Posts Tagged ‘neighborhood design’

Tweet I had the pleasure of speaking with Kerry Wilcoxon, the Traffic Engineer in charge of Safety in Neighborhood Traffic and Joe Perez, the Bicycle Coordinator at the City of Phoenix a week and a half ago at Giant Coffee.  I asked them why we don’t have the necessary bike infrastructure in place to make biking a viable mode of transportation in Phoenix and what the City is doing about it.   In today’s post Kerry and Joe talk about how Phoenix was originally planned around the car and why although this is a very hard thing to change, there is…

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Tweet Below is my conversation with Carol Johnson, the Planning Manager at the City of Phoenix about what’s next in terms of codes, walkability and making our city more livable on the whole: Blooming Rock: What’s your position in the city? Carol Johnson: My title is Planning Manager.  I oversee our long range planning division, that includes the planners that staff that Village Planning Committees.  We have 15 Village Planning Committees which are like mini Planning Commissions throughout the city to help break it up into more manageable pieces because we’re over 500 square miles.  There used to be one…

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Tweet I was very excited when I got invited to an open house by Sunday Studio a couple of weeks ago to check out the eco-flip they did on McKinley and 16th St. in the Garfield Neighborhood.  The photo of the end product was gorgeous and it intrigued me.  I was duly impressed when I got a tour, it was a house that any downtown resident would be proud to call their home.  When I saw the slide-show of the before and after pictures of the house, I knew we had a visionary on our hands, a person who cared…

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May 31, 2010

Why not All Old Buildings Should be Saved

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet This weekend, the Phoenix Historic Neighborhood Coalition (PHNC) released the Most enDangered Dozen.  It’s a list of local historic buildings in danger of being torn down, some because they are in blighted neighborhoods, some because they themselves are in terrible condition and some because their owners have foreclosed.  In other words, these properties are on the verge of being sold to some very enterprising but potentially culturally insensitive people that will likely tear these buildings down. The buildings that made this list elicited different reactions from me.  With some of them like the Art Deco Professional Building and Al…

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Tweet This week I’m traveling in Milwaukee, WI visiting family.  One of the best parts of traveling is that it gives you a fresh perspective on what’s back home. The prevailing trend is that people from the midwest move to sunny Arizona because of the weather and the promise of a new start.  But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a whole lot that’s right in the midwest that Arizona could learn from. So during my stay in Milwaukee, I’ve been thinking about what Phoenix can learn from this city.  One of the big differences I’ve seen is in the…

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Tweet I’ve been driving by this new building in construction the past few months.   It’s on 11th St. and Indian School.  My first thought when I found out what it was was – oh great, all we need in this city is another Circle K. There’s hardly anything getting built nowadays and for good reason, we have way too many existing buildings waiting to be reused.  And one of the few new buildings is a Circle K – a brand new gas station and convenience store?  Convenience gas stations are, as you might know, the bane of our Phoenix urban…

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Tweet One of the most highly prized values of our nation is “rugged individualism” and nowhere is this more apparent than in our very own city – Phoenix.  Many of us have come here to get away from our old tired communities and to start life anew.  Maybe it’s because of our bad experiences with the communities we grew up in that we seem to shun any semblance of community in our newly-adopted city. But where does that leave us rugged individuals?  Surely we can’t rely wholly on ourselves?  Surely there are times we need help from others.  Who do…

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