News Roundup › Sustainable Development

The stakes are high as the city finds it needs much more than great restaurants and the bawdy Bourbon Street scene to wine and dine itself to economic prosperity.
But there is no master vision for rebuilding New Orleans’ economy.

Source: AP Wire

A year after the introduction of the sturdy gray bicycles known as Velib’s, they are being used all over Paris. The bikes are cheap to rent because they are subsidized by advertising, and other major cities, including American ones, are exploring similar projects.

Source: The New York Times

“The time has come to see the potential for this corridor not only be used as a path for people to walk or bike to work and to better their health, but also to knit communities along the greenway together,” said Bart Everson, the FOLC’s board chair.

Source: The Times-Picayune

Long before the recent spike in the price of energy, environmentalists decried suburban sprawl a waste of land, energy and tax dollars. Governments from Virginia to California have in recent decades lavished resources on building roads and schools for new subdivisions in the outer rings of development while skimping on maintaining facilities closer in. Many governments now focus on reviving their downtowns.

Source: The New York Times

Devastated by the subprime mortgage crisis, hundreds of homes have been foreclosed and thousands of residents have been forced to move, leaving in their wake a not-so-pleasant path of empty houses, unkempt lawns, vacant strip malls, graffiti-sprayed desolate sidewalks and even increased crime.

Source: CNN

From Elysian Fields to the St. Bernard Parish line, St. Claude Avenue now hosts New Orleans’ first bike lane. Consider this a down payment on what’s to come.

Source: WWOZ Street Talk

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we’ll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We’ll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We’ll have to restore local economic networks — the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed — made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

Source: Washington Post

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

Source: New York Times

The recent uptick in big-box projects and proposals in the Crescent City, fueled by tax subsidies and other costly giveaways, has left owners of smaller home-grown businesses in related industries gritting their teeth and bracing for hard times.

Source: Times-Picayune

“We built the opera house in two months, the botanical gardens in three months, Niemeyer’s museum in five months. We transformed the city’s main street into a pedestrian area in 72 hours. It wasn’t that we were chasing after records - it was necessity.”

Wally N’Dow, former head of the UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), has described Curitiba as “a wonderful example, because cities that follow this lead can jumpstart the economies, assist the poorest of their poor, and clean up their cities.”

Source: Guardian

The school improvements cost $68,612 and are expected to save the school $26,438 per year in energy costs, so the green investment will be recouped in about 2.5 years, program assistant Linda Morgano said.

Source: City Business

FOLC said the Lafitte Greenway will encourage economic revitalization; create transportation alternatives, such as walking, biking and connections to transit; improve public health; and promote cultural tourism by connecting to neighborhood attractions.

Source: City Business

In recent years, downtown Mississauga has amassed both significant density and a reasonably broad mix of land uses. But its sidewalks remain virtually empty, especially when compared with the attractive central areas of the world’s great cities. And it’s that lack of street life that Canada’s sixth-largest city hopes to address starting with Parkside Village by Vancouver-based developer Amacon.

Source: Toronto Star

Once completed, the concrete segment of the Wisner route will be among the city’s major paved off-street bike infrastructure, joining the 1.79-mile Mississippi River Levee path and the 1.38-mile West End path, said Jennifer Ruley, a bicycle and pedestrian engineer with the Louisiana Public Health Institute.

Source: Times-Picayune

Entergy’s proposal would allow customers to voluntarily subscribe to earth-friendly, renewable energy such as hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, solar and biomass in return for a monthly premium to cover the costs of the program.

Source: City Business

The Mayor of Paris is about to launch another novel scheme for fighting congestion and pollution: self-service cars Bertrand Delanöe aims to start with 2,000 electric-powered vehicles that subscribers can drive off without booking at dozens of sites 24 hours a day and then leave anywhere in the city.

Source: The Times

The streetcar has represented something else besides the connections through time and space: the city’s living room, a privileged spot for tentative social encounters across lines of race, class and nationality, in a place not otherwise given to them. Thanks to an accelerated repair schedule, that meeting place, absent since the hurricane, is back.

Source: New York Times

Far from being what the market wants, sprawl is a Ponzi scheme that depended on the securitization of mortgages into pools mixing form, content and risk into an unrecognizable hash. It was great bait—“what the market wants”—until the trawler nets came up empty.

Source: Counter Punch

Available free to the public at www.bigboxevaluator.org, the web-based interface allows users to learn about commercial and retail development in general, but also to input specific information from their communities and receive customized reports on economics, values, planning and municpal services, and ways to improve the development process.

