• Factory-built affordability: Are we there yet?

    After more than a decade of sporadic advancements, the factory-built cottage idea may finally have arrived. This development could make a difference in quality affordable housing across the US.
    On March 22, 2021, more than a decade after many assumed such an event would become routine, a small, factory-built home designed to the standards of custom, site-built homes and targeted for infill affordability was lowered onto an infill site in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. “It was a long time...Read more

  • Not New Urbanism, nor a ‘small town’

    I was looking through the recent report, The Best Small Towns to Live Across America , published by Stacker . This kind of real estate list attracts attention, sucks you in like an awards show (which places did they pick?), and is based on nothing very real. Stacker engages in “data journalism,”...Read more

  • Building rehabs revive main street

    The character of Georgia Avenue, a historic Atlanta main street, was preserved while injecting new life into a neglected neighborhood.
    Atlanta is more or less divided into quadrants by major Interstates—I-20 and I-75/85—that meet downtown in a tremendous spaghetti junction. Just to the east of I-20 a large sports complex created a “zone of neglect” along an adjacent historic main street, Georgia Avenue, serving the Summerhill...Read more

  • Preserving history, allowing for growth

    A neighborhood in Atlanta establishes a Historic District with land-use regulations that protect the architecture in the front of the lot while allowing extensive development in the back.
    Residents of Atlanta’s Poncey-Highland neighborhood, just east of downtown Atlanta, are looking to the future with an eye to the past. For the past year, neighborhood stakeholders worked together to use the City of Atlanta’s Historic Preservation Ordinance as a tool to create an innovative Historic...Read more