I am fortunate to sit as a non-voting member on a SoCal city’s Design Review Board, which is a difficult job and I applaud the many people across our nation who serve on these boards to make difficult decisions for individual land owners and neighbors on behalf of their respective cities. The overwhelming majority of the issues I see monthly are redesigns in response to conflicts between neighbors due to a simple confusion between how new and existing buildings should relate to their lots and to each other.
August 16, 2012 | 9:53 am
Fronts, Backs, and Everything In Between
March 1, 2011 | 12:01 am
New Urban Development: Too risky, too costly. Not.
I just heard from a colleague who had a developer tell him something along the lines of: “New Urbanism is too risky and too expensive because, you know, Kentlands failed.” That’s not an uncommon belief. What is uncommon, however, for anyone on the receiving end of such broad brush generalizations, is an easy response that fleshes out the finer, and truer, details. So here’s mine: