Envy Apartment

Neighbors' Complaints Bout Noise And Crime Help Kill A 630-apartment Expansion Of The Quadrangle Development. March 24, 1999 | By Kevin Spear of The Sentinel Staff Homeowners near the University of Central Florida and developers were stunned Tuesday when Orange County commissioners denied requests to build more than 600 apartments near the college. The construction was opposed by neighbors who complained of noise, crime and unruly behavior at several hundred apartments built in recent years. In unanimous votes, commissioners rejected proposals to add 630 apartments to the existing 750 at the Quadrangle, a development of business, offices and apartments just outside UCF. ``I can't believe it - I'm absolutely floored,'' said Sue Eberle, who lives near the Quadrangle and helped lead opposition to apartment expansion. ``I always had hope, but this is beyond anything I had hoped for.'' Part of the shock stemmed from the fact that many of the proposed apartmen...

September 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm news By Kevin Plummer Every Saturday at noon, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. One Sunday evening in 1959, after a screening of the Toronto Film Society , architect Gerald Robinson and engineer/builder Irwin Burns chatted over coffee. The two shared a common viewpoint that the city’s urban core was in decline. The same was happening in cities across Canada as municipal governments were more interested in improving traffic and encouraging sprawl rather than revitalizing their downtown districts. The very next day, Burns heard from real estate developer Murray Webber that a lot with Bloor Street West frontage was going to become available for a hundred-year lease from Victoria University. “There,” Burns told Robinson , as he recalled in the Globe and Mail of October 18, 1963, “is the place to demonstra...

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...