Month: January, 2009

New New Orleans is here: Part 2, the physical city

16 January, 2009 (08:39) | Cities, Katrina, New Orleans | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's part 1.]
 
[Click here for an archive of my 2005 New New Orleans posts.]
 
As we saw yesterday, three years after Hurricane Katrina, I was in New New Orleans at an AHIC conference that included a lunchtime speaker from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, followed by a bus tour of the flooded [...]

New New Orleans is here: Part 1, the people

15 January, 2009 (09:04) | Cities, Katrina, New Orleans | No comments

[Click here for an archive of my 2005 New New Orleans posts.]
 
Three years in, what has New New Orleans become?  A month ago I was back in the Big Easy for the first time since Katrina.  Did the city bear more resemblance to my optimistic view (Venice on the bayou) or my pessimistic view (Galveston [...]

Loophole or gotcha? Part 2: I like my rights

14 January, 2009 (08:39) | Cities, Historic, Local issues, Regulation, Zoning and land use | No comments

[Continued from yesterday’s part 1.] 
 
“But I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it. “
– Jake Gittes, Chinatown
 

 
Yesterday’s post opened up the challenge of preserving old buildings that contribute to a city’s diversity, character, and with any luck economic competitiveness while at the same time not letting the taste [...]

Loophole or gotcha? Part 1: just pay for it

13 January, 2009 (11:04) | Cities, Historic, Local issues, Regulation, Zoning and land use | No comments

“‘Course I’m respectable!  I’m old.  Politicians, ugly buildings and whores, all get respectable if they last long enough.”
– Millionaire Noah Cross, Chinatown
 

 
Urbanists like me love old buildings in cities, because they create visual and usage texture and diversity, part of the complexity that makes cities magnets for entrepreneurs and wealth-generating engines.
 
We also like [...]

Paradise future? Part 2, operations

12 January, 2009 (10:16) | Chapter 40B, Co-housing, Concepts in housing, Housing, Innovations, Local issues, Massachusetts, Tenure, Zoning and land use | 6 comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
Yesterday’s exploration of the interesting experiment of co-housing, based on a sympathetic Boston Globe account, had reached the point of a completed development, using as an anti-snob crowbar the powerful lever of Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B law to produce a development that the founders swear up down and sideways ‘will’ be green.  [...]