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This was a good read about why it's so hard to redevelop these kinds of single-story, single-tenant retail buildings... https://ggwash.org/view/93853/whats-the-deal-with-single-tenant-retail-buildings

@portlandneedsnewarena , where's this from?

Like I said, figure out how to raise $30 or $40 million and you could make it happen! I find it noteworthy that Costco isn't offering to pay for it – kind of seems like it might not be worth the money. The prices at Costco might be cheap, but they're not nearly cheap enough to justify wasting...

Ha ha, not unless you wanna raise your gas taxes by a few million dollars! Westbrook ended up spending a whopping $2.6 million to widen about 400' feet of Clarke Drive last year (see page 52 of this document). At that rate, a mile-long road widening would cost Scarborough about 1/4th of its...

New design has been posted: https://selfservice.portlandmaine.gov/EnerGov_Prod/selfservice#/plan/64358869-3dca-4858-ba6f-fae620ec74d3?tab=attachments

I note that the architects for this one are Lever – the same Oregon firm that's working on Redfern's Washington Ave. project IIRC. Wonder if they're opening up a local office...

This kind of cognitive bias ("everybody that I know has a car") is a great example of how car-dependent communities get forced on us. In fact, the Census Bureau counts over 40,000 car-free households in Maine, the vast majority of whom do not live in Portland (but would probably love to live...

There have been some interesting, albeit quiet, conversations at MaineDOT recently about removing I-295 from the Interstate system and making it a slower, cheaper-to-maintain surface street, kind of like Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Right now, most of I-295's infrastructure is nearing the end...

I don't think anyone's posted this here, but the city planning office has produced this very interesting dashboard of housing production data: https://www.portlandmaine.gov/1462/Housing-Dashboard Some things to note: The 2020 "green new deal" ordinance did not, as some predicted, put an end...

Here you go: Source: https://archboston.com/community/threads/portland-me-new-construction-continued.944/page-117#post-197099

Elkus was the design architect and SMRT was the AOR, meaning they did the more detailed construction drawings and was the local liaison for permitting work...

Holst does great work! I'm excited to see them work on what's going to be a very prominent building at the entrance to Washington Ave.

This was kind of cool to see: a couple days ago, the "Mount Joy Orchard" instagram page posted a hair-on-fire NIMBY screed against this project because it would "threaten the health of Mount Joy Community Orchard" and alleged that "such a tall building in such close proximity would cast the...

The parking lots on the north side of Thompsons Point Road are actually owned by MaineDOT, and they occupy the land that the highway engineers took in the 1970s for a failed freeway spur that would have gone through the Fore River Marshes to Westbrook: That freeway got axed when Clean Water...

I agree it's slowly recovering compared to 2 years ago, but even a 15-20% rate of remote work - which is likely to be permanent at this point - represents a major shift in how much office space people need. Portland's Class A inventory is about 2 million square feet of office space; 15 percent...

I'm pretty surprised they're trying to sell offices surrounded by a dead zone of parking lots, instead of trying to start with housing - which there's actually demand for - and making an attempt to turn it into a neighborhood where people might actually want to work. There's very weak demand...

Portland Housing Authority has published a project website for its COMB Block project, which would be a multi-phase, multi-building redevelopment of the land it owns between Cumberland, Oxford, Mayo, and Boyd (COMB for short). The first building is going for planning approval this spring; it...

Franklin Towers doesn't have a bunch of fake-Greek crap plastered over its facade like those other buildings, but it does have strong claims to being historic – and it's frankly more unique than a lot of old houses with Greater Portland Landmarks plaques in the West End. It's a great example of...

Are you insinuating that "historic preservation" is less concerned about history than it is about enforcing the aesthetic preferences of wealthy, elitist snobs? What in the world gave you that idea? /sarcasm

As far as I know, they still control the big former Mercy Hospital parking lot on the other side of Spring Street, which is over 1/2 an acre with an 85' height limit...