Stories indexed with the term ‘housing construction’

The city of Ann Arbor’s automatic email delivery system sent a message today that the developer for the City Place residential project on South Fifth Avenue has submitted proposed revisions to a site plan already approved by the city council on Sept. 21, 2009.

The development calls for the demolition of seven houses and the construction of two apartment buildings separated by a parking lot, with 24 total dwelling units – each with six bedrooms.

In a telephone interview, Wendy Rampson, head of planning for the city, indicated that the revisions currently proposed can be approved administratively, without coming before the planning commission or the city council. Pre-construction meetings were held two weeks ago, she said, and the intent is to begin … [Full Story]

It is both a luxury and a curse of modern life to be doing “all the right things” while fearing you’ve missed something vital along that road not taken. Andy Hoffman, a University of Michigan professor and author of “Builder’s Apprentice,” confronted that suspicion in the mid-1980s while mulling grad school offers from Harvard and Berkeley.

As he prepared to graduate with a bachelor’s degree (“grades thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen”) in chemical engineering, Hoffman writes, he “fumbled” through interviews with prospective employers: “I had assumed that recruiters would tell me what I was supposed to do for them. … I would be guided on to the next step in life.” He took a job with the Environmental Protection Agency, “generating paperwork” for two years, and assumed that the next step – and the cure for his aimlessness – would be graduate school in public policy.

But what he really wanted to do was build houses. [Full Story]