The Revitalist

Snapshot of Boston area, houses for sale on craigslist in the $300k-$500k range.

After falling down the rabbit hole of other people's blogrolls, I stumbled on a very cool new mashup of Google Maps and craigslist housing ads, called HousingMaps.com (via Grow-a-Brain). The site maps houses for sale, for rent, sublets, and rooms for rent on craigslist and maps them onto Google Maps. One cool feature is that when you click on a pin, a popup shows the craigslist ad heading, price and any photos included in the listing; you can then click through to the ad. You can filter the maps by types of listing and price ranges. This site would be super helpful if you're not overly familiar with an area and don't know the streets and neighborhoods mentioned in the ads.

The weekend real estate section in the Globe had a good article on small, ex-urban towns drawing artists to their downtowns. The primary example was Renaissance Lofts in Marlborough, which is in need of downtown reinvestment but seems an unlikely place for an artist colony. And you have to give Deborah Fairbanks credit, the before pictures of the mill with its windows mostly blocked in are pretty grim. It took some vision to see that and think artists. The article also quotes Richard Florida who says, "You'll see more of this in the suburbs. And it's all about the fact that they're proximate to Boston. In Arkansas or the Dakotas, this might not succeed." That's good news for some of the more remote mills, ones that aren't necessarily right next to the commuter rail. Let's hope this project succeeds and sparks ideas for some of the more challenging buildings.

A little light reading for your sunny, summer weekend: Mapping the Growth of Older America: Seniors and Boomers in the Early 21st Century by William Frey from The Brookings Institution (via The Creativity Exchange). The Creativity Exchange's post was less sensitively titled "The Geography of Getting Old." Essentially, the question is: with the senior boom looming, where will they be and where will senior housing/services be hardest pressed? The answer:

The dark orange is 140%+ increase in seniors age 65 and older.

• The aging of the baby boom generation makes pre-seniors this decade's fastest growing age group, expanding nearly 50 percent in size from 2000 to 2010.
• Pre-senior populations are growing rapidly everywhere, especially in economically dynamic Sun Belt areas previously known for their youth, such as Las Vegas, Austin, Atlanta, and Dallas.
• The World War II generation currently entering its senior years is growing fastest in the Intermountain West and South Atlantic states, especially suburban areas there.
• In states where senior populations will grow fastest over the next 35 years, "aging in place" rather than migration will drive this growth.
• Projected boomer aging will cause the suburbs of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles to be considerably "older" than the cities themselves by 2040. 

There is clearly an opportunity here to provide housing and services that meets this group's needs and to combine it with smart growth elements that by happenstance are senior friendly, like walkable neighborhoods that engage people with their neighbors, retail accessible to residential areas and residents on foot, public transportation as an effective alternative to driving. The work that we are already engaged in can easily be focused on this demographic.

Although, I read this and thought of a Wall Street Journal article that I read this week about how practically none of us are saving enough for retirement – gives you chills. 

The Boston Globe ran a nice article that was essentially a soft press hit for FP3, a new condo project in the Fort Point, that talked about the technical demands of adaptive reuse projects. Aside from new mechanical systems, roofs and windows, these projects often require complex retrofitting. The FP3 project built a new building frame of steel inside the historic masonry walls to support the additional weight of added floors and to provide earthquake protection required by the building code.

At Washington Mills, we faced a hard choice between leaving the wooden floors or the wooden beamed ceilings exposed for the tenants, but we couldn't have both. In the end, we chose to cover the floors and leave the pine beams of the ceiling open. The floor system that we chose layered several acoustic mats and covered them with a surprisingly thin layer of concrete. It gives both sound and fire protection between the floors and finishes with an industrial-cool, polished concrete floor. This is just one example of the creative problem solving that has to get done with rehab projects where you have many needs to meet and only a few opportunities to make changes.

This stunning video of the relocation of an 1883 Victorian carriage house in Portland is from The Oregonian (via Urban Planning Blog). The house belongs to a local church who was having trouble keeping up with its maintenance and was in desperate need of additional parking. A developer who participated in some the Pearl Street rehab projects presented a solution. They would assemble sites next to the church, build a new condo tower with an underground parking structure, and the church would be able to utilize some of the parking. The hitch was the historic carriage house, which was located right where the parking would be. The developer's unique solution was to move the house to a parking lot three blocks away, where it would sit for a year while the underground parking structure was built, and then move the house back to its original location when the construction is complete. Wow.

The Creative Class blog noticed a US Census press release on commute statistics. According to the most recent survey, 87.7% of Americans drive to work and 77% drive alone. Only 4.7% use public transportation, that's a 0.1% increase over 2000 levels. The Creative Class people then wondered which cities have the best public transportation usage rates: New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC  were the top three (no surprise). Boston was #5 with 10.7% of people riding transit, almost the same as #4 Chicago.

These numbers probably aren't a surprise to anyone, but they are surely disappointing for conservation and transit advocates. 

Richard Florida posts about a recent WSJ article detailing Pennsylvania's inability to retain its college grads. He then follows it up with an article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about two biotech firms decamping for Boston. He says, "This is why I wrote Rise." Pennsylvania is pulling out all the economic development stakes trying to encourage people to keep/start small businesses there. The Pittsburgh article demonstrates why it isn't working: the companies are moving to where the people are (in this case, Boston). Florida's point in The Rise of the Creative Class was exactly that—companies will go to where the workers are—and, therefore, cities need to focus on creating places where these workers want to live and not financial incentives to retain corporations.

The Wall Street Journal has noticed that TODs are hot right now (via CoolTown Studios). They cite estimates that there are around 100 TOD projects in development, with about 100 more in the pipeline. The president of the American Public Transportation Association says, "This isn't to say that the traditional suburb is going away." There will just be more housing built "for this demographic who desire walkable communities with easy access to transportation."

Renaissance Place, Naugatuck, CT

The article features a major development being planned for Naugatuck, CT's waterfront. The $700M, mixed use development will also include a trolley system to move people between the residential units, the shops and the commuter rail to NYC. 

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has released their 11 Most Endangered Places 2007.

Number 3 on the list is the H.H. Richardson House in Brookline. The house is not in his signature Richardsonian Romanesque style, but it did house his workshops and studio for many years. It is also near Frederick Law Olmstead's home place; the two men were close friends and collaborated on the grounds of the H.H. Richardson House. Today the house is empty, has sustained significant water damage, but has managed to dodge the bulldozer through the intervention of its neighbors. The house is on the market with preservation restrictions, but there aren't buyers clamoring at the door, and there is no restoration plan in place. It's a tricky one, but I know that it is also on the radar of the Boston preservation community.

Number 1 on the list if the Brooklyn Industrial Waterfront, which is under heavy development pressure. The NY Times has a good article on the listing and the tension between economic development and historic preservation.

Another cool real estate related website has popped up (via An Affair with Urban Policy). Trulia Hindsight uses Trulia's vast store of real estate data and Microsoft's Virtual Earth to look at the development of residential communities over time. The map above is of Glouster, MA, but they have mapped neighborhoods across the country. Very cool visualization.