For their efforts to improve the lives of older adults and their families, AARP awarded Representative Doris Matsui and Representative Steven LaTourette with Legislative Leadership awards. The awards recognized both Congress members for championing federal Complete Streets legislation in the 111th Congress.
Each week Smart Growth America poses a question to our readers to encourage discussion about smart growth ideas in neighborhoods across America. You can engage in the dialogue by commenting on our Facebook page or through Twitter with @SmartGrowthUSA. If you’re not already a fan or a follower, sign up to participate.
The 2010 US Census data released this week revealed that Detroit, among other cities, lost more residents than initially thought. This week, SGA asks: What can cities like Detroit do to rebuild their local economy?
The New York Times’ Room for Debate debates this issue in depth, with eight experts weighing in on revitalization opportunities presented by increasingly vacant cities across America. Among the points they raise:
Which of the authors do you agree with? Disagree with? What role can abandoned property revitalization play in reviving a city?
In a piece today in TIME about growth and development in Raleigh, NC, Mitch Silver discusses the financial burdens many towns bear to support sparse development. To help reduce these costs, Raleigh has a comprehensive plan to guide economic growth and public and private investment in the city for the next 20 years. The plan is meant to help Raleigh “promote sustainability while maintaining and enhancing the natural and architectural assets of the City and promoting the social and economic welfare of its residents.”
Earlier this week Smart Growth America asked our readers to weigh in on pedestrian unfriendly roads in their neighborhoods, and we’re excited to share the responses. We’ll be asking a new question next week – be sure to follow us on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook to join the discussion!
So: is there a road in your neighborhood that’s pedestrian unfriendly? If so, how would you change it? Here are some responses:
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If you’d like to learn more about making roads that work for everyone, visit Smart Growth America’s partner organization Complete Streets to learn more.
Towns and cities across the country in all types of areas – rural, suburban as well as urban – can use smarter development strategies to create stronger, more vibrant communities. Such was the topic of a discussion at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, on Thursday. Anna Read of the International City/County Management Association and Stephanie Bertaina of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Sustainable Communities discussed strategies that can help guide growth in rural areas while protecting natural and working lands and preserving rural character.
Read and Bertaina identified a number of benefits rural areas can reap by incorporating smart growth strategies. Smaller towns and cities often a struggle to maintain open space and small-town character while still benefiting from development, and though growth can bring the economic opportunity many rural areas want, it can also bring traffic congestion and other conflicts. The speakers acknowledged these sometimes conflicting needs and explained how smart growth strategies can help towns strike a delicate balance. Smart growth strategies help create an economic climate that enhances working lands and conserves natural lands, while protecting downtowns and Main Streets and helping those valuable assets thrive. In doing so, smart growth strategies can help build vibrant, enduring neighborhoods that people, especially young people, want to live in.
One example of this principle in action is the Texas Historical Commission (THC). Through its Texas Main Street Program, THC helps communities across Texas capitalize on their unique, authentic character. For many small businesses in the state, the Texas Main Street Program is a key to survival. As Britin Bostick, who sits on the Paris, TX, Main Street Advisory Board and chairs the downtown economic restructuring committee, explained to the Daily Yonder, THC’s Main Street revitalization effort provided “a necessary framework for us to build our downtown.”
Smart Growth America’s coalition partner Regional Plan Association works on plans and policies to accommodate and encourage future growth in the Northeast corridor. The Northeast has a number of unique features and challenges, but the Regional Plan Association’s work is exemplary of how regions across the country can identify future growth and transportation challenges and work now to find solutions.
For the Northeast, RPA explains, building a high speed rail network in the region could avert imminent transportation problems. The region is projected to gain 18 million new residents over the next generation but roads connecting towns and cities in the region are already congested. High speed rail could better connect residents and businesses in the area and that doesn’t just mean less traffic: it means a stronger regional economy and better opportunities for economic growth:
In particular, U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, 3rd District of Connecticut, explained the economic boost such a system would bring to her area:
When we begin to connect cities and rural areas – cities like New York, New Haven, Providence, Boston – what you are doing is producing economic growth and economic competitiveness…It is the direction we ought to be moving in in order to look at job growth, competitiveness, economic development, and a key to our economic future.
