Features Region: West

To the untrained eye, the twin steel towers reaching high above the tree line just south of I-565 in Huntsville, Alabama, could be just about anything: the skeleton of an office high-rise, perhaps, or a state-of-the-art energy facility. But it’s in the precision of its construction that the nature of this 221-foot-tall behemoth becomes apparent. […]

If you’ve tried looking for a house or apartment in the last five years, chances are you wound up on Zillow or Redfin, two of the world’s biggest real-estate websites. Here, with just a few clicks and field-fills, users can scroll through hundreds—even thousands—of listings, each with a profile of the property. Such functionality sure […]

Every business owner dreads the permitting process. Depending on the space’s size and location, dozens of documents and licenses might be required. Fire safety, air and water pollution control, sales tax paperwork, health department checks: It’s enough red tape to mummify the building (that’s a code violation, by the way). In Reno, Nevada, all you […]

It’s among the most desirable cities anywhere, mile-high Aurora, Colorado, at least for the financially secure and gainfully employed. But the long winters can make it very inhospitable for the homeless. And that’s when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires a Point-in-Time tally of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons. The count must […]

For years, residents of Colorado’s Arapahoe County who were eligible for subsidies, including food stamps and shelter assistance, would have to wait a week or more before their benefit application was processed. During the Great Recession, in particular, when need spiked and the old systems were taxed, those lag times could prove the difference between […]

In and of themselves, report cards can be complicated to decipher—antics of the likes of Bart Simpson aside—but imagine the added challenge as parents try to make sense of them in a foreign or a second language. Now imagine those parents receiving their child’s report card accompanied by a link to a personalized video; in […]

There’s a lot of talk about the importance of medical care and closing the coverage gap—but what if your main concern is having a roof over your head or enough food to feed your family? Among myriad challenges to the country’s healthcare, is ensuring that providers and insurers have access to secure, protected and up-to-date […]

Brian Anderson has spent a whole lot of time in kitchens, and one recent afternoon was no different. Except, on this particular day, the one he was sitting in was a rough-hewn mock-up made of plywood, blue painter’s tape and hand-written signs designating where items such as “future braise #1” and “soup #3” would go. […]

The rewards—the tangible ones—might be greater in the private sector,  where Bobby Applegate applied his info-tech expertise before circumstances had him, and so many of his colleagues, looking elsewhere for much of 2011. For their long-time employer, Word & Brown Insurance Administrators Inc. in Orange, California, was undergoing a shakeup and had cut the IT […]

By any ethnic or socio-economic standard, California State University East Bay is among the most diverse campuses anywhere. The most in the Golden State, at least in 2015, according to The Chronicles of Higher Education’s Almanac. That’s as much a source of pride as it is a challenge, reminds Chief Information Officer Jake Hornsby, who […]