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You should put that in an email to the EDC!

Even clean clay is a huge hassle for any kind of underground construction - lots of expensive pile driving and retaining walls. Even without that geology, though, Portland's real estate market makes it hard to justify underground parking garages - car storage is a low-rent land use. As this...

^ We're getting into some fairly practical considerations for a "crazy" transit pitch threads, but yeah: the trunk route's the most important thing, so why divert resources at all to new rails north of Portland, where there's extremely little ridership? It *only* makes sense if there's a big...

Oh, definitely, get rid of the highway widening and a peninsula rail line becomes more feasible (both from a capital costs perspective, and from a ridership perspective). NNEPRA did a very cursory study of that alignment in 2006, and they concluded it would cost $41 million (in 2006 money) for a...

Found a massing diagram for a proposed apartment/condo building at 45 Brown Street (current site of the "Village Green" parking garage, one of Portland's oldest and rustiest parking structures): This 25-foot tall, 300 unit concept is probably not going to be built: the brochure it's from is...

I agree that both proposals are unlikely to ever happen – but I maintain the Turnpike alignment through empty ROW is much, much less unlikely than a multi-billion project with multiple new overpasses and highway interchange reconstructions through Falmouth and the Portland peninsula. Plus, I'm...

MaineDOT's 295 widening proposal died about 15 years ago, and for reasons both financial and political, it's not being revived. The region's MPO long ago decided that the Turnpike should carry most regional through traffic, instead of trying to cram even more vehicles into the state's most...

Building permits have been issued both for the SunLife office building: https://selfservice.portlandmaine.gov/EnerGov_Prod/SelfService#/permit/fdaadead-d8ef-4845-b767-9bc0bb242da2?tab=attachments And for the rebuilt/relocated "Building 12" pattern building...

^ Absolutely. The flip side of that is that there's very little demand anymore for the suburban strip malls and office parks in Waterstone's portfolio, and they see the writing on the wall. If I were in their shoes I'd focus on front-loading the project with a lot of new apartments, which are...

I'm a bit more skeptical, though I'd love to see them pull it off. It's been over 2 years since their original planning board approval, and so far they've only built a temporary concert venue and a big strip mall with an oversized parking lot. I think they've got a solid idea by trying to...

55 Portland (the former public works office) is being renovated into a new office building for Preble Street resource center: https://selfservice.portlandmaine.gov/EnerGov_Prod/SelfService#/permit/a4be3c2d-e5b0-4d0c-bca0-1234f81c26b6?tab=attachments

Parking garages are very expensive and generate little to no rent! Thread:

You can tell Corey's a new parent from all the crack-of-dawn sunrise shots he's been getting lately :D

@PWMFlyer - Every architectural style goes though a period of disillusionment in middle age. In the 1960s, they were tearing down art deco buildings we'd kill to have today; 1960s/1970s brutalist and modernist buildings (like the UHaul building on Marginal Way) are already coming back in style...

Good questions! I just checked the city's building permit site: https://egweb.portlandmaine.gov/EnerGovProd/SelfService/#/search ... and didn't see any applications for those two projects. I did, however, find a surprise: someone's pulled a permit application for 75 Chestnut Street, now being...

With repeated exposure to the elements and salt from cars, these garages have required major, expensive maintenance work nearly every year for the past decade. The fundamental rule of building maintenance – keeping out the water – isn't allowed in a parking garage, because if you did, your...

I think that the in-town train station idea has been shelved – NNEPRA's main rationalization for building a new station is avoiding a time-consuming turnaround at the existing location, and moving the station to West Commercial Street would just re-create the same problem. A West Commercial...

Dang, look at that new street wall. Great shot Corey.

Proposed office/restaurant mixed-use building on Route 1 in Falmouth. This is the first proposal for the area since the owners pulled their much larger "town center" master plan a little over a year ago...

There's still a lot of excess right-of-way for that section of Franklin (which would go down to two lanes – that section gets a similar amount of traffic as Pearl and India Streets). But yes, if the east side gets built out like this, then most of that excess ROW will by default go to the...