At the ULI Building Healthy Places Conference, developers talked about incorporating healthier features into their projects at low cost while adding value for the occupants.
Four developers of master-planned communities discussed the health-related aspects of their projects during the “Legacy of Building Healthy Places” session at ULI’s Building Healthy Places conference, held in February in Los Angeles.
The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon was held October 3 to 13 at Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California, attracting nearly 64,000 visitors.
What for a decade had been referred to either as the “Bloomingdale Trail” or simply “the Bloomingdale” will be referred to going forward as “the 606,” it was announced in June by the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national nonprofit organization that conserves land for public open space. The number denotes the zip-code prefix shared by all Chicagoans and alludes to the trail’s origin as a rail line.
Work will begin this summer to transform an abandoned 2.7-mile (4.4 km) stretch of elevated railway in Chicago into the Bloomingdale Trail, the city’s only pedestrian greenway and bike path running east to west, which ultimately will connect pedestrians and cyclists to trails that stretch all the way to the Indiana state line.
The Civita mixed-use development is a model for San Diego’s “City of Villages” planning strategy. But the development’s progressive ideas blazed new territory, and nearly a decade passed before the developer obtained approvals to begin construction.
Over the past decade, mixed-income housing has been rising in popularity across the country, with progressive cities providing housing for lower-income residents alongside more affluent ones. "[Traditional] lenders have not yet bought into the concept,” says private developer John Huskey, president of Los Angeles–based Meta Housing Inc., but he hopes traditional lenders will accept this concept, much as they did mixed-use development a decade ago. “We’re demonstrating that you can get market rents alongside affordable housing,” he says.
Known as the Duke of Art Deco, Dave Goldstein has made a profitable business out of his hobby of restoring vintage apartment buildings. They now draw above-market rents, which is helping stabilize values in neighborhoods where film stars and future presidents once dwelled.
Cities across the United States anticipate significant water challenges caused by climate change and are updating their water management plans to address areas of vulnerability and prepare for the worst.
