Apartment Choice

Plans for the controversial Lincoln Station apartment complex are now shelved after New Lenox village trustees let a motion for a third extension to the special use permit for the project die on the floor Monday night . New Lenox Development Company , LLC had requested another extension for its preliminary planned unit development for the 208-unit complex on 16 acres near the Metra Station but the motion to approve the request was not seconded at the board’s regular meeting. The village had approved the preliminary plan for the complex in August 2015, after almost a yearlong discussion and dissent from residents. In July of that year about 100 residents had attended a special townhall to discuss the project, the majority of whom opposed it. The board granted the PUD in August after NLDC agreed to cut the size of the complex from 312 to 208 units. NLDC had one year to come back to the board for approval of a final plan, however it received a six-month extension last August because it...

UConn’s place in the Hartford skyline . Hartford — For nearly a half-century, the University of Connecticut has had no place to call its own in the state’s capital city. Today that changes as Connecticut’s flagship university opens the doors of its new $140- million downtown branch campus on Prospect Street . The arrival of the campus, which comes after five years of false starts and setbacks, is a milestone for the university and the city of Hartford. Hundreds attended the grand opening ceremony downtown Wednesday morning . For UConn, it marks the institution’s return from the suburbs into the heart of the city – where the school first opened its Greater Hartford branch in 1939. It moved to West Hartford in 1970. The university, in the years since, had been able to continue to claim a “presence” downtown. Some of UConn’s graduate business programs are housed in a space it leases in 100 Constitution Plaza, and the university’s basketball and ice hockey teams play games in the XL ...

GLEN ROCK - A resolution that provides the final stamp of approval on the Zoning Board of Adjustment’s June passage of a land use variance for a 52-unit, age- restricted apartment complex on Prospect Street is likely to be voted on at the Aug. 10 meeting, according to  board chairman Bruce Beal in an Aug. 3 phone interview.   The property is currently zoned A-2 for single-family housing. At its June meeting, the Zoning Board voted 6 -1 to grant a use variance to Glen Park Village LLC , for construction of two age- restricted apartment buildings on a two-acre plot in a residential zone. Board member William Mitchell voted against it. Sign Up for E-News The vote approving a use variance followed almost four years of various proposals by Glen Park Village LLC , of Franklin Lakes, for the site, including age-restricted and not age-restricted proposals. Glen Park Village LLC representatives had previously stated that they would present a full site plan to the Zoning Board after a use...

Ready to start working on a new development project? Great! But not everything is about coding. In fact, the most difficult part comes when several people have to work together towards the same goal, and without a way to visualize all the to-do's, things can often fall apart before they begin. That's where Scrum comes into play. Scrum is a Project Management set of good practices that can be applied in any software project . In fact, it can be applied in any project that has a defined output. Scrum is based on iterations, or Sprints as they're called in the Scrum world. Each Sprint contains all the phases of a long-term project such as: Analysis Design Implementation QA At the end of each Sprint, the product increment that could be achieved during the Sprint's time will be reviewed and validated and the cycle will begin again to build a final product in an iterative way that prevents team members from getting overwhelmed. Those functional increments of the final prod...

Last week the East Design Review Board threw a wrench in plans to begin construction on the complex planned around Capitol Hill Station when they declined to recommend any part of the project, including Capitol Hill Housing ’s planned 110 affordable homes on the B-North site. Board members voiced a variety of concerns, from Kenny Pleasant ’s objections to color palette to the chair Curtis Bigelow ’s concerns about the location of the daycare on Broadway, which he found to be in poor taste or perhaps dangerous. There was also Bigelow’s feeling that the building just hadn’t reached a high enough pinnacle of greatness. “This is a really good building. I think we were expecting it to be a great building,” Bigelow said, as quoted by Brandon Macz in Capitol Hill Times . Capitol Hill Housing ’s Communications Manager Ashwin Warrior said not getting the recommendation last week will certainly delay completion of the affordable housing and increase costs on the non-profit. “We anticipate...

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...