Apartment Look

CPM proposes Lyn-Lake apartments A used car lot in south Minneapolis could soon become the site of a four-story mixed-use building with 70 rental units, some micro-style with smaller-than-average footprints. Developer CPM Cos . has proposed to build the development on property located on Lake Street near Harriet Avenue, according to documents submitted for a meeting of the Minneapolis Planning Commission 's committee of the whole. The complex would have about 1,200 square feet of commercial space on the first floor as well as an enclosed parking garage . The units range in size from 422 square feet to as large as 831 square feet. Across the Twin Cities, developers have started to build "micro" apartments in buildings that still have upscale amenities. While the average studio apartment in the area is 500 to 525 square feet, developers have recently built them as small as 300 square feet. Ray Apartments, which had its grand opening last week, is mostly studios. Some of th...

The city of East Palo Alto , a wedge of modest houses and light industrial sites in the heart of Silicon Valley , has been passed by in the great tech boom . A historically black area , it has seen a big Hispanic influx in the past two decades, with more than three out of four residents now coming from one of those two groups. It is still living down its reputation, gained a quarter of a century ago, as the murder capital of the US: one out of every 571 of its residents was the victim of a homicide in a single year. Things have improved since then. But over the same period, it has become the poor neighbour to some of the world's richest companies. In one of the ultimate signs of the divide between the haves and have-nots of the western US, the municipal government of East Palo Alto didn 't own the rights to draw more from the state's water reserves, which it would need in order to grow. In June this year, it took a gift of cash, from the private foundation set up by Mar...