood the CoolTown vision, but they were motivated to
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