Apartment Choice

AKRON, Ohio - Testa Companies plans to build 40 townhomes in North Hill, in what will be the first new family housing development in North Akron in more than 20 years. Through a partnership with the International Institute of Akron, the city and the Ohio Housing Finance Agency , Testa plans to break ground in spring 2018 on the International House at San Tomasso (Italian for St. Thomas). The units will be built on land near St. Thomas Hospital and St. Anthony of Padua Parish on N. Main Street and is intended to be largely occupied by refugees. In July, the Ohio Housing Finance Agency announced the International House at San Tomasso received a portion of the $27 million awarded under the 2017 Housing Tax Credit program awards . The program pays for construction, acquisition and rehabilitation of affordable housing communities across Ohio. The new development aligns with the city's plan to boost Akron's population and strengthen its tax base as outlined in the report Planni...

On Aug. 9, 2007, Lansing police discovered the beaten body of 46-year-old Debra Renfors in her apartment in the 1000 block of North Washington Street . Renfors was the third woman to be bludgeoned to death in the city in two weeks, and a grim reality was beginning to set in. Det. Sgt. Joey Dionise confronted Captain Ray Hall , giving voice to a fear that had been bubbling for days. “Captain,” Dionise said, ”We have a serial killer. Years later, Hall still remembers the “sinking feeling” that accompanied that moment. Ten years ago this month, Lansing was in the grip of a killer who preyed on single women, using whatever was convenient to murder them, and, in some instances, sexually assaulting them. Before police caught him, he had killed five women in just over four weeks. A sixth woman would survive. Matthew Emmanuel Macon , then 27, was eventually convicted of two of the murders, and the assault of the surviving victim. When detectives got Macon in an interview room, it would take ...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

A decade after the crash, Shannon Valley housing estate , on the outskirts of Ballaghaderreen, in Co Roscommon, remains unfinished and partly in ruins. Although the number of “ unfinished housing developments ” has fallen sharply since 2010, Shannon Valley is one of hundreds that still dot the country. The Guls: ‘Every day I put rats in the bin’ Fatima Gul says her little brother, Yousaf, doesn’t like the rats. He jumps up on the sofa or the table in the living room when they come into the house. Their parents don’t allow Fatimar, who is 10, or her nine-year-old sister, Maryam, or Yousaf and his twin, Zohra, who are five, to play near the houses on the other side of their green. It’s too close to the rats and the rubble. Shannon Valley “ ghost estate ” outside Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon. Photograph: Simon Carswell" height="349" src="https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3181475!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg" width="620...