“Yellow pages may soon go green if Cambridge City Councillor Sam Seidel gets his wish. The council voted unanimously on Monday to look into an eco-friendly plan that would allow residents to opt out of having phone books delivered to their front doorstep.”
Carolina Brownfields
“The dry-erase board bears the markings of number-hashing sessions in 1992, when Thomas Darden II was desperate to steer a struggling brick business into the black.The scrawled statistics and notes are preserved on the wall of his modest office as a reminder: “Pursue the problem,” Darden says. Darden has built a career on that mantra, expanding that problematic brick company into Cherokee Investment Partners, the world’s largest private equity firm specializing in the most problematic properties.”
“The growing possibility that much of the multibillion-dollar Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn will be scrapped because of a lack of financing may be a bitter pill for its developer, Forest City Ratner. But it’s also a painful setback for urban planning in New York. Designed by Frank Gehry, the project was a rare instance in which the architectural talent lined up for a New York project matched the financial muscle behind it.”
“An effort by Pinnacle Entertainment Inc. to expand its property is another sign that the resort’s small business industry is facing extinction, local business owners say. But they’re not going quietly. A group of store owners in and around the area targeted for redevelopment stormed over to City Hall on Thursday with signed petitions in hopes of halting a process that could lead to the use of eminent domain.”
“A plan to place tolls on most highways in the Washington area was greeted skeptically yesterday by members of a regional transportation panel, with some saying that many people have no choice but to commute by automobile and that tolls would be yet another financial burden.”
“Philadelphia’s City Council members really, really want to be good, but they just can’t help being bad. They swear they won’t hand out more special zoning favors. They promise to give power back to professional planners. They assure neighborhood leaders they will never again have to go unarmed into battle with Goliath developers.”
Contractor Corruption in New Orleans
“Of the dozens of building contractors punished by the state of Mississippi for preying on victims of Hurricane Katrina, one stands out from the crowd of mostly small-time, fly-by-night operators: Call Henry, a Florida-based firm with hundreds of employees that each year earns tens of millions of dollars from contracts with the Department of Defense, NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.”
From Streetsblog: America to the Automobile: It’s Over
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