Smart Growth Around America

The North Carolina General Assembly recently passed legislation establishing a Sustainable Communities Task Force within the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. North Carolina is now the latest state to recognize the connections between cross-agency governance at the state level, coordination with stakeholders at the local level, and sustainable communities on the ground.

In the first ten months of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), investments in public transportation have created twice as many jobs per dollar as investments in highways. A new analysis by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Smart Growth America, and U.S. PIRG shows that by mimicking funding levels for transportation set out in ARRA, the Jobs for Main Street Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in December missed an opportunity to create additional jobs where they are needed most. Read more on the report, “What we learned from the Stimulus, and how to use what we learned to speed job creation in the 2010 jobs bill.”

Tweet Smart Growth America’s Restoring Prosperity campaign, which provides help for revitalizing our aging industrial cities, recently released four more policy packages for use by state advocates.  These packages are the part of a series of six policy recommendations for how state and city governments can transform struggling cities into places where anyone would want [...]

Tweet News of continued foreclosures comes on top of the painful slow motion train wreck we’ve been watching for several years, with the foreclosure rate skyrocketing since 2006.  No one knows how many of these now-foreclosed properties are vacant or will soon be abandoned, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the numbers are dire. Community leaders [...]

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 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 This is a news release from the Smart Growth Leadership Institute about the final release of their new toolkit: Smart Growth Leadership Institute releases toolkit to help communities implement smart growth. The Smart Growth Leadership Institute (SGLI) has released a suite of tools to help communities identify and overcome barriers to smarter growth and [...]

Tweet Smart Growth America is looking to fill several internships and one full-time paid fellowship. (See the links at left) The National Complete Streets Coalition is seeking a Complete Streets Fellow. This is a tremendous opportunity for a recent graduate to take on significant responsibility while learning about transportation reform issues and working directly with [...]

Tweet We’d like to alert you to this important annoucement from the Smart Growth Leadership Institute: Join us for a Knowledgplex Experts (Online) Chat as we introduce the Smart Growth Implementation Toolkit on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 2 p.m. ET The Smart Growth Leadership Institute, through a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, [...]

Tweet Last week, nearly 650 people gathered in Pittsburgh, PA for Reclaiming Vacant Properties, the first ever national conference on the topic. The conference was the culmination of years of dreaming and working by the National Vacant Properties Campaign. Over 500 people were registered before the event, but the large number of walk-up registrants Monday [...]

Tweet Most of the SGA staff was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week for Reclaiming Vacant Properties, the first ever national conference on the issue of vacant properties. We’ll have some pictures and stories to follow in the next few days, but we wanted to alert you to a related chat taking place on the Washington [...]

Tweet An announcement from the Smart Growth Leadership Institute (SGLI): SGLI, working with The Trust for Public Land (in partnership with the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators and the River Network) launched a new program to help state governments develop innovative ways to protect drinking water sources by improving the coordination between state land [...]