Planning Our Resources


Book Description




Handbook of Massachusetts Land Use and Planning Law


Book Description

When you're dealing with any piece of real estate in Massachusetts, you need to Understand The applicable land use regulations and cases. Bobrowski's Handbook of Massachsetts Land Use and Planning Law provides all the insightful analysis and practical, expert advice you need, with detailed coverage of such important issues as: Affordable housing Special permit and variance decisions Zoning in Boston Nonconforming uses and structures Administrative appeal procedures Enforcement requests Building permits Vested rights Agricultural use exemptions Current tests for exactions SLAPP suit procedures Impact fees Civil rights challenges. Helpful tables facilitate convenient case law review, while forms and extensive cross-references add To The book's usefulness.




Mountain Resorts


Book Description

Mountain Resorts analyzes whether the law protects the ecological systems of mountains from the adverse impacts associated with resorts, examining how it might better recognize the value of the mountain ecosystem.




County and City Extra 2013


Book Description

When you want only one source of information about your city or county, turn to County and City Extra This trusted reference compiles information from many sources to provide all the key demographic and economic data for every state, county, metropolitan area, congressional district, and for all cities in the United States with a 2000 population of 25,000 or more. In one volume you can conveniently find data from 1990 to 2012 in easy-to-read tables. No other resource compiles this amount of detailed information into one place. Subjects covered in County and City Extra include: • population by age and race • government finances • income and poverty • manufacturing, trade, and services • crime • housing • education • immigration and migration • labor force and employment • agriculture, land, and water • residential construction • health resources • voting and elections The main body of this volume contains five basic parts and covers the following areas: Part A-states Part B-counties Part C-metropolitan areas Part D-cities with a 2010 census population of 25,000 or more Part E-congressional districts In addition, this publication includes: •figures and text in each section that highlight pertinent data and provide analysis •ranking tables which present each geography type by various subjects including population, land area, population density, educational attainment, housing values, race, unemployment, and crime •multiple color maps of the United States on various topics including median household income, poverty, voting, and race Furthermore, this volume contains several appendixes which include: • notes and explanations for further reference • definitions of geographic concepts • a listing of metropolitan and micropolitan areas and their component counties as of December 2009, with 2010 census populations • a list of cities by county •maps showing congressional districts, counties, and selected places within each state New in the 21st edition: In February 2013, the Office of Management and Budget released a completely new list of Core Based Statistical Areas (metropolitan and micropolitan areas) based on the 2010 census and some changes in the way these areas are defined. These newly delineated areas are presented in a new Appendix C, together with their component counties and their 2010 census and 2012 estimated populations. Table E (Congressional Districts) includes a wide selection of American Community Survey data for the newly established congressional districts of the 113th Congress, along with the 113th Congressional representatives. Some interesting facts found in the 2013 edition of County and City Extra include: Vermont had the fewest births between 2010 and 2012. West Virginia was the only state to have more deaths than births, but a net migration of more than 5,665 people prevented the state from having a population loss In ten states, more than 70 percent of the residents were born in that state. Louisiana ranked highest with 78.0 percent. There were 41 counties with a population of 1,000,000 or more in 2012. At the other extreme, there were 35 counties with fewer than 1,000 people. Over 1,200 counties had unemployment rates above the national average of 8.1 percent in 2012. In 2012, 83.9 percent of Americans lived in metropolitan areas, but these areas only made up 26 percent of the nation’s land area. Among all cities of 25,000 or more, 262 had unemployment rates of 10 percent or more significantly lower than two years earlier when 555 had unemployment rates of 10 percent or more. Rhode island’s 1st district of the smallest congressional district with a population of slightly more than 524,000. In California 33rd district, 95.9 percent of residents were high school graduates, compared with just 50.9 percent in California’s 21st district.




