livagreen » Housing

Greening Suburbia

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:19:02 +0000

In the SF Bay Area over the past few weeks we’ve seen the FTA take a very tough stance on transit in favor of smart growth with two projects: 1) potentially removing funds from the Oakland Airport Connector; and 2) not allowing AC Transit to backfill operational budgets with money intended for Bus Rapid Transit. It seems the fed is taking on a proactive land use perspective which leads me to a recent thought-provoking article from the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute. It frames Obama-Admin policies as being hostile to suburbia and proposes that:

Given these realities, it seems more practical not to work against such aspirations (of greening suburbia) but instead to evolve intelligent policies that would reconcile them with our long-term environmental needs. Suburbanites like their suburbs but would also like to find a way to make them greener as well as more economically and socially viable. Right now neither party has developed such an agenda, and so the suburbs, now clearly leaning right, remain up to grabs. To win suburbanites over, politicians first have to respect the basic preferences while offering a realistic program for improvement. This remains a key to building a sustainable electoral majority, not just for the next election, but for the decades to come.

So what is your opinion? Are we not working enough to retrofit and green suburban communities? How we might work with the suburban landscape to make it greener? Suggestions?

Livable and Unaffordable Cities

admin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:47:00 +0000

The Economist magazine has provided a nice little paradox for urbanistas. Apparently most of the most livable cities in the world, are not unaffordable to live in. Painfully ironic and solifying theories that residential choice within livable, healthy and walkable neighborhoods, is not a truly equitable factor.

Climate Evil: Cars vs. Houses

admin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:58:00 +0000

Here’s a good article about the impact of Cars vs. Houses on the environment which mainly gets at the energy and resource-use side of the issues. However from a planning standpoint it overlooks the critical issue that every real estate professional knows – “location, location, location”! Proximity of housing to jobs, jobs to housing balance these do more to influence the transportation sector that many people give credit to and are quite possible the most important (and toughest) thing to target in addressing VMT and emissions reduction.

Growing Smarter

admin — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:56:00 +0000

“What we see here is a chance to turn the Bay Area into a model metropolis, so that in 30 years when we do this show, you [Michael Krasny] don’t introduce this as ‘this is what they do in the Netherlands,’ instead, it’s ‘this is what they do in the San Francisco Bay Area.’”

–Greenbelt Alliance Executive Director Jeremy Madsen on KQED’s FORUM with Michael Krasny, 8 June 2009

Let’s just hope there is an equity component and that our ’smart growth’ is not smart for minority and dumb for a majority…. See two Rolf Pendall articles:

Car-free Development: Where's the Transit?

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:35:00 +0000

“Quarry Village is a proposed 1,000-unit neighborhood that would fill a former quarry near Cal State East Bay and 1 1/2 miles from the Hayward BART Station…. I’m skeptical that you can eliminate cars in a development that is not directly on top of transit,” said Jeff Loux, a land-use expert and UC Davis professor who has visited Vauban.”

Quite a surprising article here on a new development that tries to be car-less without transit. Based on the existing body of knowledge on transit behavior research, Mr. Loux’s statement above strikes me as the understatement of the year so far, and he rely’s on the rational that a frequent shuttle system might actually supplant transit accessibility. I’d be surprised if he (and the developer end up being right.