Posts Tagged ‘Bruce Tolar’
Filling in the ‘Missing Middle’: No new wheels, please
For lots of reasons, including the ones PlaceMakers’ Scott Doyon explains here, Seaside, on the Northwest Florida Gulf Coast, makes a great place to talk about the appeal of small-scale dwellings in small-lot neighborhoods. Certainly, hanging out in a place where the real estate market has bid up the price for small wooden houses without…
Read MoreIdeas Converging for Housing Opportunity: Some sorta oldish, lots very NUish
When we look back on this period, we might discover that the effort to ramp up realistic approaches to the challenges of community affordability reached some sort of tipping point in the spring and summer of 2015.
Read MorePlaceMakers’ Intrepid Inside-Baseball Highlight Reel from CNU23
Having just wrapped up what may have been our favorite CNU ever, in Dallas on April 29 through May 2, we want to share some of the ideas that resonated the most with us. The topics below are snippets of great insights from many voices, including the likes of Andrés Duany, Fort Worth Mayor Betsy…
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Small to Go Big in 2015?
Maybe. Finally. Here’s why.
Those of us who’ve been tangling with status quo protectors in housing design and policymaking got a charge out of Justin Shubow’s Forbes blog post earlier this month. Shubow backhanded modernist starchitects for persisting in their personal artistic vision without regard to the human use of real places: “Modernism might appear outwardly impregnable: it dominates…
Read MoreThis Just In: No one is everyone, no place is every place
Now that the recent economic unpleasantness is behind us, we can resume the suburbanization of everywhere. The Economist apparently thinks so, given its recent special section headlined “The World Is Becoming Ever More Suburban, and the Better for It.”
Read MoreAre We There Yet? Affordability in the ‘New Normal’
Pretty soon we’ll have something like a decade of experience in losing our innocence about housing affordability. Isn’t it about time we got over it? For a good part of the last century, we trained generations of housing consumers and housing enablers to buy and sell into what Chuck Marohn calls a “growth Ponzi scheme.”…
Read MoreFinally Thinkin’ Small: But can we build on what we’ve learned?
As soon as the destructive path of Hurricane Sandy became evident, I got emails and calls from colleagues who, like me, worked in disaster recovery situations on the Gulf Coast. When the clean-up gets underway, could this be an opportunity for the Eastern Seaboard states to apply some of the rebuilding lessons of the Gulf…
Read MorePunk Rock and the New Urbanism: Getting back to basics
By the early to mid 1970s, something was wrong with rock and roll. It no longer fought the system. Worse than that, it had become the system. Bloated. Detached. Pretentious. Performer and audience, once fused in a mutual quest to stick it to the man, now existed on separate planes — an increasingly complacent generation…
Read MoreSix Years Later: Katrina Cottages take hold
August 11 will be a landmark day in the South Mississippi communities still recovering from the 2005 mega-storm, Hurricane Katrina. And it’s about time. On that day next week, 18 days shy of the sixth anniversary of the storm, the development team behind the Cottages at Oak Park in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, will host a…
Read MoreLivin’ Large in Small Spaces: It Takes a Town
I’m big on small. Ever since the 2005 Misissippi Renewal Forum in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I’ve been beating the drum for Katrina Cottages and cottage neighborhoods. Most recently here and, in 2009, here. I haven’t exactly been a voice in the wilderness. In fact, I wasn’t even among the early wave of advocates.
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