Construction Maison

Looking at the County of San Bernardino ’s Point in Time Homeless Count numbers , veterans comprised 8.2 percent of those who were homeless in the county in 2016, but that percentage increased to 9.6 percent in 2017. Although the increase was slight, it was moving in the wrong direction. We knew the numbers were not trending the right direction when my nonprofit organization purchased the five-acre parcel on the southwest corner of Texas Street and Lugonia Avenue in the city of Redlands nearly two years ago. At the time, we were also cognizant of the rich tradition city and community leaders had in supporting our veterans. The VA Loma Linda Healthcare System was a few miles away, and in fact opened an Ambulatory Care Center on Redlands Boulevard even closer to our property just last October. There were active AMVets and American Legion Posts in the community, and the service clubs in the community included many veterans. As an experienced affordable housing developer with a miss...

The Late Victorian period in the United States—roughly the last third of the 19th century—produced some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the history of Western civilization . It also produced some of the most hopeless slums. In response to the crisis of industrial cities, the modern discipline of city planning emerged . The tools of this new profession helped clean up many unhealthy aspects of urban industry , but also stifled some of the best innovations of Late Victorian urbanism . By the 1920s, planners in the industrial world had established the legal authority to promulgate land-use regulations, and over the next generation, they succeeded at slowing the construction of slum housing and segregating noxious industries from incompatible activities, such as housing and office space. Through some of the same devices, however, planners curtailed some positive features of 19th- century urbanism , including the rich variety of free- form industrial development and the adaptiv...

"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...