Curbed November 2018 Calling the Minneapolis 2040 plan ambitious is an understatement. The plan, which is expected to pass City Council scrutiny early next month, is the furthest-reaching such proposal from a U.S. municipality, and comes after nearly a year of heated debate. The updated policy would upzone nearly the entire city, which will allow taller buildings with more […]
Curbed December 2018 A wave of sameness has washed over new residential architecture. U.S. cities are filled with apartment buildings sporting boxy designs and somewhat bland facades, often made with colored panels and flat windows. Due to an Amazon-fueled apartment construction boom over the last decade, Seattle has been an epicenter of this new school of structural […]
Curbed January 2019 When Cameron Crow, 29, contemplated a move back to his native Boise, Idaho, three years ago, his friends reacted with confusion. At the time, Crow was a data analyst working in San Francisco, the nation’s tech hub; why would he leave that for a small city in Idaho? Crow said it took […]
Curbed February 2019 Chicago’s many nicknames, from the City of Big Shoulders to the City That Works, riff on its reputation as a gritty, hard-working, and down-to-earth alternative to coastal cities. But the nickname that best characterizes life in Chicago may be the City of Neighborhoods, which reflects its array of diverse, distinct, and close-knit […]
Curbed March 2019 Along with dog parks and third-wave coffee shops, the high-end, over-amenitized apartment has become a contemporary urban cliche. Luxury apartments aren’t new. But today’s developers have elevated to an art form the practice of including amenities that pander to millennial lifestyle trends. In Seattle, where the Amazon-fueled boom in luxury high-rises added so much inventory that rents at […]
Curbed May 2019 Like many born and raised in Bakersfield, California, Austin Smith has made peace with the city’s reputation. Built on oil and agriculture, the city of half a million in the state’s rural Central Valley, known by outsiders for its unique strain of country music and long-running role as a punchline for Johnny Carson, has traditionally […]
Curbed May 2019 When country music megastars George Strait and Alan Jackson performed “Murder on Music Row” live during the 1999 Country Music Association Awards show, the two singers used the song’s blunt lyrics to critique the radio-friendly sheen of contemporary country and its threat to traditional songwriting and artistry. Anyone familiar with the country […]
Curbed June 2019 Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the Southeast’s biggest cities, is short 34,000 affordable housing units. A booming job market has attracted 100,000 new households to the city since 2000, and supply hasn’t kept up with demand. In Salt Lake City, Utah, there are more families than available places to live, a shortage of about 54,000 […]
Curbed June 2019 If you had asked Paul Smith Jr., mayor of Union Beach, New Jersey, if he thought he’d still be talking about Hurricane Sandy today, more than six and a half years after the storm made landfall, he would have said no. But years after the storm pummeled New Jersey’s coastline, Sandy is […]
Curbed June 2019 Timothy Paule’s path to revitalizing vacant lots in his hometown of Detroit started with a persistent cough. In the fall of 2016, the commercial photographer found himself sick and tired from a cold that wouldn’t quit. After a litany of medicines failed him, someone manning a stall at a local farmers market […]