American Dirt
The search "site selection" yielded
169 articles

Towamencin Shopping Village: a strip mall, all dressed up for a date, but not a single suitor. (MONTAGE)

April 28, 2023 8 Comments

I’ve featured more derelict malls and shopping centers than the average reader can shake a selfie stick at.  (An apt reference, since the oldest chroniclers of struggling retail—the sites DeadMalls.com and LabelScar.com—haven’t received updates since the popularization of the selfie stick.  But they were great sites when I first started blogging!)  As far as depressed

Dusk to dawn parking restrictions: why so hard to enforce?

March 31, 2023 6 Comments

I’ve seen some creative attempts to manage and control on-street parking, most of which don’t seem to work as intended, precisely because they’re creative.  Regulating how people use the margins in a public right-of-way doesn’t really leave much room for creativity, because, when it comes to conveying that law to the lowest common denominator, creativity

Outside the Outer Banks of North Carolina: can OBX energy spread to the Inner Banks?

March 21, 2023 6 Comments

The letters “OBX” adorn many a back bumper, at least among vehicles in the eastern half of the country, particularly concentrated among the states along the Eastern Seaboard.  (And typically cares at the level of Volvos and Subarus…or pricier.)  It’s safe for me to wager that most people in these eastern states—loosely equating to the

Dolphin House revisited: they’re turning it into apartments!

January 16, 2023 4 Comments

Two articles in a row that resuscitate topics from less than a year ago…am I losing my edge?  Maybe.  But when you’ve been hacking away at this for twelve years while using little more than social media to promote yourself (but swearing off Twitter and Patreon and Youtube), it’s hard to say what constitutes an

Adult-oriented businesses in the burbs: a veritable lion’s den for innocent impalas.

November 27, 2022 35 Comments

Several years ago, a perfectly ordinary drive-thru Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) in Indianapolis flourished, collecting business both from locals in the area (near the south side enclave of Southport), and, most likely, people passing through the city along Interstate 65, for which there was an exit ramp from Southport Road just a few hundred feet

Gas stations that lack that certain human touch, yet still strike gold.

October 14, 2022 4 Comments

I am by no stretch anywhere near the most well-traveled person in this fine country—that’s a singular achievement, and I’m many tens of millions of ranks below that elusive, eternally unknown #1.  But I’m not badly traveled: in 2021 I finally made it to Alaska, my 50th state (a pretty clichéd 50th state if you

Corner commercial lots: are they worth more? You can bank on it.

September 12, 2022 5 Comments

As recently as my last blog article, I alluded to an unusual dichotomy in the value of corner parcels: for the most part, residences on street corners are less valuable than homes on the rest of the block.  People don’t the reduced privacy one expects when a property fronts two streets, when they can easily

Dolphin Mansion: the country’s ugliest house hits a fascinating planning snag.

August 25, 2022 14 Comments

The Dolphin Mansion is up for sale again!  Indianapolis’s most notorious home has struggled to find an occupant for the last seventeen years, but it’s not for lack of trying.  Actually more of a campus with six structures on a mega-lot, surrounded by mid-century middle-class housing that’s a lot humbler (and I mean that in

Join the Conversation

© 2020-2023 American Dirt. All Rights Reserved.

 

Web Development by Creative Concierge.