Will California’s plans for reducing dangerous climate-changing emissions help or hinder the building and development market? California’s most prominent association of real estate developers answered that question emphatically last week, saying that California’s law requiring regions to reduce emissions through smarter land use, transportation, and housing decisions is good for business.
Last month, the Minnesota Complete Streets Coalition celebrated the passage of a strong state law. They have kindly shared more information on the bill and how they did it, including lessons learned.
This post by SGA board member Kaid Benfield, originally appeared on his blog at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). We thank him for allowing us to reprint his post in full here, encourage you to read his blog daily, and join him in recognizing and thanking Richard Moe for his years of service preserving, building and advocating for American communities at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. As Kaid said to me, Smart Growth America might not exist without him. – Stephen Davis, SGA Communications Associate.
On a Friday where anyone can bring up a live video stream on their computer of oil still pouring from a broken well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps you, like a lot of Americans, feel a little powerless about it and aren’t sure what we can really do to prevent such a disaster in the future. While certainly not responsible for the spill itself, that well and thousands of others are there because we need quite a lot of oil every day.
Some of us here at SGA, through our other work at Transportation for America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, joined with other advocates for biking and walking to ride to the US DOT last Friday to thank Sec. LaHood for recent policy changes to include the needs of bikers and walkers in transportation planning. Check out the video from the T4America youtube channel.
Since 1995, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Brownfields Program has helped communities across the country assess and clean up thousands of those contaminated, vacant properties known collectively as “brownfields,” leveraging more than $14 billion in public and private investment and contributing to the creation of more than 60,000 jobs in the process. Over the last several months, Smart Growth America has been working as part of the National Brownfields Coalition to help reauthorize this vital program, with a series of amendments to improve it.
These resources, compiled by from the Northeast-Midwest Institute, cover federal, state and local Brownfields incentive programs.
Last Friday, the National Complete Streets Coalition joined our Coalition partners Transportation for America, America Bikes, and the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, along with dozens of other advocates, to personally thank Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood for his support for all modes of transportation. We’re also excited by a more mundane document: the U.S. DOT draft Strategic Plan, which makes adoption of state and local Complete Streets policies one of the Department’s Performance Measures.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
A central strategy of the Complete Streets movement has been to learn from local success. We are proud to share a publication that takes this strategy to its highest level: Complete Streets: Best Policy and Implementation Practices, a joint project of the staff of the National Complete Streets Coalition and the American Planning Association.