Source: The Orton Family Foundation

Pre-Katrina, the St. Charles line, which extended from Canal Street to Carrollton Avenue and Claiborne Avenue, ran 24 hours a day, but the new Canal-to-Napoleon service will operate daily from 5:27 a.m. to 11:55 p.m. with a fleet of five 1923 Perley Thomas streetcars running 10 minutes apart.

Source: Times-Picayune

KB Home, which once announced a 3,000-home subdivision project in the New Orleans area and later abandoned it, is leaving Louisiana altogether. Clint Szubinski, president of the company’s Gulf Coast division, said residents are rebuilding instead of buying new homes.

Source: City Business

The ORM has $2.4 million of an estimated $2.5 million needed to complete phase one, which includes developing a greenway between North Broad and Jefferson Davis Parkway. ORM will use $2 million from the $117 million authorized by the Louisiana Recovery Authority for the city, $313,000 from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development and a $95,000 grant from the American Institute of Architects to develop the park.

Source: City Business

Source: City Business

Working from barges and tugboats off New York City’s Roosevelt Island, engineers are battling northeasters and this month’s heavy spring tides to install the first major tidal-power project in the United States. The project involves a set of six submerged turbines that are designed to capture energy from the East River’s tidal currents.

Source: Technology Review

Mayor Marcelo Ebrard proposed the programme last year — and was the first to get on his bicycle from his home south of the city to his office in the central Zocalo.

[Louisiana] is getting ready to spend three hundred and fifty-eight million dollars on a gigantic automobile overpass along the northern edge of the Lower Ninth Ward, to connect downtown New Orleans with neighboring St. Bernard Parish. St. Bernard was home to sixty-seven thousand people before Katrina and to maybe a little more than a third of that now. Opponents call the overpass “the bridge to nowhere.”

Source: The New Yorker

Between 1990 and 2005, the amount of store space per capita in this country doubled, while consumer spending grew at less than half that rate. The predictable result is that the U.S. is now home to thousands of dead malls and vacant-strip shopping centers. City planners are not the only ones alarmed. “The most over-retailed country in the world hardly needs more shopping outlets of any kind,” advised PricewaterhouseCoopers in a report to real-estate investors.

Source: Grist

EMO, a Falls Church, Va.-based energy efficiency and sustainable design consulting company, has been recommending and designing alternative building materials since 1998. Initial plans were to construct the first zero-net energy building for its Virginia headquarters but Hurricane Katrina changed plans.

Source: City Business

The office of Farr Associates is no next-generation green-building prototype — it’s located in the historic 114-year-old Monadnock Building, Chicago’s tallest all-brick skyscraper. But inside, green spores of sustainability burst forth. The open studio spaces have walls that have been painted by a local artist who used milk-based, non-toxic paints. The desktops are made of natural linoleum, and a translucent divider embedded with leaves separates one desk from another. “Occupancy sensors” trigger energy-conserving lights in the kitchenette, conference room, and main studio. Large, operable First Chicago School windows gaze over nearby Printer’s Row, letting in eastern and southern light that is welcomed by the many living creatures in the space.

Source: Grist

Wal-Mart’s specific approach to reducing the growth of its health insurance costs centers on providing disincentives for less healthy workers to take a job at Wal-Mart in two ways: by incorporating physical activity into all job functions (the benefits memo suggests, for example, that cashiers should gather carts) and by providing health benefits that expose workers to much more cost-sharing for medical expenses than their wages suggest they can reasonably afford.

Source: TomPaine.com

When the Central Artery expressway was built in the 1950s, it carved through Boston indiscriminately, destroying sections of Chinatown and effectively cutting off the North End from the rest of the city. Half a century later, as part of the massive Big Dig construction project, much of the elevated expressway has been torn down. In its place will be the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a nearly 30-acre stretch of parks and public spaces that promises to reunite neighborhoods long divided.

Source: Good Magazine

Welcome to the world of “objective” economists, economic developers, and business leaders who believe that the future of their community depends on Wal-Mart and Borders. Despite the nearly one hundred “Local First” campaigns around the country, fervent opposition is also growing. So, to prepare you and thousands of other independent businesses for the battles ahead, let me share a half dozen of the most common arguments circulating and how best to respond to them.

Source: Bookselling This Week

Five years later, no one is questioning Saulson’s sanity. Thanks to midcourse changes in the building’s design, materials, lighting, and heating and cooling systems, the 647,000-square-foot steel, stone and curved glass structure overlooking the Monongahela River spends $1.5 million a year on utilities — 26 percent less per square foot than one of the bank’s comparable standard buildings.

Source: Washington Post

“The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design” aims to show visitors how thoughtful choices — even small ones — can help conserve resources, save money, and support healthier lifestyles. With displays that are complemented by lectures, trips to renovation and construction projects, family programs, and a comprehensive website, the exhibit offers something for everyone.