High speed rail has been controversial in some places, but many of the arguments in this video apply to transportation options of all kinds, including buses, streetcars or subways. Creating these transportation options means better serving more people, accommodating more travelers in the same space and creating more efficient ways to get between home, jobs and stores. Large or small, every community can use smart growth techniques to give people the freedom to choose how they get around.
Commuters sitting in gridlock may find it hard to believe, but many smaller and mid-size cities in America have under-used highways. In some of these cities, highways that were built decades ago are now impeding potentially valuable real estate development. And as many highways from the middle of the last century deteriorate past the point of minor repairs to needing to be entirely rebuilt, leaders in these cities are starting to question the cost and efficiency of maintaining certain pieces of their highway systems.
In Seattle, Cleveland, Syracuse and a number of other cities across the country, leaders are debating the merits of removing portions of their underused, crumbling highway systems to allow for economic development instead. As older highway segments meet the end of their useful life, civic leaders are presented with a rare opportunity to reduce expenses on underused infrastructure and create new opportunity for development at the same time. (editors note: according to transportation engineers, a road or bridge’s “useful life” is determined to be over when repairs are so expensive and the conditions are so bad that it would cost several times more to rebuild the road or bridge than to tear it down and build something different.)
Smart Growth America’s Sustainable Communities Network hosted a webinar yesterday on how state, local and national organizations can support the federal Partnership for Sustainable Communities through advocacy.
Included in this webinar is an update on the current state of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities in federal budget negotiations from Devon Barnhart, Transportation Policy Advisor for Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ). Also included is an overview of what individuals and organizations can do to express their support for the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, including a guide for scheduling meeting with Members of Congress, how to call or email your Representatives and what documents to take to a meeting. The webinar also included a question-and-answer session with an opportunity for participants to share information as well.
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Listen in: Click here to view the archived webinar Presentation begins at the 10 minute mark |
As Congress continues to negotiate both 2011 and 2012’s federal budgets, telling your Congressional representatives that you support the Partnership for Sustainable Communities is important now more than ever. Click here to send a letter to your Senators in support of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities.
Smart Growth America’s Sustainable Communities Network is an online community of state and local government officials, business leaders and nonprofit professionals interested in the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. The Network provides opportunities to ask questions, learn best practices and share ideas with others from around the country. The Network also shares updates about federal initiaitves, upcoming events, webinars and conferences to support vibrant, sustainable communities. Interested in joining? Click here to subscribe.
Oklahoma City Mayor Mark Cornett (R) is making his city more attractive to businesses, tackling a public health crisis and he’s using smart growth strategies to get it done. Cornett gained notoriety for tackling Oklahoma City’s obesity epidemic by changing the landscape of the city. After setting a goal in 2008 for the city to lose a million pounds, he passed a massive $777 million “Metropolitan Area Project” in 2009 that made jogging and biking trails, sidewalks and neighborhood parks a priority in downtown development.
The project aimed to make Oklahoma City’s residents healthier, but slimmer figures weren’t Cornett’s sole goal. Mayor Cornett also understood that an obesity epidemic could deter businesses that might consider locating in Oklahoma City. He recently told Next American City, “if I’m a job creator, and I see Oklahoma City on the list of the most obese cities in the country, I’ve got to think: What are my health care costs going to be? What’s my absenteeism rate going to be? Why would I create jobs in a city that doesn’t value health?”
New Yorkers are lining up to support bills S1332 and A1863, known as “Brittany’s Law,” which would direct inclusion of all users in state transportation projects. The law takes its name from the tragic death of 14-year-old Brittany Vega, whose mother Sandi is tirelessly advocating for Complete Streets policies at the state and local level.