Construction Maison

Dave Coughenour describes himself as a “projects kind of guy.” His current project: Putting the finishing touches on a 106- unit apartment building , the latest addition to an upscale housing development perched on a hilltop overlooking U.S. Route 60 between Huntington and Barboursville. Beginning in 2008, in the midst of one of the nation's worst housing markets ever, Royal Oaks at Pea Ridge has taken shape in stages. First, Coughenour and his partners — Dave Tarter and Pat Hootch — built 16 apartment units. They followed that with 48 more units and then another 32. Now, a new three-story building will double the total available units to 202. Nearly all the apartments are leased, including those still being finished up, Coughenour said. And he and his partners are readying plans for more construction on the nearly 14-acre site. “This is an excellent market for apartments,” Coughenour said. Born in Tennessee, Coughenour and his family moved to Huntington when he was high-school a...

Roughly 220 children in lower-income families in Bloomington qualify for but do not have access to affordable pre- kindergarten education . In an effort to change this, Alex Crowley, director of the city’s Economic and Sustainable Development Department , said a state-sponsored initiative, On My Way Pre-K pilot program, which provides funding to programs serving 4-year-olds from families with household incomes at or below 127 percent of the federal poverty level , is coming to Monroe County next year, and it is estimated it can help about 50 children. That begs the question: What can the city and others do to make sure no children who are eligible for pre-kindergarten are left out? As part of that answer, the city is proposing investing $100,000 to support quality child care for lower-income families. “Every dollar initially invested in early education programs for children from low-income families is estimated to generate $4 to $11 in economic benefits over a child’s lifetime,” May...

Photo by Andrea Yori | CC BY 2.0 In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance , agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations , and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year. Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus . According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “b...

"It's the same old story. First the builder picks the property, then he gets the Planning Commission to designate it, then the people get bulldozed out of their homes." - Jane Jacobs Under Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, federal funds became available to cities for demolition or rehabilitation of blighted areas, and throughout the 1950s, Robert Moses' Slum Clearance Committee lived up to its name, razing entire New York neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. In 1960, the city's Housing and Redevelopment Board took over those duties, promising to displace residents less brusquely than had been Moses' way. But the city Planning Commission continued to support the basic tenets of urban renewal, believing that New Yorkers would ultimately be much happier in modern, less crowded housing with lots of open spaces. Jane Jacobs, a 45-year-old editor at Architectural Forum, had another opinion: Urban planners , she believed, were des...