Smart Growth
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Michigan governor’s race: Snyder vs. Bernero
Michigan Republican Rick Snyder is a high-tech venture capitalist, a one-time Nature Conservancy board member, and a Smart Growth backer who talks about investing in transit and reining in sprawl. And he could well become governor of a state with huge challenges and huge opportunities to reshape its economy. For enviros searching for the elusive "green Republican," he's worth tracking.
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Friday music blogging: Arcade Fire
You can bet an artist is grappling with questions of place and home and belonging when she belts out a line like, "Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small / that we can never get away from the sprawl ... Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / And there's no end in sight."
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Grassroots financing is underwriting a new crop of neighborhood businesses
In the summer of 2008, business partners Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting were making plans to open a bookstore in Brooklyn. Their chosen neighborhood, Fort Greene, was over the moon at the prospect. For years, residents had been clamoring for a bookstore, repeatedly citing it as their top need in surveys conducted by the […]
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How Obama could make housing policy greener
On Tuesday, the Obama administration is holding a large summit on how to reshape federal housing policy and eventually offload mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the government bailed out in 2008. It'll be a Very Serious event in which the health of the economy gets top billing and the health of the planet will be lucky to get even a passing mention.
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How much do you spend on transport? New web app aims to show you
The cost of a home is easy to keep in mind. The cost of getting to and from it is not. A new web tool aims to shed light on transportation costs and nudge Americans away from sprawl.
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How to make Smart Growth affordable
If you live in a walkable, transit-connected neighborhood, you'll probably spend less on transportation. Perhaps mortgage lenders should take note. Here's how smarter mortgages could crack the Smart Growth housing premium.
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Smart Growth is great, unless it created the housing bubble
Did land-use regulation contribute to the housing bubble? New research finds that any limits on where homes can be built corresponded to both higher price gains and steeper price drops for residential property.
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Climate & Energy Bill Will Do More For Health Than Health Care Legislation
This post was co-authored by Dr. Rahul Rajkumar, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. As oil and gas continue to spew out of a broken pipe at the BP spill site in the Gulf of Mexico, those of us who rode on the health care reform bandwagon have to wonder if we […]
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Feds fund new rapid buses, leave out hovertrains
We’re starting to see some tangible progress from President Obama’s Smart Growth/Livability initiative — a joint venture of the Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency — which announced $293 million in grants for urban transit yesterday. Much of the total goes to bus rapid transit systems, which […]