March 28, 2024

Election Results for Smart Growth Are Strong

Smart Growth continues to flourish at the ballot box. With the exception of the defeat of a disputed highway and transit measure in the Seattle region, voters on Tuesday this week again overwhelmingly approved candidates and strategies that make their places cleaner, greener, more neighborly, and much more efficient consumers of land and resources. Voters across the country approved 34 of 55 conservation measures on the ballot, generating $1.4 billion in new conservation funding. The election …

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Blueprint for American Prosperity

  If you’ve had the chance to visit America’s big cities, you’ve no doubt noticed that almost without exception they’re pretty terrific places to be these days. The revival of America’s big city downtowns and neighborhoods, the development that’s occurring in the inner ring suburbs, all portend something very useful to the nation’s well being in this century. The prosperity that’s occurred in American cities represents one of the great achievements in the United States in the …

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$100 Barrel Oil Nears; Streetcars in Portland

  Two items caught my eye today. World oil prices reached $93 a barrel this week, which is why gasoline at the Wesco down the road is $3.07-a- gallon tonight. The other news is the announcement on Monday that city leaders in Oregon want to dramatically expand the number of neighborhoods served by Portland’s spectacularly successful streetcar. The two developments are related, of course, because as fuel prices rise the sanity and fuel-efficiency of streetcar lines makes ever …

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New Peak Oil Assessment – Not Good

  Cheap oil was, arguably, the most important driver of prosperity in the industrial world during the 20th century. Expensive energy is one, but not the only significant driver of the economic Mode Shift occuring in the 21st.  Today, just in time for gas prices here in Benzie County to edge close to $3.00 again, and with news of $90 a barrel oil this week, comes the latest independent assessment of global oil stocks. The conclusion that the …

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At Notre Dame, Coming of Age For Young New Urbanists

  I visited South Bend earlier this month to join a group of students from Notre Dame and several more of the nation’s best universities who held the first Congress of the Students for New Urbanism. The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, it turns out, was an apt choice for the gathering. Notre Dame reframed its architectural curriculum several decades ago to concentrate on traditional neighborhood and urban design, one of the few architectural schools to …

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Michael Moore and the Traverse City Film Festival

In the fall of 1993, when I moved to northwest Michigan, Poppycocks was the only decent place to eat on Traverse City’s Front Street. The city had plenty of surface parking lots where buildings once stood, a delapidated State Theatre on Front Street, and a ghostly 100-year-old psychiatric asylum on its western boundary. On the sprawling outskirts, the Grand Traverse Mall had just opened and the South Airport ring road at the mall’s doorstep was so fry pit-ugly and congested that it was a metaphor for …

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In Cleveland, The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes

  CLEVELAND — I.M. Pei’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a masterpiece of glass and steel on Lake Erie,  is a great pyramid playbox for people who love the music, the messages that changed the world, and the men and women of my generation who, unlike nearly all of us,  lived as far out on on the creative edge as it is possible to be. A lot of the very best didn’t dwell there long.  This weekend I visited the Hall for the first time and came away …

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While Lansing Sputters and Fumes, Grand Rapids Excels

  There still isn’t much to be happy about when it comes to the political conversation in Lansing, our state capital. Though she won more than 50 counties in the 2006 election, more than any Democrat running for any state office in Michigan history – she also delivered a Democratic-led  House;  Republicans hold the state Senate by a slim majority – Michigan’s governor hasn’t done anything with her influence. Politics is a full contact body sport.  Ms. Granholm, …

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Green Neighborhood Grant Act in Illinois

Illinois, our neighbor to the west, has been doing a lot of things right of late for its residents, environment, and economy. It makes a Michigan resident a bit jealous. The Center for Neighborhood Technology and Bethel New Life, for example, convinced the Chicago Transit Authority to rebuild rather than tear down the elevated Green Line in the 1990s, helping to promote the revival of the city’s West Side. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley turned a tree-planting campaign …

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Toronto Transit City

In 1954, the year that Detroit was busily completing the Lodge Freeway and starting construction on the city’s other major highways Toronto (see pix) opened 12 stations on the Yonge Street subway line, the city’s first. Since then Toronto has built three more regional rapid transit lines, 69 stations, and nearly 43 miles of subway and rapid transit track. The city’s subway and surface streetcar system carries 1.2 million passengers a day, many of whom …

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