Well, outside of the fact that it’s hardly affordable, the renovated/new Historic Front Street in Seaport North (near the Brooklyn Bridge) in Manhattan is the best creative class development among the seventeen CNU Charter Awards profiled yesterday.

Eleven 18th century buildings plus three brand new buildings host 96 residential apartments for rent from 600 s.f. to 1400 s.f., plus thirteen retail spaces on the ground floor.  The project encompasses the entire block on either side of Front

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If you’re wondering what the best new models for placemaking are each year, it’s wise to keep tabs on the CNU’s (Congress for the New Urbanism) annual

announcement of its Charter Award winners.

Out of 160 entries, here are the 17 they chose, and I’ll profile my favorite over the next couple of days.  Each year the winners are increasingly urban, which is refreshing over past selections that were largely greenfield (ie ‘well-designed sprawl’)

Block, Street, and Building
The Cap at Union

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Environmentalists value land preservation.  Commuters hate traffic.  Home buyers can’t afford single-family homes.  There aren’t many inspiring, pedestrian-friendly places to shop, dine and be entertained.  Well, Pulte Homes just made a lot of those people happy with MetroWest in Vienna, Virginia.

64 single-family home owners on 60 acres sold their homes at a hefty profit so that Pulte could build 2250 homes, plus 300,000 s.f. of office and 100,000 s.f. of retail (a good sized main street)

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For those who like to cook and commute by transit, it doesn’t get much better than this, that is, if you can afford to live here in Mission Bay, San Francisco.  At least 28% of the housing in this progressive new neighborhood is supposed to be below market, though in this particular development, a good portion of it is above market (pun intended).

Thanks to Portland’s innovative urban planning heritage, which hosted the first Safeway with housing above, more and more of us won’t have to lug

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Disneyfication - the term given to developments that look a bit sterile because it was built by one developer, in one style, all at once (ie non-organically.)

So far one of the most noticeable and admirable traits about the first signs of construction in Mission Bay is that it doesn’t look like it was built by one developer, which is so often the case (like many of the new developments recently reviewed here.)  Part of the reason is that it’s such a large urban site (303 acres) and investment

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With 303 acres in what is already one of the most desired cities in the country, Mission Bay is one of the most significant urban redevelopment projects ever.  Its key features include:

Moderately affordable housing:  Of the 6000 housing units, 1700 (28%) will be affordable to moderate, low, and very low-income households
High-tech focus: 6 million sq. ft. of office/life science/technology commercial space
A university: A new UCSF research campus containing 2.65M s.f. of building space on 43

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Of course, the more expensive/unaffordable a place becomes, the less of a destination it becomes for more people as well.

Bay Meadows in San Mateo, CA is lauded by nonprofits (including the Sierra Club) for its smart growth principles of compact, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use planning with public spaces, and rightfully so.  However, like at Santana Row a little south of it, the average homebuyer will need to be making well above $100,000 to live in one of its 734 homes.  Nearly all the

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Yesterday I made a comment about the plaza in Santana Row, that with a bit of imagination you could feel like sitting in a piazza in Italy.  Maybe not so much based on the bird’s eye photo yesterday, but more so from the perspective in this image (minus the palm trees.)  While the average person can’t afford to shop or live here, there’s a lot of positives in seeing more of these truly pedestrian-oriented, ‘Europeanesque’ piazzas built that are free to the public.  As I mentioned yesterday,

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