Sometimes, the process of creating change in your neighborhood starts with meeting your neighbors and engaging them in the conversation about how your community looks, how it works, and which of your neighbors struggle and why. It is extremely difficult to make...
On October 14th, the Cultural Landscape Foundation of Washington, DC awarded the Cornelia Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. This is like the Nobel Prize for great thinkers on planting schemes. The inaugural prize was awarded to Julie...
It is amazing how often public life suffers because some fairly highly paid individual didn’t pay attention to the details. And because of those faulty details, everyone feels uncomfortable, even if they don’t know why. That was brought home to me on my drive...
Blight is the process or effect of community deterioration. It can manifest in vacant and abandoned homes, litter-filled vacant lots, empty storefronts, or even lots of broken windows in a neighborhood. Blight and poverty are not the same thing, and there are plenty...
I want to sing praise to the humble porch. In particular, the front porch. Porches are common features of homes in older neighborhoods here in the Northeast, and they are extremely popular in the South. There are home builders in our area (and I wouldn’t be...
This past year has been a hot one in the real estate market for many areas of upstate New York. One of the hottest of those markets has been in Saratoga County, where Flatley Read is headquartered. In the weekly real estate transfer listings that are published in the...
