The Bullitt Center will feature 100 percent solar power, a rain garden, and composting toilets.

In 2009, Seattle set out to to create the next generation of cutting-edge green buildings and inspire other forward-thinking cities to follow suit. Three years later, only one of these space-age structures is under construction, with just two more in the planning stages. What happened to the Emerald City’s “deep green” dreams?

Under the Living Building Challenge Pilot Program, which went into effect in 2010, the city offered special incentives to the first 12 developers who managed to meet at least 60 percent of the requirements of the Living Building Challenge, a program that leaves the LEED green building standards in the dust. To win official Living Building status, a structure must, among other things, generate all its own electricity and only use water that falls on site. (The latter would be a piece of cake in Rain City. The former, not so much.)

But by the middle of this summer, with just months remaining before the program was set to expire, the city had found only three takers.

Tusk, tusk: It's time to stop ignoring tough problems like urban poverty and climate change.

In the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine, longtime education writer Paul Tough has an insightful treatise on President Obama’s policies regarding poverty -- the issue that, more than any other, holds American cities down, and one that we seem incapable of addressing in any rational, lasting way.

Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes, a book about the Harlem Children’s Zone, a trailblazing program that offers poor kids a web of services designed to carry them out of the ’hood and into the middle class. On the campaign trail in 2007, Obama promised to pour a few billion dollars a year into creating Children’s Zones in cities across the country. Here he is in a speech at the community center in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C.:

We know this works. And if we know it works, there's no reason this program should stop at the end of those blocks in Harlem. It's time to change the odds for neighborhoods all across America.

The proposal, which Obama later dubbed Promise Neighborhoods, sent waves of excitement through American cities. In 2009, dozens of communities hastily compiled proposals to be one of the first 20 test cases.

Agenda 21: It's the biggest threat to your freedom, and unless you regularly attend yahoo-filled local planning and zoning meetings, you've probably never even heard of it. Until recently, this 20-year-old United Nations plan to promote "sustainable development" was known only to stalwart defenders of Liberty and Freedom like the John Birch Society. But the underground resistance is about to go mainstream. GOP intellectual it boy Ted Cruz leads the counterstrike, and the Republican Party is even considering a public flambéing of Agenda 21 in its official 2012 platform.

Looking to help break the siege of bike paths and high-quality education on our freedoms? Here’s what you’ll need to know.

Bill Gates watches a researcher from the University of Toronto feed fake poo into a NASA-worthy, next-gen crapper. (Photo by Gates Foundation.)

The first thing that strikes you about the “Reinventing the Toilet” fair at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle this week is that the scene looks more like a wing of the Air and Space Museum than the bathroom section at your local Home Despot. Toilets here incorporate solar panels and collectors, windmills, and gizmos that look like jet engines. They generally look like something you’d get in trouble for taking a shit in.

The second thing that strikes you is that no one here is talking about taking shits. (George Carlin would no doubt be relieved.) No crap, no No. 2, no dookie: It’s all  "feces" and "urine." Even the toilets get referred to as “user interfaces.”

We’ll forgive the gathered scientists and engineers for their lack of scatological slanguage (or just candor) given the gravity of their undertaking. The Gates Foundation has committed more than $3 million in prize and R&D money to redo the loo for the estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide who have probably never heard the term “sewer trout” because they don’t even have a sewer.

The story seems to change every five minutes. One recent report found that, for the first time since the advent of the automobile, cities are adding population faster than suburban areas. “Cities grow more than suburbs, first time in 100 years,” trumpeted the Associated Press.

Now comes news that the most suburban of all suburban areas, the exurbs, have been the fastest growing places in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas  -- yes, even after the housing crash. The headline in The Atlantic Cities: “Exurbs, the fastest growing areas in the U.S.”

I’m sorry. Come again?

Is it me, or is it getting hot in here?

Two summers ago, the National Weather Service’s thermometer in downtown Los Angeles cracked 113 degrees F for the first time ever. Then it broke, leaving weather geeks to wonder if the city’s record high was actually even hotter than their tools were able to handle.

Better fix the thermometer, L.A. There’s more record heat on the way. A new study conducted by researchers at UCLA finds that climate change will drive up average temperatures in the City of Angels by an average of 4 to 5 degrees F by midcentury. And that’s just an average -- some days, global warming will no doubt push the mercury even higher.

Another new report, from the National Research Council, predicts that sea level will rise up to a foot along the California coast in 20 years, and could top 5 feet by the end of the century. Again, these are averages. When the big storms roll in, folks in Malibu can kiss their beachfront mansions goodbye.

After months of partisan gamesmanship, Congress finally coughed up a transportation bill today.

Both the House and the Senate voted to okay a compromise of a compromise that is a major letdown for fans of bikes and clean transit. President Obama is expected to sign it into law today or tomorrow.

Despite much back-patting and talk of bipartisanship, a semi-decent Senate version of the bill was gutted during the conference-committee process. First House lawmakers loaded it up with “poison pills,” including a provision that would have forced the approval of the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline. Those pills were dropped from the final bill, but so were measures that would have promoted public transit, walking and biking infrastructure, air quality, accountability, and environmental review.

What was left? Highways, highways, and more highways.

Photo by Christopher Schoenbohm. Hold the phone. The Census Bureau has just released new numbers suggesting that America’s largest cities surged past the suburbs in 2011, growing at a faster rate than the ’burbs for the first time since Henry Ford started rolling out the cars that would fuel almost a century of sprawl. If the numbers hold up (these are between-year estimates, not full-blown census counts) they represent a dramatic shift, and one that fits nicely into our favorite narrative about cities rising from rust while suburbs languish in big-box obsolescence. Some highlights, care of the Associated Press: New …

Lawmakers worked late last night to hammer out a final transportation bill -- the product of years of wrangling over how we’ll spend billions of dollars on roads, public transit, and biking and walking paths. The final language, which will be voted on before Congress breaks for the Fourth of July, is a huge disappointment to advocates of a cleaner, greener transportation system.

“If you’re not a paving contractor, you didn’t get much out of this bill,” says David Goldberg of the nonprofit Transportation for America. “This is just a really disappointing day.”

The Earth Summit is mercifully over, leaving us all to wonder: What the hell happened last week? Did the end result justify the 3,600 tons of CO2 generated by the U.N. delegation alone? And has anyone seen my pants?

Rio+20 was like Carnival without the party -- unless you consider 50,000 people cramming into conference centers, soccer stadiums, and makeshift meeting halls, all struggling to access the internet and navigate between venues as much as three hours apart by bus a good time.

The official summit and negotiations were, as we predicted, a bomb. The final “outcome document” [PDF], signed by world leaders last Friday, brings empty political speak to new heights. The 49-page tome amounts to a long list of “acknowledgements,” “affirmations,” and “underscorings” of statements and agreements already put in writing years or decades ago.

In a nutshell, the leaders of the world said, “We recognize that we are in deep doo-doo, and we need to do something about it.” What that “something” is remains unclear.