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I got some photos of the Maine Mall parking lot on Black Friday – allegedly the busiest shopping day of the year:

Oh no if we build affordable housing Portland might be less attractive to people from away and snobby boomers from North Yarmouth

To be sure, other civil engineering firms put their names on similar dreck, but Gorrill-Palmer isn't just doing the engineering, they're also doing the site design with their in-house landscape architects. Look at their past projects – almost all of them are strip malls, cul-de-sac...

Traffic concerns are obviously going to be a huge issue when your development is a car-oriented mess of suburban sprawl like this proposal: These consultants, Gorrill-Palmer, have a terrible reputation. I remember about 15 years ago they produced a "traffic plan" for Portland that suggested...

I'd have to check, but it might be awfully difficult – if not outright impossible – to try and get planning approval for a new surface parking lot in the B3 zone one block away from Congress Street. Drive-thrus are also prohibited – this one is grandfathered, but hard to see how it would be...

Probably more valuable than they were 10 years ago, but I don't think these lots are appreciating as fast as other parts of the city, thanks to worsening outlooks for flooding and sea level rise in this neighborhood. Even in the first version of this project, the developers were going to spend...

The last wholesale warehouse on inner Washington might be up for sale soon. The owners of Northern Burner, across the street from Amvets and next to the Eastern Prom, have announced their retirement and are merging their operations into The Granite Group near Cash Corner in South Portland...

Yes, there is: https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-migration-data It's been a while since I dug into it, but when I looked c. 2017, some of the top sources of domestic in-migration for Cumberland County were Suffolk County MA and Kings County (Brooklyn) NY.

Several much larger waterfront projects come to mind without even leaving New England: Seaport Square in Boston: 6.3 million square feet total, including 2500 homes: https://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/seaport-square-pda Dorchester Bay City in Boston: 6.5 million square...

Building permit application is in for 155 Sheridan, the project that's next to/downhill from Fort Sumner Park:

I got nerd-sniped into figuring out the date for this photo – you can see Hannaford Hall on the USM campus under construction, which dates it to summer 2004: https://usmfreepress.org/2004/09/07/and-the-construction-continues/ Also, it may be dated, but it does do a nice job illustrating how...

I got nerd-sniped into figuring out the date for this photo – you can see Hannaford Hall on the USM campus under construction, which dates it to summer 2004: https://usmfreepress.org/2004/09/07/and-the-construction-continues/ Also, it may be dated, but it does do a nice job illustrating how...

Go to Apartments.com and you'll see that a number of those addresses have rental listings – it's not uncommon for projects to lease out unsold condo units on short-term leases while they wait for buyers (or for buyers to rent out their condos as apartments to other people). Just because they're...

Impressive project! Too bad there's a white elephant parking garage blocking views of the river. From the story, it sounds as though nobody's even using it: "The 590-space parking garage, which Levesque said is empty, is planned to serve tenants of both residential buildings."

I was by there this morning and there's already a big crew working on the masonry, and the old fabric awnings have been torn off.

They're building 24 duplexes on a cul-de-sac. This section of Main Street doesn't even have a sidewalk on the east side, and judging by the site plans, the developers aren't adding one. Imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a new home that's within walking distance of downtown...

Speaking of creativity, I would love to read a critique that doesn't resort to Red Scare cliches while complaining about affordable housing. In fairness, though, it's pretty funny if you think that the solution to this imaginary problem is to have a government committee mandate the "correct"...

I definitely agree that there's still more parking than necessary in this proposal, but the project is being built on what is an existing surface parking lot that has 40-something parking spaces, so it is giving us a net reduction in parking.

Yeah, I'm a little dubious about those huge riverfront parking lots – they're wasting some of their most valuable real estate on asphalt (and it looks like they're also planning at least some ground-floor structured parking?) With all the development in this area there's a strong case for...

Asking them to add another floor to include more apartments on the site is good feedback for the applicants and the Planning Board to hear, especially now at the workshop stage. I doubt it's a financial issue – adding another floor would add some construction expense, but most of the fixed...