Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Cincinnati voters have rejected "Measure 9," an anti-streetcar initiative, by a 56-44 percent margin. The measure was aimed at killing a streetcar plan approved earlier this year by the city council, and would have required further referenda...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Fans of Larry David's hilariously cringeworthy hit comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm can't miss the Prius. It's in every episode, one way or another, and has been as long as the show has been on the air, I think. Replacing the...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) has long been the U.S. Congress's leading champion of smart growth. On Monday, he announced the launching (if I recall correctly, actually a re-launching) of a Livable Communities Task Force within the Democratic Caucus of the...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
One of the more frustrating challenges for people in our field to overcome is a certain past-is-destiny argument from sprawl defenders who contend that past trends in favor of large-lot, dispersed, automobile-dependent development constitute proof that Americans want more of...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
As many readers of this blog already know, Orenco Station was built as one of the country's first new, suburban transit-oriented developments. It's on Portland's MAX light rail line in Hillsborough, Oregon, and comprises some 1,850 housing units...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Big-time kudos to Bike Pittsburgh for combing through new census data to extract and rank the commuting habits of the 60 largest US cities. The data chart on the organization's website, naturally, opens up with the ranking of bicycle commuting: ...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Environmental Justice , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
There has been a lot written about how federal stimulus money has not done as much as one might hope for existing urban communities. By contrast, quite a bit of the money has instead been slated for highway projects. A shining exception,...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
For me, a post about Dubai (the amazing pace of construction shown above) must begin with some thoughts about Las Vegas and about the king of rock'n'roll, who performed in that city often and whose impersonators there remain legion. ...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Solving Global Warming
Almost completely dormant for practically a century - with much of their once-rolling stock suffering the indignity of conversion to cheesy "ye olde" city tour buses - streetcars are now making a major comeback across the country. And they are poised to become a...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
Andre Leroux, executive director of the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, believes that New England's smaller cities hold the potential to absorb much development that could help save the region's countryside from sprawl. But it will take some policy reforms to...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
This comes via John Massengale, who says it was taken at the corner of 63rd St. and Park Ave. in New York. The red car is a vintage Fiat CinqueCento (500): Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
If the Reburbia contest sponsored by Dwell and Inhabitat was all about flights of imagination to reconceive suburbs, then FormShift Vancouver, a competition sponsored by the Architectural Institute of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver, was all about...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
I make no pretense of objectivity on this one. I've been working on LEED for Neighborhood Development for seven long years. It's now finished and awaiting final approval by the three founding partners - NRDC (in consultation with the Smart...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
Is it any wonder that neighbors continue to oppose density (oops, I meant "compact development") when this is what we have been giving them? We smart growth advocates have gotten lazy. The issue has evolved in the last decade but,...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Environmental Justice , Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
I want to do a new series of occasional posts on greening the urban density that we need for sustainable growth. And I can think of no better way to kick it off than with this 5-minute video featuring my...
