Smart Growth Around America

Tweet rock bottom rollback, originally uploaded by sssteve.o. Doug Simpson shares one education company’s exciting efforts — presented last Friday at the Louisiana Smart Growth Summit — to breathe new life into abandoned big box retailers. AUGUST 20, 2010 – An Alabama-based adult education company seeks out vacant “big box” retail sites and shopping malls [...]

David Crossley is a busy man. He’s on the board of Smart Growth America and serves on the National Committee of America 2050. His organization, Houston Tomorrow, a SGA coalition partner, works within the Houston region to promote livability, transit, efficient infrastructure, and planning decisions that would benefit the environment. Their ambitious motto: “To improve the quality of life in the Houston Gulf Coast region.” So what do they mean by “improving the quality of life” for Houstonians? Crossley was recently featured in a cover article in a local Houston magazine about his vision for the Houston of his grandchildren, and what will need to change:

During a recession, city officials often eye park budgets as an easy way to save money without cutting “essential” services. Yet even during the recession, voters supported green space and park ballot initiatives at far higher rates than most ballot initiatives. The 2008 election rounded up $7.3 billion in new spending for parks and open-space preservation, less than a month after the stock market crashed hard. What is it about parks that inspires this kind of public support? Most communities have few public, non-commercial spaces — except for parks. Believers in the “broken windows” theory will also say that upkeep in parks and other public spaces are important for community pride — and for keeping crime rates down.

Tweet View of Puget Sound. Creative Commons Flickr photo by Chas Redmond. Learn more about the work of the Coalition For Smarter Growth Learn more about the work of the Piedmont Environmental Council Learn more about CSG & PEC’s “Blueprint for a Better Region” vision for the DC Region While we’ve done much to clean [...]

Tweet It’s right around the corner, but it’s still not too late to register and attend the biggest smart growth conference of the year. The 8th annual New Partners for Smart Growth Conference will be held January 22-24 in Albuquerque, NM, and the last date to register without incurring a late fee is January 9th. [...]

Tweet Last week, we mentioned the release of a new tool from the Center for Neighborhood Technology that measures the true cost of housing affordability, by also considering the transportation costs of each area. (Note: the Washington Post had a good story about the index here.) A few other outlets have done their own local [...]

Tweet It’s not just gas prices that make transportation expensive… Yesterday, The Center for Neighborhood Technology, an SGA coalition member, along with the Brookings Institution, released a new web-based tool to measure housing affordability — by also measuring the transportation costs inherent in a home’s location. Traditionally, affordability is measured at 30% or less of [...]

Tweet Anyone who has attempted to measure the merits of proposed development in their area knows of the difficulties in attaching quantitative values to a proposal. Community opposition or support to a project, based on nothing but emotion or feelings about what may result from that new development, isn’t always productive in achieving desired outcomes. [...]

Tweet To follow up our post from last week on the local, state, and regional coalition members, I put together a list of our national coalition members that have syndicated feeds you can subscribe to. Here is a quick list of those national folks with regular blogs — and a few that at least have [...]

Tweet We’ve been thinking about how to have a blogroll here on SGAA without having one of those infinitely long lists in the sidebar that no one seems to pay attention to anyway, and it seemed that a good place to start would be with our coalition partners. Over the next few days, I’ll be [...]

Tweet When a timber company proposed a new development on a lake in central Maine that would clear 14,000 acres of forest to build roughly 2,300 homes, forward-looking leaders in Maine questioned the wisdom of a mega-project on pristine wilderness so far from existing infrastructure. Considering the fact that satisfying the growing demand for homes [...]

Tweet As we mentioned earlier this week, Gov. Spitzer in New York created a new smart growth cabinet via an executive order that will attempt to coordinate all state agencies’ spending and policies into a coherent vision for growth and development in the state. Regional Plan Association’s Bob Yaro, which has been working for years [...]