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 … Continued
It’s not just gas prices that make transportation expensive… Yesterday, The Center for Neighborhood Technology, an SGA coalition member, along with the Brookings Institution, released a new web-based tool to measure housing affordability — by also measuring the transportation costs inherent in a home’s location. Traditionally, affordability is measured at 30% or less of a … Continued
Anyone who has attempted to measure the merits of proposed development in their area knows of the difficulties in attaching quantitative values to a proposal. Community opposition or support to a project, based on nothing but emotion or feelings about what may result from that new development, isn’t always productive in achieving desired outcomes. And … Continued
To follow up our post from last week on the local, state, and regional coalition members, I put together a list of our national coalition members that have syndicated feeds you can subscribe to. Here is a quick list of those national folks with regular blogs — and a few that at least have RSS … Continued
We’ve been thinking about how to have a blogroll here on SGAA without having one of those infinitely long lists in the sidebar that no one seems to pay attention to anyway, and it seemed that a good place to start would be with our coalition partners. Over the next few days, I’ll be starting … Continued
When a timber company proposed a new development on a lake in central Maine that would clear 14,000 acres of forest to build roughly 2,300 homes, forward-looking leaders in Maine questioned the wisdom of a mega-project on pristine wilderness so far from existing infrastructure. Considering the fact that satisfying the growing demand for homes in … Continued
As we mentioned earlier this week, Gov. Spitzer in New York created a new smart growth cabinet via an executive order that will attempt to coordinate all state agencies’ spending and policies into a coherent vision for growth and development in the state. Regional Plan Association’s Bob Yaro, which has been working for years behind … Continued