Envy Apartment

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...

The city of Tampa is on the cusp of a total makeover. With billions of dollars in investment and dozens of new apartment, condo, office and cultural buildings in the pipeline, the city's skyline and surrounding communities are poised to look a whole lot different than what it does today. But dreaming up the future of Tampa doesn't come without its challenges. For all the promises of a new urban core filled with hotels, parks, food halls and stores, there are also potential pitfalls. The Tampa Bay Times identified the five key obstacles that stand in the way of some of the biggest projects proposed in Hillsborough County . Many of these challenges are ones local politicians and business leaders have been fighting for years to find a solution. Others are fairly new territory, but still pose a real threat to the region's continued growth. [LOREN ELLIOTT | Times] A construction site is seen just north of Amalie Arena in downtown Tampa , Fla., on Monday, May 1, 2017. Curr...

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...