A Decent Home: Planning, Building, and Preserving Affordable Housing

What is a decent home? Does it simply provide shelter from the elements? Is it affordable enough that you can buy the other necessities of life? Does it connect you to a community with adequate social and economic resources? Noted housing expert Alan Mallach turns his decades of experience to these questions in "A Decent Home". M

Politics & Social Sciences

Mallach, Alan

Social Sciences

Routledge

Abandoned properties are a plague across the United States, from rust belt cities like Detroit and Buffalo to small towns like Lima, Ohio, and Waterloo, Iowa. Even in Sunbelt cities such as Houston and Las Vegas, abandonment is a major problem, as investment flows to the periphery, leaving the older, inner neighborhoods behind. In Bringing Buildings Back, Alan Mallach provides policymakers and practitioners with the first in-depth guide to understanding and dealing with the many ramifications that this issue holds for the future of our older cities. Combining practical suggestions with a thoughtful exploration of policy, Mallach pulls together insights from law, economics, planning, and design to address all sides of the problem, from how abandonment can be prevented to how best to bring these properties back into productive reuse. Focusing on the need for sustainable reuse and revitalization of America's cities and neighborhoods, Bringing Buildings Back shows how finding solutions for individual buildings can and must be tied to the larger process of making our cities economically stronger and environmentally sounder places to live and work. The book is replete with examples of how cities, community development corporations, and others have come up with creative, effective solutions. Written by a distinguished urban planner and practitioner with three decades of experience, Bringing Buildings Back provides both a detailed toolkit and a call to rethink the way America carries out urban redevelopment. It is a book that should be on the desk of every mayor, city planner, community developer, or neighborhood activist, and used in every course on urban redevelopment or neighborhood revitalization.

Bringing Buildings Back: From Abandoned Properties To Community Assets

Rutgers University Press

Written by a distinguished urban planner and practitioner with three decades of experience, the original volume of Bringing Buildings Back provided both a detailed toolkit and a call to rethink the way America carries out urban redevelopment.
This second edition of Alan Mallach's now classic work contains new material that directly addresses the issues that have arisen as communities across the country try to stabilize their neighborhoods in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. It discusses both the fundamental "big picture" issues and the technical and practical questions that have emerged. Mallach explores the concept of neighborhood stability and explains how it relates to the economic forces affecting a community, city, or region. As in the prior volume, this updated edition of Bringing Buildings Back does not seek simply to provide technical guidance to practitioners; it also suggests creative ways of thinking about local policies, strategies, and actions. Ultimately, no plan for dealing with problem real estate is about just the properties themselves; it is about how to build stronger, healthier neighborhoods, towns, and cities.

Bringing Buildings Back: From Abandoned Properties to Community Assets

National Housing Institute

Inclusionary Housing Programs: Policies and Practices

Politics & Government

Rutgers Univ Center for Urban

For America’s Legacy Cities—cities losing population and their economic base—this book puts forth strategies to create smaller, healthier cities. Creative strategies for using vacant land need to be matched with successful efforts to stabilize the local economy and re-engage residents in the workforce, and to reinvigorate the city’s still-viable neighborhoods. This volume offers a broader discussion which recognizes the complex relationships between today’s problems and their solutions. The rich material contained in this volume provides thought-provoking reading for anyone concerned with the transformation of America’s older industrial cities, either with respect to a specific city or from a broader perspective, whether the reader is a policymaker, practitioner, or concerned layperson. These chapters do not suggest that that the process of change will be an easy one. They do offer a robust collection of ideas and directions that can help animate local action or state policy and help practitioners and policymakers take the steps that may indeed lead to the smaller, stronger, and healthier city that the authors believe is possible.

