Smart Growth Around America

One enterprising Portland realtor combined the growing demand for homes in convenient locations with Portland’s biking fervor to boost her bottom line — filling a niche that was previously empty. When Portlanders want to buy a home that lets them bike to the office, the grocery store, or the post office, they call Kirsten Kaufman, whom Portland Live calls the “Bike Broker.”

For 17 straight years, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) has failed to meet their own, not-remarkably-ambitious hiring goals: that at least 11% of their workforce should be people of color and at least 6% should be women. (Minnesota is 85% white, though not 94% male.) The economic stimulus was meant to benefit everyone in hard economic times, partially through job creation in the transportation sector. African-Americans are hit disproportionately by job losses in a recession, but in Minnesota they haven’t received the full benefit from the stimulus money, an investment meant to aid everyone.

The National Academies recently released a report on driving and the built environment in which they concluded that increasing job and population density in city centers would benefit the environment by reducing vehicle travel, energy use, and CO2 emissions. (We reported on the release of that report a few weeks ago.) Two years ago, Smart Growth America and a number of other organizations collaborated on a report called Growing Cooler which similarly demonstrated the impact of our built environment on curbing climate change. However, Growing Cooler’s findings showed that the built environment’s impact on the environment was far greater than the conclusions of the National Academies’ report. Reid Ewing, Arthur C. Nelson, and Keith Bartholomew of the University of Utah’s Metropolitan Research Center (none of whom work for Smart Growth America) have issued a response to the authors of the National Academies report detailing how their original numbers remain more valid than the “moderate” findings of the new report.

A new report released yesterday chronicles how the record public transportation ridership of 2007 and 2008 helped cut carbon dioxide emissions by 37 million tons in 2008 — and more importantly, how increasing transit ridership in the future is an essential strategy for helping us reach our ambitious national goals of cutting emissions and preventing climate change. Read the report (pdf)

Tweet This is the latest edition of the Washington Update from Smart Growth America. The Washington Update is a typically policy-heavy newsletter covering federal policy developments here in Washington. If you want to know more about the details of policy and would like to receive this regularly via email, you can sign up for it [...]

Tweet Yesterday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson announced several new ways her department will further the Sustainable Communities Partnership — including interagency cooperation in the technical assistance program offered through the EPA Smart Growth program. Administrator Jackson is spending three days touring the country with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Housing and Urban Development Secretary [...]

Tweet As we said yesterday, vacancy is a serious issue—and due to increasing foreclosures, job layoffs, and bankrupted businesses, more houses are sitting vacant in our communities than ever before. In some cities — like Buffalo, NY, Youngstown, OH, or Charleston, WV — population loss and abandonment have been part of the story for a [...]

Tweet Vacant homes are becoming an increasingly visible problem in this country — some 15% of all homes in the second quarter of 2009 are sitting empty, according to the US Census Bureau. That’s 18.7 million unoccupied homes slowly decaying on lots across the country. Yet there’s no lack of people in this country who [...]

Tweet The Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science yesterday released a Congress-commissioned report entitled, Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use and CO2 Emissions. The study by a panel of transportation planning experts looked at the role smarter planning and development could play in reducing [...]

Tweet Artists and community developers are not the most obvious partners — except for how strongly both believe in the possibility of transformation. Community Partnership for the Arts and Culture is holding Rust Belts to Artist Belt II, a conference held in Cleveland September 17th-18th, in the belief that artists and their work can affect [...]