Envy Apartment

At the ribbon cutting this month for the Wesley Village affordable housing complex in Garden Grove, Laura Archuleta couldn ’t resist referencing Joni Mitchell ’s 1970 environmental protest “Big Yellow Taxi.” Built on underused land that’s part of the Garden Grove United Methodist Church campus on Main Street, Wesley Village offered Archuleta , president of the nonprofit community organization Jamboree Housing Corp ., a chance to riff on one of Mitchell’s most famous lyrics. Where Mitchell sang “They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot,” Archuleta told about 300 people packed into the steamy church sanctuary on a hot afternoon that “Today we are going to learn how a group of dedicated organizations and individuals re-purposed a parking lot and put up a paradise.” Then she and others who spoke, including a single mom with six children who now reside at Wesley Village , told how the project became reality through a unique collaboration that involved the church, Jamboree and other...

AGOURA, CA - AMCAL Multi-Housing, one of California's leading builders of workforce and affordable housing , has just announced plans for two new, apartment developments in Los Angeles stemming from the recent funding from California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (TCAC). TCAC funding will be used by AMCAL to finance the Argyle Apartments, a 40-unit development in Hollywood, and the Terracina Apartments, a 72-unit development in South LA. Construction on both is set to begin this Fall. "Our success in receiving these awards is a result of our ability to develop adequate soft funding , which made our applications competitive and demonstrated a readiness to proceed with the development," said Percival Vaz, chief executive officer of AMCAL. "We have also been able to secure equity investors and permanent lenders enabling us to move forward, whereas with the economy still struggling other developers without strong backgrounds and investor relationships have ha...

CLOSE The Americana Lodge in downtown Redding , California, closed in January after hundreds of alleged code and safety violations , and now The Hignell Companies hopes to repurpose the building. Wochit Architectural renderings of the proposed remodeling project to turn the closed Americana Lodge into The Lofts. (Photo: Russell Studio) Plans to convert the shuttered Americana Lodge in downtown Redding to apartments come before the city Wednesday afternoon . The project has been hailed as a catalyst for the area since The Hignell Companies of Chico announced it was purchasing the former motel late last year. Hignell would transform the property between Pine and Market streets into 24 one-bedroom and 20 studio apartment units that would average between 400 and 500 square feet of floor space. At least four of the apartments would be set aside for very-low and low-income renters. The Redding Board of Administrative Review will consider Hignell’s site development permit application ...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

LAKE Macquarie is being transformed at a rate not seen for generations, with a construction frenzy spilling over from Newcastle and pushing Warners Bay and Charlestown skywards. The Lake Macquarie council area, which includes a swath of greater Newcastle suburbs and townships such as Morisset, Cooranbong and Swansea, had about 2,700 development applications worth $607 million approved in the last financial year . That is 550 more than the previous year, and an increase of 23.5 per cent. About $250 million worth of construction is underway and, while not on the scale of Newcastle’s $900 million transformation, the Lake figure is mainly private investment unswollen by major public works  like the Newcastle light rail . There is also more than $300 million worth of development in the pipeline. Among the projects attracting buyers’ interest are the $80 million Water’s Edge apartments proposed for the Esplanade at Warners Bay. If approved, Water’s Edge will take the site of a former ...