Rebuilding America's Legacy Cities: New Directions for the Industrial Heartland

Sociology

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

The Changing American Neighborhood: The Meaning of Place in the Twenty-First Century

The Changing American Neighborhood argues that the physical and social spaces created by neighborhoods matter more than ever for the health and well-being of twenty-first-century Americans and their communities. Taking a long historical view, this book explores the many dimensions of today's neighborhoods, the forms they take, the forces and factors influencing them, and the people and organizations trying to change them. Challenging conventional interpretations of neighborhoods and neighborhood change, Alan Mallach and Todd Swanstrom adopt a broad, inter-disciplinary perspective that shows how neighborhoods are messy, complex systems, in which change is driven by constant feedback loops that link social, economic and physical conditions, each within distinct spatial and political contexts. The Changing American Neighborhood seeks to understand neighborhoods and neighborhood change not only for their own importance, but for the insights they offer to help guide peoples' efforts sustaining good neighborhoods and rebuilding struggling ones.

Swanstrom, Todd

Cornell University Press

The Changing American Neighborhood argues that the physical and social spaces created by neighborhoods matter more than ever for the health and well-being of twenty-first-century Americans and their communities. Taking a long historical view, this book explores the many dimensions of today's neighborhoods, the forms they take, the forces and factors influencing them, and the people and organizations trying to change them. 
Challenging conventional interpretations of neighborhoods and neighborhood change, Alan Mallach and Todd Swanstrom adopt a broad, inter-disciplinary perspective that shows how neighborhoods are messy, complex systems, in which change is driven by constant feedback loops that link social, economic and physical conditions, each within distinct spatial and political contexts. The Changing American Neighborhood seeks to understand neighborhoods and neighborhood change not only for their own importance, but for the insights they offer to help guide peoples' efforts sustaining good neighborhoods and rebuilding struggling ones.

This biography of Mascagni charts the course of his intriguing life and career. With privileged access to Mascagni's 4,200 letters to Anna Lolli, his mistress for more than three decades, Alan Mallach provides a compelling portrait of a flamboyant, combative and emotional man who was passionately devoted to the Italian opera tradition and committed to innovation in musical language and dramatic form. Combining serious biography with critical commentary, Mallach begins with the captivating story of Mascagni's rags-to-riches adventure, from his birth in Livorno in Tuscany, to his years as a vagabond musician, to the worldwide success of his breakthrough opera. He then traces Mascagni's private and professional life after Cavalleria, examining a prolific yet controversial career that was forever overshadowed by the work that had unexpectedly thrust him into the limelight. Mallach provides a full analysis of Mascagni's oeuvre and discusses his complex relationships with such Italian cultural and political figures as Edoardo Sonzogno, Giacomo Puccini, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Luigi Illica, and Benito Mussolini. He also thoroughly chronicles Mascagni's bouts with manic depression, his marriage to Lina and devotion to their three children, his grueling schedule of concert and operatic tours, his patriotism and bitter opposition to Italy's involvement in both world wars, and his passionate love affair with Anna Lolli.

Pietro Mascagni and His Operas

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Northeastern University Press

With the passing of giants like Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and with Verdi in decline, Italian opera at the end of the nineteenth century appeared to be on the wane. Then, suddenly, with the legendary premiere of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana in 1890, Italian opera entered into a period of enormous artistic creativity and commercial success. In The Autumn of Italian Opera, Alan Mallach chronicles the last years of Verdi and Catalani and the emergence of the Giovane Scuola (young school) of Italian composers led by the superstar composers Puccini and Mascagni, and including such lesser-known but important figures as Giordano, Cilèa, and Leoncavallo. Mallach carries their story through to the first World War and a new generation of composers, including Zandonai and Wolf-Ferrari, through the rise of musical modernism in Italy early in the twentieth century. In doing so he offers opera scholars and aficionados a detailed and richly textured perspective on an important but widely misunderstood period in Italian opera.Mallach places the emergence of the Giovane Scuola firmly within the great social and political upheavals of the time, which brought previously unexplored themes and exotic settings into the Opera House. Their works expressed an intensity of passion, sentimentality, and violence, which appealed to a new generation of operagoers, reflecting the growing dominance of the bourgeois in the new Italy that emerged after unification. Their music reflected the nation’s growing cosmopolitanism, integrating themes and styles from composers as diverse as Massenet and Wagner, Strauss, and Debussy into the Italian operatic tradition.While the author’s principal emphasis is on operas and composers, he also provides portraits of the outstanding operatic singers and conductors of the time, and the developments that transformed the opera industry toward the end of the nineteenth century. Mallach discusses the powerful role played by the two dominant publishers, Giulio Ricordi and Edoardo Sonzogno, the ownership and operation of the nation’s opera houses, the make-up of the operatic audience, and the diffusion of opera throughout Italy through civic bands and choral societies. This is a landmark and highly readable work of scholarship that sheds light on the last great era of Italian opera.

