Subject: Sustainability
About two miles from downtown Indianapolis is the city’s designated smart growth revitalization district, a distressed area with many vacant properties, including a largely abandoned industrial corridor along a rail line, but also good bones for renewal including a resilient…
Habitat for Humanity’s East Bay affiliate is retrofitting a brownfield into 54 affordable homes on two acres of land in Oakland, Calif. With excellent location, walkable density, great design, and green features, the Edes Avenue project is participating in the…
Last week I had the honor of being one of seven smart growth types recruited by the American Institute of Architects to work with the city of Indianapolis and community residents on the model revitalization of a distressed urban neighborhood.…
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I’ve been thinking a bit recently about the possibilities in vacant or underused property in the heart of the city. Kaid Benfield brought this topic up in his recent mention on Rooflines of how a Boston CDC showed movies on…
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Folks in Massachusetts searching for all those green jobs Obama’s promised, including jobs for the working and middle classes, recently got a little better grip on how many such jobs are likely to materialize in the next few years. A…
As some of you may know, Smarter Cities is an initiative that ranks US cities on a number of key sustainability criteria as well as on overall sustainability. The system has been developed, managed and staffed independently of NRDC, but…
Wow. Only a week after I wrote a post celebrating how well the Obama administration seems to be getting its act together on smart growth and sustainability, they have done it again. My friend Shelley Poticha has accepted a senior…
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The print media industry, we all know, has been in rapid decline over the past few years, but recently, we’ve truly begun to see the manifestation of that decline as regional newspapers from around the country are drastically changing their…
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There’s quite a jumble of tools out there for people who want to make their houses into models of energy efficiency. As far as the best way to go about achieving higher levels of sustainability at home, I’ve been aware…
The federal government has a history of subsidizing sprawl, wittingly or not. Even the Clean Water Act contains a mechanism that, according to my NRDC colleague Nancy Stoner, “continues to fund new sewage treatment plants and new sewage and stormwater…
Later this week, I am going to be participating with my friend David Dixon and marketing whiz Laurie Volk in a seminar on development density at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects. Our session is titled “Making…
In the US, we tend to think of public transportation as inherently green, which of course it is compared to our addiction to driving. It becomes even more so when old diesel buses are replaced with models running on natural…
Even before the recession began, the market for residential and commercial property in the US was changing away from a model of unmitigated suburban sprawl and toward one of more central locations, urbanity, and walkable neighborhoods. The foreclosure crisis, spike…
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There’s been a number of news items on Rooflines in recent months about how the recession has finally led to the demise of many big-city newspapers that for years have tottered on the brink. Add my hometown paper, The Boston…
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Another major daily faces major cutbacks. This time it’s the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cutting its full-time news staff by about 90 people, or roughly 30 percent. Most of the cuts, according to the AJC article, will be in production and management.…
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This is awesome. Here is an excerpt from yesterday’s joint press release from HUD and DOT: “WASHINGTON—U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan and U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Ray LaHood today announced a new…
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It’s now a regular exercise where we report the demise of another respected, long-standing, print media outfit and while news that the Hearst Corporation-owned The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will likely to turn into a Web-only enterprise does not fall into that…
A new report from the US Environmental Protection Agency documents a dramatic shift in the pattern of new development in the nation over the past two decades: Central cities and counties are now claiming a much larger share of overall…
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Rooflines has been watching a disturbing decline in the newspaper industry as print media is falling victim to fewer subscribers, falling numbers in advertising, and increased competition from the Internet with the concern that as standard media outlets begin to…
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Compelling ideas are all you need to start a revolution. That could be one lesson to take from the experience of Van Jones, the green jobs activist from Oakland. Jones is one of the best-known faces in the green jobs…
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National Housing Institute
