Smart Growth

A new study confirms what we already know too well: Sprawl is expensive. The New Climate Economy's latest report [PDF] attempts to put a figure on it and it's pretty staggering: more than $1 trillion a year nationwide.

Kaid Benfield's new blog post on density is getting a lot of buzz over at NRDC's Switchboard blog. Benfield, a planner/lawyer/professor/writer who co-founded both LEED's Neighborhood Development rating system and the Smart Growth America coalition, has some serious street cred when it comes to these matters. And on this one, he's with Danish architect Jan Gehl, who says wonderful places are built at human-scale density -- three to six stories.

This post is part of a series featuring stories and research that will be presented at the Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike/Pro-Place conference September 8-11 in Pittsburgh.

Losing Shaun Donovan at the helm of HUD was a blow for urbanists. This afternoon President Obama formally announced the nomination of San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro to replace Donovan as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. What will the transition mean for the agency, which under Donovan championed smart growth and the integration of transportation and housing programs?

As the downside of sprawling development becomes better understood, some developers are getting better at greenwashing sprawl.

"Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism" is a new book by Ben Ross, longtime president of Maryland's Action Committee for Transit and a frequent contributor to Greater Greater Washington. This excerpt is preceded by a section describing the post-war expansion into the suburbs and the surrender of public space to automobile traffic. Highways proliferated, congestion worsened, children's play was prohibited in the street and often in the sidewalk, and pedestrians were engineered out of the roadway. 

Hartford, Connecticut, has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. The urban renaissance that has visited so many cities hasn’t arrived there. Housing is still cheaper in the city than in the suburbs, and although suburban poverty is growing alarmingly fast, it’s nowhere near the levels seen in the city.

Vox, the much-anticipated Ezra Klein/Matt Yglesias/Melissa Bell reporting venture, launched earlier this week to wide fanfare, and one of the first articles explained that "traffic deaths are way, way down" in the United States.

As an avid iPhone user, I have bought into the sense that Apple could literally peer into the future and deliver me technology that I never realized I would so desperately need.