The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890-1915

Historical

This policy focus report explores the challenges of regenerating America’s legacy cities—older industrial cities that have experienced sustained job and population loss over the past few decades. It identifies the powerful obstacles that stand in the way of fundamental change in the dynamics of these cities, and suggests directions by which cities can overcome those obstacles and embark on the path of regeneration.While almost all of the nation’s older industrial cities declined through the 1980s, the picture has changed in more recent decades. The report examines 18 representative cities to explore how their trajectories have changed, with some showing signs of revival while others continued to decline. These 18 cities were selected from a universe of approximately 50 legacy cities, which met two primary criteria: population of at least 50,000 in 2010; and loss of at least 20 percent from the city’s peak population. The cities represent geographic diversity, including New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southern, and Midwestern cities, as well as variation in their level of recovery or regeneration.Alan Mallach and Lavea Brachman lay the groundwork by exploring the challenges these cities face and reviewing the economic, social, market, physical, and operational factors that have led to their present condition. The relative health or vitality of each of these cities was tracked with 15 separate indicators to measure population change, socioeconomic condition, housing markets, and economic activity. Some appear highly successful, at least in relative terms; others are clearly unsuccessful; and others fall in between.Legacy cities have many assets that can be starting points for revitalization and change, including downtown employment bases, stable neighborhoods, multimodal transportation networks, colleges and universities, local businesses, historic buildings and areas, and arts, cultural, and entertainment facilities. A renewed competitive advantage, which will enable them to build new economic engines and draw new populations, is likely to come from leveraging the value of their assets.The authors argue that regeneration is grounded in the cities’ abilities to find new forms, including new physical forms that address the loss of population and changing economy. New models of governance and leadership, new forms of export-oriented economic activity, and new ways of building stronger regional and metropolitan relationships are other vehicles to successful regeneration.In further addressing “what does it take to change?” the authors discuss what is meant by successful regeneration, followed by an exploration of obstacles to change, leading to the presentation of a model, which they call strategic incrementalism, as a framework with which cities can overcome these obstacles and pursue successful change.The final section offers a series of recommendations to foster change in the nation’s legacy cities. These include:• rebuilding the central core;• sustaining viable neighborhoods;• repurposing vacant land for new activities;• using assets to build cities’ competitive advantages;• re-establishing the central economic role of the city;• using economic growth to increase community and resident well-being;• building stronger local governance and partnerships;• building stronger ties between legacy cities and their regions;• making change happen through strategic incrementalism; and• rethinking state and federal policy toward legacy cities. 

Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities (Policy Focus Reports)

Brachman, Lavea

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mallach, Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mallach, Alan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mallach, Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Decent Home: Planning, Building, and Preserving Affordable Housing

Bringing Buildings Back: From Abandoned Properties To Community Assets

Bringing Buildings Back: From Abandoned Properties to Community Assets

Inclusionary Housing Programs: Policies and Practices

Rebuilding America's Legacy Cities: New Directions for the Industrial Heartland

The Changing American Neighborhood: The Meaning of Place in the Twenty-First Century

The Changing American Neighborhood: The Meaning of Place in the Twenty-First Century

Pietro Mascagni and His Operas

The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890-1915

Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities (Policy Focus Reports)