The 234 Apartment

The $13. 5 million Dillard project is scheduled to break ground in October and be completed in spring 2019, Deb Wendel-Daub, a Kilbourne project manager , said Wednesday, Aug. 23. The construction site is now a parking lot owned by the Dillard family but had once been home to row houses and a lumberyard, according to Kilbourne. Like many parking lots, it's not appealing to pedestrians and the new building is intended to change that. The Renaissance Zone Authority on Wednesday recommended tax exemptions for the project worth $967,000 over five years. After the incentives expire, Kilbourne estimates it would pay $202,000 a year in property taxes. The parking lot now pays $2,400 a year. Because the area is also part of a tax- increment financing district paying for a city- owned parking ramp that the developer finished in June, the taxes would go towards the ramp. Plans call for a 94,000-square-foot, six- story building with 84 apartment units and 13,000 square feet of ground...

click to enlarge Crews on site at 2447 Cass, which housing preservationists say is slated for demolition. Historic preservationists are keeping a watchful eye on three brick multi- level buildings that stand in the shadow of the Little Caesars Arena after getting word last week that the Ilitch family- owned Olympia Development had planned to demolish them without permission. The company’s contractors had previously obtained demolition permits for the more than hundred-year-old buildings, but according to the city's buildings department, the permits are frozen as the city studies whether the buildings are eligible for historic designation. Alarm bells first went off Tuesday when workers in neon shirts and hard hats showed up outside the more than hundred-year-old buildings at Cass Avenue and Henry Street, near Woodward and I-75. With them was a truck printed with the Homrich logo— a company known for its work in demolition and remediation. The activity sparked swif...

Along Florida's Turnpike in South Miami -Dade, where potato farms and fields of row crops stretched all the way to the visible horizon at the time when Hurricane Andrew struck , it’s virtually all rows of close-packed houses and townhomes today. Now the unavoidable noise walls are going up to forever block vistas once among the most beguiling in South Florida. Along South Dixie Highway , where scraggly lots, small farm fields and vegetable- and fruit-packing houses once mixed it up with used-car lots and budget motels, the landscape is a cornucopia of strip malls, Publix and Wal-Mart stores and fast- food chain restaurants . And everywhere there is traffic, backed up one way in the morning, when three-quarters of all employed adults in South Miami - Dade head north to downtown Miami , Coral Gables or even Doral to work, and the other way when they drive back home in the evening. Lightning struck as thunderstorms swept through the ruins of Homestead in the days after Hurricane...