Smart Growth Around America

Do you know what happens to your food before it gets to your plate?
Don McCorkell’s new documentary, A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth about Factory Farms, demonstrates how ruthlessly efficient factory farm operations across America are failing to adequately protect against serious environmental and health problems that can arise from the necessary [...]

The public health community, increasingly alarmed over Americans’ increasing waistlines, has sided wholeheartedly with the need to make our streets safe for walking and biking.
But it was still big news this week when CDC researchers pushed forward community recommendations for preventing obesity in the highly-influential and trusted Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).  Out of [...]

In a recent landmark decision, Cleveland Judge Raymond Pianka held lender Wells-Fargo responsible for failing to maintain their large holding of foreclosed properties. This will be the first lending institution to be held accountable for neglecting to maintain their foreclosed properties, abandoning them, and leaving cities to “clean up the mess.” The problem is a significant one for cities trying to keep foreclosure and vacancy from causing even greater damage to cities already under pressure. As Smart Growth America staff member Mara D’Angelo writes in Next American City:

The town of Edmonston in Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., is a small hamlet of under 2000 residents, most of them blue-collar workers. Like many other cities in America, times are tough in Edmonston, which has high rates of unemployment and foreclosure. What makes life particularly hard for Edmonston is that it is bisected by the Anacostia River. Due to poor environmental practices, the Anacostia periodically floods the town, wreaking devastation on a place already struggling to get by.

During the housing crash it became clear that not all parts of the country were being affected equally — and not even all areas within a metro area were performing the same. In the DC region, foreclosures were rising and home prices were falling rapidly in several exurban counties, while prices were holding mostly steady [...]

The report featured in last Thursday’s Washington Post (“Highway Conditions Contribute to Over Half of Fatal Auto Crashes”) got it half right: highway design does affect safety. But the argument that road and bridge widening is a cure for fatalities is wrong. That recommendation could have been written in 1959, and has been refuted on the ground in projects around the country.

There’s a handy interactive map accompanying the Trust for America’s Health new report, titled “F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing America.” The results of the 2009 edition are fascinating — and frightening. Adult obesity rates dip below 20% in just one state (Colorado.)  The percentage of obese and overweight children is [...]

Abandoned Flint home; image courtesy NPR

Times are tough in Flint, Michigan. And truthfully, times have been tough for quite some time now.
Once home to General Motors and to more than 230,000 people, this rust-belt city has been losing residents for decades. The population of Flint today is nearly half of what it was at its [...]

For a few years now, EPA and the Smart Growth Network have been sponsoring a regular series of terrific lectures on smart growth and related issues here in Washington, D.C. at the National Building Museum. They’ve had well-known authors, innovators and special guests from all over the country come to talk about different aspects of [...]

Smart Growth America State Policy Director Will Schroeer was on Fox Business this morning, discussing our 120-day report from Minneapolis.