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Being the new guy at LJUrban, I came in with huge expectations of how we will change the world by building a whole new kind of community. It was pretty easy to get those expectations just looking around this website and reading through the mission and values of the group. Having worked here for a several weeks now, I believe we will do it. Everyone’s confidence and willingness to take risks and sacrifice are the key ingredients for getting there.

I also see how the progress towards sustainability will be incremental. Now that I’ve gotten the inside scoop on the status of all our projects, its clear the first steps toward sustainable cities are being taken with the first project—B Street West, with more steps on the next project—Newton Booth, and a continuing escalation as we snowball toward sustainability!

B Street West
B Street West will be the first to be built. If all goes as planned, site work will be starting in the next several months with construction starting in early Summer. Coming from the Tree Foundation, it was so exciting for me to see the oak trees on the corner preserved and given the space to exist for many decades to come. I would sure love to have an oak grove out my front door. Plus Micah has a whole load of other green features we will be adding to B Street West (look for a forthcoming post from him on this sometime this week). We should have more to show about this project, including floorplans and elevations in the very near future.

Newton Booth
The next big step we will make is to go from detached houses to attached housing in some of the progress in our gallery). Apart from inherent green features we’ve built into the design itself (such as leaving room for PV panels on the roof and incorporating passive solar design into each unit), we haven’t started the detailed specifications process yet. That will be our next step as we work toward construction drawings. But, we’re all pretty thrilled that we’ll have solar on our second project.

More Projects Forthcoming
In addition to B Street West and Newton Booth, we have four other infill sites, including the Discovery Center—all within a few blocks of each other in the Washington Area—that we’ve begun some preliminary planning on. Jason says we’ll have a map on the website soon so you can see where these newest acquisitions are and we’ll be talking more about them here in the blog.

Steve