Apartment Look

Sign-up for the Urban Milwaukee daily email Intersection of N. Commerce St and E. North Ave. The meeting of Commerce and North — just east of Humboldt Ave. — is one of the busiest un-signalized intersections in the city. The number of issues presented by this important intersection convince me it merits some review and revision by the city. North Avenue is a primary east-west corridor which runs west from Lake Michigan across the entire length of the city. It is a busy street at nearly all hours and according to WISDOT, it carries over 30,000 vehicles a day. Commerce Street, meanwhile, has over the course of the last 20 years transformed from dormancy to being lined with hundreds of apartments and condominiums and many thousands of new daily users. Despite the significant amounts of development that have occurred around Commerce and North, the intersection has not been retrofitted to account for those changes. What Works Commerce and North is a victim of its success – an increasingly ...

When our children were 11 and 9, young enough to still be entirely inside the family circle but old enough to remember, we splurged on a “once in a lifetime vacation ” and rented a small farmhouse in Southwestern France outside the village of Saint-Cyprien. Each day, our son and daughter would say goodbye to the donkey that hung around our patio and we’d climb in the tiny rented Renault and drive somewhere in the fairy- tale beautiful Dordogne River region . On one of these excursions, we stumbled on the provincial city of Sarlat. An accident of history and several centuries of stagnant economy had left Sarlat’s center virtually unchanged architecturally since the days of siege engines and knights galloping over drawbridges. City fathers had wakened one morning in the late 1950s to realize that, leaning above narrow and winding cobblestone streets and alleys, they had one of the largest collections of intact medieval architecture in Europe. The French government subsidized restor...

When Mayor de Blasio held a press conference in May 2014 to debut his new affordable housing plan , his full- color presentation touted a project called Spring Creek in Brooklyn. Spring Creek was flagged as a “case study” partnership between the city and developers to “create a strong, vibrant and self-sustaining neighborhood.” But on Friday, the bulk of that project remained a big, ugly vacant field of weeds and abandoned roadway in East New York. More than 1,500 of 1, 803 planned affordable units are now in a bureaucratic Twilight Zone — and may become less affordable as a result. “There is no progress from the progressive mayor ,” said the Rev. David Brawley, a leader of East Brooklyn Congregations , one of the groups sponsoring Spring Creek . Brawley said the delays to Spring Creek caused by the de Blasio administration are particularly ironic given that the mayor cited the project in his promise to build or preserve 200, 00...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Right now, the 4800 block of Duke Street, across the street from the Harris Teeter at the Shoppes at Foxchase, doesn’t look like much. It’s just a 14-acre dirt lot with construction underway. An Aldi grocery store is being built on the site that for years had housed restaurants, most recently Tres Hermanas ; for 18 years before that, Mango Mike’s. “The Alexandria location is expected to open near the end of the year,” said Jeff Baehr, Aldi Frederick division ’s vice president. “The store will be approximately 17,000 square feet and have 10,000 to 11,000 square feet of selling space, with four to five aisles, as is typical for Aldi stores,” Baehr said. “Today’s Aldi stores are also built with environmentally friendly materials such as energy-saving refrigeration and LED lighting.” Aldi is a well- lit discount supermarket with its own brand-name items that look similar to well-known brands. The shelves are stocked not with items neatly lined up one behind the othe...

A 48- unit apartment complex called the Villas at Potter's Creek is developing in Alliance. Malcolm Hall CantonRep .com staff writer @mhallREP ALLIANCE  Never mind that the landscaping is far from finished and there is no grass on the lawns. People are already arriving to take up residency in a developing apartment complex called the Villas at Potter's Creek. Located in the extreme southeast corner of Alliance, the Villas at Potter's Creek is in its first phase of what is expected to be a two-phase development. The land where the vinyl-sided apartment buildings sit was an unoccupied and vacant site just south of E. State Street and east of Brayton Avenue . It is about a quarter mile west of the city's eastern corporation line and border with Columbiana County. To carry traffic into the 6.37-acre complex, a new street called Judy Rae Avenue was created. The units are in the 2000 and 2100 blocks of Judy Rae Avenue . "All-on-one-floor living is popular,"...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...