The Pittsburgh City Council voted unanimously yesterday to approve landmark historic status for the Iron City Brewery in the Lawrenceville neighborhood.
Earlier in the month, the city’s Historic Review Commission voted in favor of the designation, as the Post-Gazette reported.
The brewery currently sits vacant. Last year, Iron City Brewing Co. closed this plant and moved all operations to Latrobe.
Planners hope this compound and collection of historic buildings will become the sight of a mixed-use development.
The timing of this designation comes just weeks after a developer announced plans to infill neighboring Doughboy …

Great article in the Plain Dealer about the city East Cleveland–Ohio’s poorest city–its new mayor and the seemingly impossible task of turning it around.

Gary Norton is young (37) and well educated (he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and earned his master’s degree in public administration at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs). And that’s a big change in a city that has been characterized by political mismanagement and corruption. Former Mayor Emmanuel Onunwor was convicted on bribery charges in 2004.

Norton’s election has injected fresh hope in the largely black, inner-ring suburb of Cleveland, which has lost more than 1,500 homes to foreclosure in the past two years–about 500 per mile, the highest in the state.

Take a look at this CNN article about a Chinese firm with plans to build a “Chinese-style mega shopping mall” in Milwaukee.

“The cost of doing business there is very low,” Wu Li, president of Toward Group told CNN. “The people are friendly, the environment is peaceful and the pace of living is slow. It is a good place for Chinese enterprises to go abroad.”

The story explains Wu’s company recently purchased a dormant shopping complex in northwestern Milwaukee that was built in the 1970s, for $6 million. It will open the mall, renamed AmAsia, in August, according to CNN, part of a growing trend of Chinese investment in US real estate. That trend has mostly been in cities outside the Rust Belt –until now.

  The Allegheny Valley Commuter Rail, a proposed commuter line serving the Pittsburgh region, faces another hurdle today. Allegheny Valley Railroad, a freight company which has made their rail corridor available for development into a commuter service, and Buncher Co., a real estate developer, will go before the Surface Transportation Board (STB) in Washington D.C. At stake is whether AVR owns an easement on property that Buncher holds. The easement is located in the Strip District neighborhood east of downtown and would be necessary for bringing trains into downtown stations. …

This article in the Las Vegas Sun seems to think that city’s era of unbridled growth has definitely ended.
The article cites U.S. Census Bureau data showing:
-its slowest rate of population growth since 1967,
-for the first time in a long time, the state experience out-migration (more people left the state than came there).
“The new numbers contrast strikingly with the rest of this decade when an average of 45,000 people moved here every year from other states,” according to the story. “Analysts both here and nationally cited the weak economy of Nevada …

Check out this recent column by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill.

He interviews ‘burgh native Don Carter, who recently retired president of Urban Design Associates and was named director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

For years, Carter tells O’Neill, he has hated the term “Rust Belt.” And he’s trying to get folks to start calling …the “Water Belt.”

In place of “Sun Belt?” Try “Drought Belt.” Cities here, Carter writes, “are low-density, auto-dependent, and survive on ever diminishing supplies of

As strange as it sounds, it can happen, according to this recent story in the Pittsburgh City Paper.
“Even today, Cranberry retains some rugged rural terrain amidst the strip malls and drive-throughs. Cranberry may be a synonym for “suburban sprawl” for many, but local officials are trying to preserve those places — and environmentalists give them high marks for the effort.
Still, finding a connection with nature is a lot like my coyote encounter: If you blink, you may miss it,” the author writes.
What did the Pittsburgh-area suburb of Cranberry do? …

Let me start by saying I’m a little bit biased because my house is on this street. But I think an impartial observer would agree that Franklin Boulevard is probably the most important historic street on Cleveland’s west side.
See for yourself:

The street runs from W. 25th in Ohio City through the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood and into Cudell. In between there are dozens of beautifully restored Victorian homes. Most range in origin from the mid-1800s to early in the 20th Century.

The most famous of these is probably Franklin Castle (pictured above), …

This week I attended a conference called “Finding Common Ground” at the Gleaners building in East Detroit. I met some people at this event who seem very willing and excited to change Detroit in meaningful ways. There were two Dans: Pitera and Carmody of University Detroit Mercy’s Architecture program and Eastern Market respectively. Their presentations on the possibilities that exist in Detroit’s future spoke to me in ways I had not imagined. I also met several young people working with Southwest Solutions who were enthusiastic about their organization’s community development mission.

On Saturday I found myself in Detroit again. The Detroit Urban Craft Fair was a fine example of entrepreneurship in action.

Creative urban planners, like University of Virginia’s Dr. Timothy Beatley, are seeing green innovation in smaller nooks and crannies—alleys, façades, neighborhoods—that can spur urban makeovers. The movement is dubbed “green urbanism”.

Dr. Timothy Beatley, author and University of Virginia’s sustainable communities professor and guru, shed his light on a packed house at Cleveland’s Natural History Museum Friday night (Nov. 14).

Invoking examples from mostly European cities that have embraced green innovation in dense urban pockets—Copenhagen, Melbourne, Freiburg, Stockholm—Beatley submitted that “a city ought to be