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The way our communities have been developed for more than half a century — houses separated from schools separated from businesses separated from nearly everything else you need — didn’t just happen by accident. Though it’s been the status quo of development for more than 50 years, many [...]
Last spring, Chris Leinberger wrote in The Atlantic that the pendulum was slowly shifting away from suburban life due to our country’s changing demographics, growing public demand for “urban” amenities like walkable neighborhoods and better transportation options, and the overbuilding of exurban housing — far from jobs and highly inconvenient when gas gets expensive.
While many of us may futilely try to verbally explain abstractions like ‘auto-dependency,’ ‘resource depletion’ or ‘density,’ aerial photographer MacLean heeds the ancient wisdom about the power of a picture.
Transcending usual limits of geography and scale, he rises above and captures in rich detail those scenes we only catch brief unsatisfying glimpses of during our [...]
updated 6/27: The NYT changed the previous headline from “country living” to the “far suburbs.”
Good piece today in the New York Times, surveying the scope of changing preferences for buying in the suburbs as energy prices continue rising:
Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of [...]
I’m back from a weeklong vacation, so you probably already saw Paul Krugman’s wonderful column in the New York Times last week that was subsequently posted and emailed all over the place, but it’s worth posting for posterity.
In “Stranded in Suburbia,” Krugman muses on the differences in how high gas prices are devastating our economy [...]
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 test [...]
As we’ve highlighted this week, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change is out in its final, sharp-looking book form. Released in a preliminary technical form last fall, the book has been revised, updated, and published as a beautiful hardcover book, replete with informative graphics, pictures and illustrations.
The crux? It will be [...]
What’s in store for newly-created exurban neighborhoods like these, far from the city’s core?
Perhaps for the first time since the late 1940s, when the country emerged from depression and world war to launch the national project of settling the countryside surrounding its beleaguered cities, our culture appears to be entering a critical examination of [...]
Those were the words of Scenic America’s Kevin Fry in a slideshow from the New York Times that accompanied a Dan Barry column just before Christmas.
(New York Times photograph by Angel Franco. Click image to view the slideshow)
“Once you’ve lost your connection to your place you have no reason to care about it anymore. It’s [...]
As long as local and state leaders in Georgia fail to grasp that Atlanta can’t pave its way out of traffic congestion, Atlanta could be in danger of becoming a case study in what may happen to a city’s business climate when an economic model based largely on growth and continual outward expansion hits the [...]
I recently spent five wonderful days in Houston. When I tell people that, they think I’m joking. Most people outside of Texas seem to regard Houston as little more than a bloated, polluted, overheated hellhole. Not a baseless assessment, I’ll grant you, but the smugness with which it is delivered is utterly unwarranted.
First off, as [...]
Devastation was wrought across California over the last two weeks as a spate of wildfires, powered by the mighty Santa Ana winds, roared across the landscape, while firefighters struggled for days to gain control and citizens scattered in the face of danger. While most people probably didn’t give much of a thought to the “why”, [...]
Three-fourths of Americans believe that being smarter about development and improving public transportation are better long-term solutions for reducing traffic congestion than building new roads, according to a survey released today by the National Association of Realtors® and Smart Growth America.
The 2007 Growth and Transportation Survey details what Americans [...]
“This 2007 drought is telling us we can keep on wasting, or we can keep on growing, but we can’t do both.”
— Sally Bethea, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper
Think of it as Hurricane Katrina in slow motion. As you may have heard, the Southeast is withering under a drought unlike any other for at least 100 years. Blame [...]
Atlanta has been a region typically known for its affordable housing stock and rapidly-growing suburbs and exurbs. But a new study being released in Atlanta this week chronicles affordability in the region and finds that not only is there a dearth of affordable housing, there is a disconnect between affordable housing and its major job [...]
Many of us watching the last few decades of development in America have been repeating the mantra that the weight of crushing commutes, skyrocketing fuel and energy prices, overly large and costly houses and understated demographic changes were converging on us with serious ramifications and that changing the rules to create more affordable, smaller footprint [...]
When the United Kingdom announced their goal of adding 3 million new homes by 2020 to relieve pressure on an overburdened housing market, some residents probably had visions of great natural places like the London Greenbelt or Scottish Highlands filling up with new housing developments. In a country where space is at a premium, a new report by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment makes the case that it’s a more economical and environmentally sounddecision to add these 3 million homes by creating “walkable, mixed use, mixed income developments instead of car-dependent housing estates.”
As gas costs go up and geopolitical concern over oil supplies rises, many Americans are feeling increasingly vulnerable. But residents in some metro areas are more exposed than others. Places where “affordable” housing lies at the distant fringe no longer look so affordable. Spread-out metros like Atlanta, where Gov. Sonny Perdue cancelled school during the post-Katrina fuel shortage, are especially susceptible to fluctuations in gas prices…
