Category: urban planning
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Part I: More Housing Choices Are Coming to Ferndale
Housing for All Ferndalians & Income Levels This is a two part blog post on the development growth spurt and new housing in Ferndale. In Part One: I explore why new housing projects help the city address housing needs for everyone. In Part Two: I discuss city initiatives to create inclusive housing policies, and responding […]
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Fair Dinkum: Park Ingenuity
Fair Dinkum: Aussie slang that means true, real, genuine. In 1998, I lived in Tasmania, Australia as an exchange student. I was 14. During my year abroad, I went on a two-week trip with 30 other exchange students through the center of Australia to Uluru (the big monolith). We drove and camped during our tour […]
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Age Friendly Ferndale
How livable is Ferndale? A couple Sundays ago, I asked myself that question while reading an article in the American Planning Association journal about the AARP Livability Index. Sipping my coffee with my journal in one hand and my laptop next to me on the couch, I was very curious about the Index measures and […]
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Citizen involvement shaping growth and development
Communities have been in transition from the typical car-focused development known as urban sprawl to smart growth or compact, higher-density development that is now known as the preferred way to grow an urban downtown. New development projects that include retail space, new housing and office space needs to be easy to walk to, close to transit, increase […]
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Twenty Years: Revitalizing Downtown Ferndale
In the December 2014 Ferndale Friends issue, I responded to questions about the 3-60 development project. My intent was to expand on that response here, but that intent evolved into answering my personal question “when DID Ferndale determine to build higher-density, mixed use office and residential in the downtown?” Essentially, I “scoped creeped” my original post idea, […]
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Borders of Opportunity
It’s time to finally shed the negative narrative of inner-ring municipal borders as dividers between Detroit and its border communities. The common narrative frame about suburbs and Detroit municipal borders typically focus on borders as physical and emotional dividers. Instead let’s reframe the municipal borders as positive opportunities that benefit everyone. Detroit and the inner-ring […]
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Poops and the City
Dog poop. It’s the under belly of public spaces, neighborhood parks, side walks, lawns and your bushes. We all love our pets and parks though some pet owners have a hard time following through on their daily pet duties—picking up the poop. In response to the fouling of public spaces, municipal governments everywhere respond with […]
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What’s Up With Those Green Markings?
Something looks really different about the Livernois bikes lanes than most motorists and cyclists have not seen or experienced in Michigan communities. Bike lanes help cars and motorists co-exist safely. Buffered bike lanes, which is the first type of bike lane in Ferndale, is another level of safety up from a conventional bike lane. The City […]
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The Way Finding Trees
Sometimes I wonder how I navigated getting myself from one destination to another–BGM (Before Google Maps). Before GIS mapping came ubiquitous on smart phones, I relied on AAA Trip Tickets to show me the travel directions from one state to another. Before AAA Trip Tickets, and in navigational mystery emergencies, a rolled up tattered metro […]