Envy Apartment

Last year, the Miami- Dade County Commission shot down a plan that would have forced local developers to include some affordable apartments in every new project. Commissioner Javier Souto claimed the idea was "social engineering," one of the most profoundly stupid things said in South Florida politics this decade. According to the study, almost two-thirds of Miami's poor are stuck spending more than half of their income on rent or living in roach-infested hellholes. "These households are defined as very low-income renters who do not receive government housing assistance and who paid more than one-half of their income for rent, lived in severely inadequate conditions , or both," HUD's researchers write. "High rents in proportion to renter incomes remain dominant among households with worst-case needs, leaving these renters with substantial, unmet need for affordable housing." Larger cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, techn...

Ruth Chase with two of her paintings at the opening of "West of Lincoln" Jennifer Swann Eddie Hadvina points to the painting of himself as an 11-year-old Boy Scout. In it, he’s wearing an olive green cap and a red kerchief with his khaki uniform, a skateboard in one hand and a trophy in the other. On his left shoulder is a patch representing Venice ’s Troop 34, which he joined at his mother's insistence. “That’s where all the trouble started,” says Hadvina, now 56 and sporting a gray goatee. “That’s where I met all my Venice Hoodlum friends ,” he says, referring to a street gang that was active in the neighborhood in the 1970s. Hadvina's parents, both Hungarian immigrants, visited Venice on their honeymoon in 1960 — Hadvina says he was conceived during that trip — and decided to move there two years later. Hadvina discovered skateboarding when the sport was still brand-new and being pioneered in the neighborhood by people like Stacy Peralta, one of his peers. But H...

It took less than a month to find a new use for the palatial sandstone building in the heart of Edinburgh that was once a jewel of Sir Philip Green ’s retail empire. The Scottish capital was one of more than 100 British towns and cities to see a large gap open up in its high street when BHS collapsed last year. For some provincial shopping streets , the clothing and homeware outlet had been their biggest draw. The chain’s demise has forced landlords to be creative in filling those gaps, often by embracing gym operators and pound shops as well as other retailers, in the hope they can seed life in the darkened stores. With other department stores looking vulnerable, having survived a cyclical downturn only to be plunged into a new battle against obsolescence, what has happened to BHS’s stores might prove instructive for the future. Scottish Home Stores on Princes Street in Edinburgh © Alamy On Edinburgh’s bustling Princes Street , local entrepreneurs reopened the former BHS as “ S...