Smart Growth

To reduce the country's excessive energy consumption, we need to make our new and existing suburbs more like cities. This means embracing the principles of smart growth and transit-oriented development.

Most small New England cities were once booming industrial centers, but over time they became subject to considerable disinvestment in the form of plant closings, job losses, weakened civic infrastructure, and shrinking tax bases.

One of the goals of smart growth must be to create neighborhoods that foster "aging in place."

Texting-while-driving is not just a safety issue, it's an environmental issue too. If our streets aren't safe and perceived as such, it'll be that much harder to convince people to walk or bicycle.

Most of the issues of growth, mobility, equity and the environment that we address here are fundamentally regional in character. But our political mechanisms place most of the authority for dealing with them at the smallest levels of local government.

We need compact development, not large lots, to protect our waterways. But how do we soften the localized impacts of density and deal with the stormwater that runs off of dense urban sites?

When it comes to policy on sustainable progress, we should be including measures that change the way we are doing things, not merely advance the technology that allows us to do things the same.

Suddenly people who two years ago wouldn't give smart growth advocates the time of day are talking about things like transit-oriented development and growth boundaries.

Cincinnati's historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood is poised to become one of America's greatest revitalization stories, in the process creating a national exemplar of sustainable development.

The maps demonstrate vividly that, although emissions on a per-acre basis are greatest in highly urban areas, it is in the suburbs and outlying areas where we pollute the most on a per-household basis.

The theory is that drivers get more used to seeing bikers on the road and know how to deal with them. So it might actually be a smart strategy not to be out there by yourself.

New development should pay its own way, or at least make a justification as to why the subsidy is in the public interest when all factors, including the consequences of sprawl, are considered.

Let's be honest -- HUD has become the Department of Subsidized Housing, and that must change. We've got to put the "UD" (urban development) back in HUD.

Suburban sprawl as we have known it may not be dead but it is surely not well, and we are already seeing the beginning of its end.

One of the sad ironies of our time is that, as demand for public transportation is soaring to levels not seen in 50 years, the recession has dampened government support for transit.

When it comes to choosing places to live, many of us don't seem to listen to our inner monologue.