New Buildings Change Neighborhoods, Mainly for the Better

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Omaha plans the future of downtown: Omaha has big plans for downtown including room for 30K more employees and 30K more residents over the next 20 years in a push to attract more talent and grow the region. The Chamber of Commerce’s Urban Core Strategic Plans lays out a vision of new housing, redevelopment, a highway turned into a boulevard and better transit access. (Henry Cordes and Jessica Wade | Omaha World Herald)

Why boomers tell millennials there’s no housing crisis: John Elledge writes that one of the reasons why older Brits think housing isn’t that expensive for younger people is because they are comparing it to other housing options instead of incomes. The lowest end 300K home might look good when everything is 600K or more, but if you’re only making 50K a year it’s still unaffordable. (John Elledge | New Statesman)

Your sense of direction comes from your youth: New research out of University College in London have found that people who grew up outside cities and in areas with unorganized street grids are better at directions later in life. After gathering a database of 4.3 million responses, the researchers posit that developing a sense of direction is like developing anguage, which is easier earlier in life. The findings have value in thinking about diagnosing dementia in its earliest stages. (Benjamin Mueller | New York Times)

Colorado could soon allow Idaho Stops: The Colorado State Legislature has voted for a law that would allow Idaho Stops in the state. If enacted, the law would allow bike riders to slow down to under 10 mph without coming to a complete stop at intersections. Additionally, at intersections without cars a red light would become a stop sign and a stop sign becomes a yield sign. It will soon be sent back to the House and then to the Governor’s desk. (Hannah Metzger | Colorado Politics)

New buildings change neighborhoods for the better: New research from the Urban Displacement Project looked at the impacts of new buildings constructed in existing neighborhoods. They found that the new buildings increased what is known as churn, or more people moving in and out of the neighborhood based on need. But one surprising finding was that when more new buildings were built, people of lower incomes moved into the neighborhood more than stagnant areas. (Henry Grabar | Slate)

Quote of the Week

So when do the kids ever get to see something other than the concrete jungle that surrounds them? I think it is our moral responsibility to provide that.

-L.A. Unified School District’s superintendent Alberto Carvalho discussing in the LA Times why the district should change its concrete school yards to create green space.

This week on the podcast, Jeremy Levine, an assistant professor of organizational studies and sociology at the University of Michigan, talks about his book “Constructing Community: Urban Governance, Development, and Inequality in Boston.” Below are both parts of the conversation.

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