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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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There are hundreds of stories of failed subdivisions left empty by the housing bust, where homeowners are stuck staring into vacant lots of PVC pipes and weeds. There are very few stories where a half-finished development has been saved from ruin. The rescue of one such development, by the city in which it is located, is being heralded as a potential solution to some of the worst mistakes of the housing crisis. The local newspaper, the Covington News, praised the project, writing that "a community has been brought back from the dead." That Covington, a city 35 miles east of Atlanta, did anything at all is unusual, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, an architect and urban-design professor at Georgia Tech who has a chapter on the subdivision, Walker's Bend, in a forthcoming book, Retrofitting Sprawl.
"I really applaud them tremendously, since its pretty unusual: Cities just aren't in the business of being developers," she said. "In conservative districts, there's a philosophical sense that the city as master developer smacks of socialism." But some residents say that the way the city intervened in this subdivision has just made life there worse -- raising questions about whether or not government intervention in the housing market is a good thing, and about whether mixed-income housing can ever work.
