Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Development

Real Estate Giant: Suburban Office Parks Increasingly Obsolete

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 10, 2015 | 23 Comments

What tenants want in an office building is changing, and the old model of the isolated suburban office park is going the way of the fax machine. That’s according to a new report from Newmark, Grubb, Knight and Frank [PDF], one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the world. The old-school office park does “not offer the […]

Livable Streets or Tall Buildings? Cities Can Have Both

By Tanya Snyder | Oct 6, 2014 | 30 Comments

Kaid Benfield’s new blog post on density is getting a lot of buzz over at NRDC’s Switchboard blog. Benfield, a planner/lawyer/professor/writer who co-founded both LEED’s Neighborhood Development rating system and the Smart Growth America coalition, has some serious street cred when it comes to these matters. And on this one, he’s with Danish architect Jan Gehl, […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Good Riddance, “Level of Service”

By Tanya Snyder | Jul 15, 2014 | 4 Comments

All the buzz right now is about Arlington, Virginia — the DC suburb has seen its population rise and its car traffic drop since the 1980s. How did they do it? It could be a lesson for Palo Alto, California, which is considering various growth proposals, including one that would invite greater density as long as […]

Parking Craters Aren’t Just Ugly, They’re a Cancer on Your City’s Downtown

By Payton Chung | Apr 10, 2014 | 12 Comments

Streetsblog’s Parking Madness competition has highlighted the blight that results when large surface parking lots take over a city’s downtown. Even though Rochester, winner of 2014’s Golden Crater, certainly gains bragging rights, all of the competitors have something to worry about: Cumulatively, the past 50 years of building parking have had a debilitating effect on America’s downtowns. […]

Measuring the Shift Away From Car Ownership, City By City

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 31, 2013 | 11 Comments

A new analysis by Michael Andersen at Bike Portland helps illuminate how shifts in car ownership are playing out in different cities. Andersen reviewed Census data from 2005 and 2011. He found that households with less than one car per adult accounted for about 60 percent of Portland’s population growth. About one in four Portland households met […]

From Bust to Boom: Rental Housing Takes Off in Madison

By Tanya Snyder | Jul 19, 2013 | 5 Comments

Madison, Wisconsin, is on a building binge. Developers are constructing so much rental housing that market observers fear that the housing shortage could quickly turn into a glut. One thousand units were approved last year for large apartment complexes. There’s a reason behind all this building, according to an article in yesterday’s Isthmus: Young professionals, […]

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