Subject: Sustainability
This is exactly how the federal government should be supporting sustainability: helping communities who want to do the right thing for their environments, economies, and residents. Congress may have just used the federal budget to zero out the sustainability assistance…
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The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has posted a brief, informative interview with Raphael Bostic, HUD Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research, on energy-efficient housing and the role of public and private sector finance. The interview stems from Bostic’s…
It’s been cause for celebration here in the DC region, and rightfully so, that suburban Prince George’s County, Maryland, has a new, high-end Wegmans supermarket. It opened last weekend. “PG County,” as we locals call it, has long been a…
Oakland, California’s Tassafaronga Village is a new mixed-income, green neighborhood development that is bringing a high degree of environmental excellence to a traditionally underserved portion of the city’s Elmhurst district. A federally assisted HOPE VI development built by the Oakland…
Enraged at the spill in the Gulf and the American appetite for oil that ultimately caused it? Stop land development on farmland, forests and other fringe locations and direct future development to close-in opportunities. A massive new study, years in…
To some, today’s title will sound a little counterintuitive. Using residential and commercial density to revitalize downtowns or bring people closer to rail transit stops makes sense. But aren’t parks and trails supposed to be bucolic, the antithesis of urbanity?
Not necessarily. Writing in the City Parks Blog, Ben Welle notes that parks and people need each other, and we need to bring them together:
“There is a symbiotic relationship between parks and population density. For those living in compact housing around a park’s borders, there is respite, a place to recreate, a back yard where little private outdoor space exists and an amenity that increases property values. For the park, there’s the “eyes” that make it safer, more property taxes to keep it maintained, nearby users to keep it vibrant and able to maximize its value as a public amenity.”
Ben is assistant director of the Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence, so he knows a thing or two about what makes parks work best. In his post, Ben describes an initiative in Minneapolis that would upzone areas near a popular rail-trail as a revitalization strategy, which is of course part of the game plan in Indianapolis and Atlanta as well.
Ben made a similar point in a blog post from early last year, drawing from an article by Brad Broberg in the National Association of Realtors’ On Common Ground:
“Balancing the yin of green space against the yang of greater density is a cornerstone of smart growth.
“Smart growth encourages compact development as an antidote to sprawl. Preserving green space is part and parcel to that approach. The green space makes the density more palatable and the density makes the green space more desirable.”
While many of us — including myself — love remote wilderness and natural areas, few of us want our city parks to be empty. When Nos Quedamos was allowed to plan Melrose Commons in the South Bronx, for example, one of their most important changes from the unpopular original city plan was to eliminate a large centrally located park area and, instead, redistribute the green space in smaller parcels around the neighborhood, precisely so there would not be vast areas without frequent activity.
Props to Ben for bringing the topic back up. It’s an important one.
_Originally posted on my NRDC blog, where I write (almost) daily. For daily posts, go here. Photo by jah_maya, creative commons license_ more
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 population, a good street grid, some stable residential blocks, and prospects for a new, state-of-the-art transit line in the old rail corridor. I spent a few days there last fall as part of an AIA advisory team. I’ve been running a series on the neighborhood in my NRDC blog, summarizing what we saw and heard while there.
In my most recent post, I offer some thoughts on what strategies might give redevelopment there the best chance of success as a smart, green model project.
Achieving a path of sustainability in the district will be a challenge, and not just because of issues within the neighborhood. For example, Indianapolis as a whole is extraordinarily automobile-dependent: Of the nation’s 60 largest cities, it ranks 6th in the portion of its commuters who drive alone to work. In addition, disinvestment is a well-established pattern in Indiana: the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy found that an astonishing 94 percent of development in the state has been taking place on greenfields, outside of existing areas. (By comparison, in Oregon the portion is 52 percent; in Colorado, 62 percent.) more
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 a vacant lot. I’ve been talking with colleagues in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood about how to make creative use of a parking lot when it’s not full of cars. Then I read a story in the New Yorker about ambitious plans to re-make Governors Island, a huge piece of empty real estate in New York Harbor. What’s interesting in each case is the tension between seeing vacant land as something that ought to be open to the public, free of charge, and the uncomfortable reality that someone has to pay for that.
There are also creative types trying to envision alternative futures for empty lots in places like Cleveland or Detroit, where such weed-strewn properties abound. Often the proposed solutions involve farming, bike paths or some other sort of green space. Others organize artsy projects on these sites, not just movies but also disco parties and what not, with the aim of instilling vibrancy and giving people a sense of what could be. In Midwestern, shrinking cities perhaps these visions really will come to pass. But in expensive coastal cities, one wonders if the real estate barons must invariably eventually gain control. Vacant property is just waiting for the right development deal to be made. more
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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 local green consultant, talking specifically about jobs retrofitting older homes to make them more energy efficient, says it only took 39 full-time people last year to conduct energy audits on over 19,000 homes in Massachusetts. That’s around 500 houses per person. There’s a similar level of productivity for people installing weatherstripping or insulation. Granted, a lot of these audits, performed by utility companies mainly to meet a state requirement, were probably pretty meager and missed a lot of opportunities for deeper retrofits. But ya gotta start somewhere.
At first glance, the numbers suggest there couldn’t really be that much work available for people doing this stuff. But the consultant says we are on the verge of a ramp-up in funding for energy efficiency programs in Massachusetts, triggered by a state legislative mandate to cut greenhouse gas emissions. By 2011, the number of energy auditors statewide will more than double, and there will be similar increases in workers doing weatherization.
Every $1 million invested in these kinds of energy retrofits generates 8 to 11 new jobs, plus indirect support jobs, according to one study. Given that Massachusetts will go from $86 million in funding for retrofits in 2008 to $322 million in 2012, we could see some pretty substantive job creation here.
The next question is who will get the jobs. Community Labor United and the Boston Green Justice Coalition are organizing to make sure it isn’t only folks who already are in the construction trades and unions, although those workers need to eat too. Read their Green Solution for more. more
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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