Livable Streets

With multiple versions of two years' worth of federal budgets flying around, some details are still emerging about what's in and what's out. At the end of last week we heard that the FY2011 budget, which has been sent to the president for his signature, includes $100 million for the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. According to HUD Sustainable Communities Director Shelley Poticha, the partnership was allocated $70 million for regional planning grants ($17.5 million is slated for regions with populations of less than 500,000) and $30 million for Community Challenge planning grants.

Congressional committees charged with drafting the new transportation bill have been holding hearings to seek input from stakeholders around the country. In today’s installment, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee heard from five state DOT chiefs, one city official, and the chair of FedEx. Those witnesses’ pleas to the committee ranged from bike trails and transit to highways and deregulation.

You could say Oskaloosa, Iowa, population 11,000, is a model of small-town livability. Families rent apartments over renovated historic storefronts. Local college students take the bike lane down Market Street to grab a bite in the local restaurants. Visitors travel from distant towns to browse the city's local bookstore in its revitalized, walkable town square.

Slate has posted this map to illustrate the concentration of "food deserts," where large numbers of people don't have access to fresh food. The USDA considers households more than a mile from a supermarket and without access to a car to be in food deserts, often with only convenience-store junk food for nourishment. In 2009, the agency found 2.3 million of these households. Here, Slate shows the preponderance of those households in Appalachia and the Deep South, and on Indian reservations.

The transfer of power in the House of Representatives gives transportation reformers plenty to wring their hands about. Oberstar’s ouster was a shock, and folks are still synthesizing what it means to have John Mica in charge of the next transportation bill.

As the Obama administration's inter-agency sustainable communities project commands a growing share of attention and funding in Washington, the response from conservatives and business lobbies has been decidedly less than enthusiastic.

When President Obama signed an executive order in October requiring federal agencies to craft strategies for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, he described the mandate as Washington "lead[ing] by example" on the pollution-reduction front.

The White House's effort to promote sustainable communities has prompted serious (and inadvertently humorous) hand-wringing from conservative pundits who fear the concept of livability will translate into governmental edicts on lifestyle choices. What's the best way to counter such tactics?

Architect Leon Krier has been dubbed the godfather of new urbanism. His work on the U.K.'s Poundbury development project, spearheaded by Prince Charles, has made the Luxembourg-born Krier one of the world's most talked-about urban planners.