Construction Maison

It’s been only two months since the Portland Housing Authority opened Bayside Anchor , its first new housing development in decades. But already, the low- income housing provider is poised to file plans for two additional projects , totaling more than 155 units of housing at a time when a dearth of affordable housing in Maine’s largest city is reaching crisis levels . “This is the continuation of our effort to be a part of the solution to the affordable housing crisis in Portland,” said Jay Waterman, the housing authority ’s development director. The authority is looking to build a 55- unit apartment building at 58 Boyd St. in the city’s East Bayside neighborhood . The site is practically across the street from Bayside Anchor , a highly energy- efficient PHA apartment building at 81 Oxford St. with 45 units that opened in June. A public meeting about the East Bayside proposal has been scheduled for Monday, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., at 47 Smith St. Meanwhile, about 2 miles away, t...

Every metropolitan area in the nation is racially segregated, and Los Angeles is no exception. We tolerate residential segregation because we’re convinced that it happened informally — because of personal choices and private discrimination. But what cemented our separate neighborhoods is something most of us have forgotten — government’s unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century, establishing patterns that persist to this day. The 2010 census data show that 60% of Los Angeles’s African Americans live in neighborhoods where few whites are present. The exposure of blacks to whites is as minimal as it is in Chicago or Newark; concentrated African American poverty is as common in L.A. as in New York or Pittsburgh. The New Deal created the nation’s first civilian public housing in the 1930s, segregated not only in the South, but nationwide. In his autobiography, the African American poet Langston Hughes recounted his adolescence in Worl...

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...

'Your home is wherever you stop and that's what's really, really cool about that whole idea' Rain patters on the roof of John Salhany's 2006 Mercedes Sprinter van as he points out the half-finished ceiling of tongue-and- groove pine paneling that will eventually continue down the walls over layers of plywood and reflective insulation. Items strewn in the hollowed back include a dusty climbing rope , a road bike and a six-pack of Upslope Brewing Company 's Citra Pale Ale . All his essentials will soon have their places once the van build-out is complete, when Salhany will have a bed big enough to accommodate all 6 feet, 2 inches of him, a countertop with a sink and drawers, and maybe even a backsplash with the cutout of the mountains — amenities like that of a house. "I have a lot of friends who are buying houses right now who are just getting to that age, all on the East Coast and I'm just like, how do you guys know where you want to live?" said...