Source: Grist Magazine

Chicago is set to unveil new plans for becoming a bicyclist’s haven. And this time, it means business. The new Bike 2015 Plan wastes little time on breezy rides in the park. Instead, the city’s Department of Transportation is bent on getting people to bike to work, to school, to stores and to mass transit stops, cobbling together a 500-mile network of designated routes.

Source: Chicago Tribune

With world oil production approaching a plateau, energy demand soaring, growing talk of global warming, and fossil-fuel habits under scrutiny, you may be worried about the employment outlook for traditional energy industries like oil. But according to Kevin Doyle, author of The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century , there is a bright side for job hunters: Renewable energy.

“In 2006, we’ve made a switch: Alternative energy is no longer alternative,” he says.

Source: Monster.com

Solar panels on the roof. Hybrid car in the garage. Organic-cotton clothes in the closet. Today’s eco-radicals are voting with their dollars.

Source: Wired

Schools must become more “carbon neutral” by 2020 by reducing pollution and encouraging children to walk or cycle from home, the government says.

Education Secretary Alan Johnson also called for lower water and energy use, with some schools in England using solar panels and wind turbines.

The government says that by 2020 it wants all schools to be “models of energy efficiency and renewable energy” and provide “healthy, local and sustainable food and drink produced or prepared on site”.

Source: BBC

An agreement that will be discussed at this week’s WTO
ministerial meeting in Hong Kong poses a serious threat to state and
local authority over land use policy, according to Public Citizen. Big
box retailers such as Wal-Mart are pushing for new provisions in the
WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services that could further
undermine local zoning and other land use and development policies.

Among the local laws threatened by GATS rules are those that impose size and height restrictions on big box stores; limits on hours of operation; economic needs tests before stores can be approved; and limits on development to protect the environment or protect historic and cultural sites. No state or local group has yet recognized the threat posed to land use laws and local sovereignty by the WTO’s one-size-fits-all rules for service firms. One group that has recognized this threat is major
retail firms.

“Major big box retail corporations have been eyeing the GATS as a way of gutting local zoning and land use laws that have kept them out of
communities in Europe and the United States.”

Source: Public Citizen

A Louisiana environmental group said Tuesday that the cake-like muck that Hurricane Katrina dumped in much of St. Bernard Parish is loaded with toxic substances in amounts exceeding federal and state recommended levels, and the group contends that federal and parish officials are not giving returning residents enough warning about potential health risks.

Source: The Times-Picayune

“Economic juggernaut, factory of the world, emerging superpower: When it comes to China’s ascendancy, the journalistic cliches come fast and furious. And there’s no denying that China’s hypergrowth wave is a wondrous thing. But another, darker dimension to China’s prosperity exists. The country is fast becoming an ecological wasteland, home to some of the world’s smoggiest cities as well as rampant water shortages, soil erosion, and acid rain.”

Source: Business Week

Source: Michael Wolf

“So next time you are in the supermarket pondering the organic Gala or the local Granny Smith, consider how you might help create a food system that is both organic and local. Seek out a local farmers market or vegetable subscription service that provides a weekly bag of produce. Meet your local farmers this way. Encourage them to use organic methods and local sources of compost and other soil amendments. And seek out the small growers, who don’t have to exploit labor to gather their harvests.”

(Thanks, Dar)

Source: The Land Institute

“It’s a model that works because it’s so simple. It’s thousands of years old. Take consumer and producer and put them together and amazing things happen,” says Richard McCarthy

Source: City Business

State and Local Policy Edition
August 8, 2001, Vol. 3, Issue 5

In a victory against big-box sprawl, the Chestertown, Maryland, Planning Commission voted June 19 to reject a proposal by Wal-Mart to build a sprawling, 107,000 square-foot store on the outskirts of this small historic town in Kent County. The vote came after the Maryland Court of Special Appeals upheld the prior ruling of the Kent County Circuit Court, which had remanded the Wal-Mart application back to the planning commission for reconsideration based on issues relating to traffic and economic impacts on local businesses. After hearing testimony on how damaging these impacts would be, the commission denied the proposal in a 5-2 vote. The decision was based on the proposal’s violation of the Kent County Comprehensive Plan, which prohibits projects that have certain negative effects on the community.

Kennedy Smith, director of the National Trust’s Main Street Program, had testified at a planning commission hearing that economic assertions regarding the project’s economic benefits were overly optimistic and that the development would have an adverse effect on Chestertown’s Main Street. The National Trust had filed an amicus brief in support of Chestertown.

Wal-Mart has appealed the decision.

Local governments should scale back the amount of retail-zoned land to reflect a realistic assessment of the size and strength of the market, advises the Urban Land Institute in its latest publication.

Source: Preservation Advocate News