cities

As if they haven't done enough for you, trees also increase property values

Trees, man! They produce oxygen, they cool the planet, they make you smarter, and it turns out they also make your house worth more. It's like a Shel Silverstein book or something.

How Central Park cools the entire planet

Like all urban parks, Central Park cools New York City through evaporation. That is, its plant life and ponds give off moisture, which takes heat energy with it. It's as if the park sweats.

Until recently, though, we didn’t know whether green spaces cool the planet as a whole.

Walk Score's new apartment finder lets you build your perfect commute

Sure, there's a tool for finding the apartment with, say, the most bars in walking range. But eventually you're going to need to go to work, and if your commute is miserable, even having a bar for every day of the month won't save you. (Though it'll help.) Luckily, the Walk Score guys have put together a new tool that lets you search for an apartment based on how long it'll take you to get there from work.

Phenomenal cosmic skyscrapers — itty bitty environmental savings

Urbanists such as Ed Glaeser argue that tall buildings will save our cities. But they won't save the earth.

Critical List: Crowdsourcing carbon solutions; New Yorkers regret drilling leases

The Maldives are going to crowdsource their carbon-cutting plan. (They’re asking international experts, not just letting any citizen drive policy. Not sure how that would work in the Maldives, but in the U.S. you’d get a lot of “shine lamps on solar panels for infinite energy!”)

Should the new poster child for global warming be the city mayor who has to deal with unexpected weather extremes?

Usually you hear about buyer's remorse, but New Yorkers are having sellers' remorse about turning over drilling rights to natural gas companies.

Move to New York, save the planet

New York City's transportation commissioner wants you to come clog up her roads and subways. "If you want to save the planet, move to New York," Janette Sadik-Khan said at a Clinton Global Initiative panel discussion on Tuesday. Thanks to dense, car-light living, she said, New Yorkers have a third of the carbon footprint of the average American.

This park would turn an abandoned subway into an underground paradise

Sure, the High Line is great and all -- abandoned rail line turned into a beautiful outdoor leisure area, what's not to love? (Plus, reportedly you can see people getting undressed in the windows of one of the hotels that straddles the park.) But what it's really missing is an element of Neil Gaimany beautiful creepiness. I know! Let's put it UNDERGROUND.

That's the thinking behind the Low Line, a proposed park that would turn two acres of abandoned Lower East Side trolley terminal into an underground Eden.

Tombstone, with sewage backups

New Mexico "ghost town" will give researchers room to play -- without flooding real people's basements.

Right up your alley: the hidden housing trend

Building houses along alleys is a great way to unobtrusively increase density and provide more affordable housing.