From the Archives

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July 21, 2019 by Kevin

From the Archives: More from Scottsdale, Arizona

From 2007-09 we worked on the Downtown Plan for Scottsdale, Arizona. This was a particularly special project since I’d grown up in Scottsdale, twenty years earlier. The downtown was going through a resurgence and people were excited to work on the plan.

Like the rest of our projects, there were lots of photos. This third set was taken over the course of a five-hour walk on a single August afternoon in 2007. As the afternoon progressed, the sky darkened as rainclouds started to form.

See more Downtown Scottsdale archive photos here and here.

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Archives

September 29, 2018 by Kevin

From the Archives: Foster City Neighborhood 5

Bayporte newspaper advertisement – September 7, 1974

In 2010-2011 we assisted the City of Foster City with the existing conditions analysis for the Land Use & Circulation Element of its General Plan. This involved lots of photos.

Foster City is a master-planned “new town” founded in the 1960s on engineered landfill in the marshes of the San Francisco Bay. The city was named after T. Jack Foster, a real estate magnate who owned much of the land comprising the city and who was instrumental in its initial design.

The neighborhoods in Foster City are numbered: Neighborhoods 1 through 9, as well as C, L, PT, TC and VP. The street names area also named around themes such as fish, ports and famous explorers. Neighborhoods 1 and 2 were covered in a previous entry; followed by Neighborhoods 3 & 4 in a subsequent entry.

Winston Square newspaper advertisement – May 25, 1974

Neighborhood 5 was first Foster City neighborhood to be built out of order. It was developed in the 1970s, and consists entirely of multifamily condominium and cluster developments; there are no detached single family homes. The developments provide a showcase of 1970s architectural design and site planning, including the iconic white and blue “The Islands” and “Lido Island” condominiums which overlook Foster City’s Central Lake.

Neighborhood 5 also included the Charter Square shopping center, which is shown in this collection of photos but has since been torn down to build a new elementary school.

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August 5, 2018 by Kevin

From the Archives: Williams, California

Through the years of the consulting business we compiled a lot of photos, so an aspect of  this site it to provide a venue for pulling those out of the archives. Here is a handful of photos produced for a proposal for Williams, California. The photos were taken in September 2009:

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July 25, 2015 by Kevin

SOMA

For a time I had two parallel careers: city planning consulting and real estate agent. Though I’d studied city planning, I’d also long had a real estate license so I could help out in my partner’s business on the weekends. In 2005 with the strong local property market I went full time into real estate sales while my planning consulting was fledgling.

During that time I got a listing for a loft that was in the popular South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood. Life in SOMA varies block-to-block, with snazzy new lofts and highrises on one block, and skid row and rescue missions on the next. It is the diversity that makes the neighborhood interesting and provides a place for pretty much everyone, but can provide a challenge for marketing a property depending on which of those blocks it is located. My loft listing was on one of the more troubled blocks, one with more than its share of boarded-up buildings and illicit activity occurring in broad daylight. Yet within two or three blocks were the bars, restaurants and markets that prospective loft-dwellers would be attracted to.

In an effort to encourage prospective buyers to “look there, not here” I took a series of neighborhood photos to accompany the internet property listing. The photos included the various popular hang-outs in SOMA at the time.

A decade later, SOMA is a bit more snazzy and quite a bit less diverse than it was then. And at the time these photos were taken, the neighborhood had already been notable for how much it had changed from previous decades. So in a sense, these photos offer a time capsule of a point in time of an ever-changing neighborhood.

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