Apartment City

A building at Woodcreek Apartments in Ypsilanti Township remains abandoned as the management and insurance company settle a dispute over the insurance settlement. Tom Perkins | For AnnArbor.com An eight-unit, burned-out apartment building in the Woodcreek Apartments off East Forest Avenue continues sitting vacant after a Molotov cocktail attack damaged it in a July 10 arson. A building left vacant with no timetable for demolition or repair is rare in Ypsilanti Township , where officials are tenacious in their efforts to quickly address blight . But this time, the township is caught in the middle of a settlement dispute between an insurance adjuster, Woodcreek management and the building's insurer. Also at stake is $120,000 in insurance money. The insurance adjuster, Craig Trombley of American Adjusters, was hired by Woodreek's owner, Ken Sharrock . Trombley is paid a percentage of the $120,000. The two accuse an Ypsilanti Township building official of putting residen...

In the 1920s, you could live on the edge of downtown off Park or Portland Avenue S. and never need to own a car. That’s because as much as a generation earlier, Park and Portland served as anchors for a swank residential neighborhood south of 10th Street, complete with tree- lined side streets , small hotels, townhouses and high-end apartments for professionals, many of them designed by leading architects. Well into the 1940s, this part of downtown was very much a neighborhood with networks of long-term residents and nearby cultural institutions , theaters and churches, as well as shops and restaurants. Today, there’s little reason to get out of your car, aside from the new Commons park by U.S. Bank Stadium. So many of the once-grand buildings were lost in the postwar flight to suburbia. In their place was left acres of parking lots and drive-though banks. But a walkable neighborhood is worth bringing back . And that’s what BKV Group hopes to do. The Minneapolis architecture, interi...

RIO DE JANEIRO ― Seven years ago, Vila Autódromo was little more than a tranquil fishing village on the edge of Jacarepagua Lagoon, next to the racetrack for which it was named. Like the hundreds of other favelas that dot Rio de Janeiro ’s landscape, it had long been neglected by the city government , and it lacked many basic public services that are standard in the fast- growing wealthier neighborhoods just across the water. But to the more than 600 families that lived there, it was home. “This was a paradise,” said Luiz Cláudio Silva, who lived in Autódromo for more than 20 years. “I thought that I would live here for the rest of my life.” By the time the Rio Olympics are over, just 20 of the families who lived in Autódromo in 2009, the year the International Olympic Committee chose the city to host the games, will remain. The community, which sits less than a mile away from Rio’s Olympic Park, was crushed so that the city could build new access roads to connect Olympic venues . ...