Foul Ball


Book Description

A rollicking and “compelling” true story of baseball, big money, and small-town politics by the author of the classic Ball Four (Publishers Weekly). Host to organized baseball since 1892, Pittsfield, Massachusetts’s Wahconah Park was soon to be abandoned by the owner of the Pittsfield Mets, who would move his team to a new stadium in another town—an all too familiar story. Enter former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton and his partner with the best deal ever offered to a community: a locally owned professional baseball team and a privately restored city-owned ballpark at no cost to the taxpayers. The only people who didn’t like Bouton's plan were the mayor, the mayor's hand-picked Parks Commissioners, a majority of the City Council, the only daily newspaper, the city’s largest bank, its most powerful law firm, and a guy from General Electric. Everyone else—or approximately 98% of the citizens of Pittsfield—loved it. But the “good old boys” hated Bouton’s plan because it would put a stake in the heart of a proposed $18.5 million baseball stadium—a new stadium that the citizens of Pittsfield had voted against three different times. In this riveting account, Bouton unmasks a mayor who brags that “the fix is in,” a newspaper that lies to its readers, and a government that operates out of a bar. But maybe the most incredible story is what happened after Foul Ball was published—a story in itself. Invited back by a new mayor, Bouton and his partner raise $1.2 million, help discover a document dating Pittsfield’s baseball origins to 1791, and stage a vintage game that’s broadcast live by ESPN-TV. Who could have guessed what would happen next? And that this time it would involve the Massachusetts Attorney General? “An irresistible story whose outcome remains in doubt until the very end. Not just a funny book, but a patriotic one.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Bouton proves that a badly run city government can be just as dangerous—and just as hilarious—as a badly run baseball team.”—Keith Olbermann







Designing the City


Book Description

Written in a clear and engaging style, Designing the City is a practical manual for improving the way communities are planned, designed, and built. It presents a wealth of information on design and decision-making, including advice on how citizens and activists can make their voices heard, and numerous examples of effective strategies for working with all parties involved in neighborhood and community development. It highlights proven models and strategies to help communities: establish unique and productive partnerships with public works and transportation departments develop resources through grant programs broaden expertise, perspective, and constituency create new and enduring models for effective action educate participants and consumers of the design and development process




Planning the Home Front


Book Description

Before Franklin Roosevelt declared December 7 to be a “date which will live in infamy”; before American soldiers landed on D-Day; before the B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s roared over Europe and Asia, there was Willow Run. Located twenty-five miles west of Detroit, the bomber plant at Willow Run and the community that grew up around it attracted tens of thousands of workers from across the United States during World War II. Together, they helped build the nation’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” but Willow Run also became the site of repeated political conflicts over how to build suburbia while mobilizing for total war. In Planning the Home Front, Sarah Jo Peterson offers readers a portrait of the American people—industrialists and labor leaders, federal officials and municipal leaders, social reformers, industrial workers, and their families—that lays bare the foundations of community, the high costs of racism, and the tangled process of negotiation between New Deal visionaries and wartime planners. By tying the history of suburbanization to that of the home front, Peterson uncovers how the United States planned and built industrial regions in the pursuit of war, setting the stage for the suburban explosion that would change the American landscape when the war was won.




The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright


Book Description

This is the first book devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for remaking the modern city. Stunningly comprehensive, The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright presents a radically new interpretation of the architect’s work and offers new and important perspectives on the history of modernism. Neil Levine places Wright’s projects, produced over more than fifty years, within their historical, cultural, and physical contexts, while relating them to the theory and practice of urbanism as it evolved over the twentieth century. Levine overturns the conventional view of Wright as an architect who deplored the city and whose urban vision was limited to a utopian plan for a network of agrarian communities he called Broadacre City. Rather, Levine reveals Wright’s larger, more varied, interesting, and complex urbanism, demonstrated across the span of his lengthy career. Beginning with Wright’s plans from the late 1890s through the early 1910s for reforming residential urban neighborhoods, mainly in Chicago, and continuing through projects from the 1920s through the 1950s for commercial, mixed-use, civic, and cultural centers for Chicago, Madison, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Baghdad, Levine demonstrates Wright’s place among the leading contributors to the creation of the modern city. Wright’s often spectacular designs are shown to be those of an innovative precursor and creative participant in the world of ideas that shaped the modern metropolis. Lavishly illustrated with drawings, plans, maps, and photographs, this book features the first extensive new photography of materials from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright will serve as one of the most important books on the architect for years to come.