Modeshift

SAN FRANCISCO — Since late March I’ve been living in a one-room cottage behind an old Craftsman-style home in Berkeley, and commuting to downtown San Francisco. It’s not your typical daily trip. But as gas prices rise, congestion mounts, and family incomes fall, it may well become a new kind of commuting norm in the United States. Of course it may not, too. This being San Francisco. And the weather is just unbelievably good most of the year.

But this is how it goes. I am a casual carpooler. Every morning I stand on line in front of the Safeway on Claremont Street, about six minutes walk from my house. Usually there are other people there, too, along with a line of cars and drivers waiting to pick up other casual commuters, two or three at a time. The goal in all of this is to save time and money for driver and passengers. Crossing the tragically congested San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on a weekday morning can take over an hour because of the longest toll lines I’ve ever seen. The cost also is $4.00.

But cars with three or more passengers zip through in the free carpool lanes. I save the $3.30 it would cost to ride the BART from the Rockridge Station to Embarcadero.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now and it’s just a marvel of ingenuity, convenience, and overcoming the fear of the stranger, which has gripped our country for 40 years or so. I’ve ridden with two student artists at San Francisco State, a manager of high rise buildings in San Francisco, a graphic designer, and a developer of affordable housing. I’ve had the chance to check out a two-seat Mercedes, a brand new Volvo, a Land Rover and any number of Toyota Prius’s. Nobody, and I mean nobody, drives an American car here. One of the guys I rode with is an engineer who gave me a lead on an apartment in Oakland, which turned out to be too expensive. Another told me about a hot graphic designer, who is as good as advertised and may fit into our publication schedule at the Apollo Alliance, where I work.

Drivers dispatch their passengers in San Francisco at the corner of Fremont and Howard, which is a couple of blocks from the Embarcadero along magnificent San Francisco Bay. In 1991, two years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, San Francisco demolished the elevated Embarcadero Freeway, replacing it with a palm-lined boulevard. An active lightrail line now runs in the median, passing gardens and parks and thousands of new units of housing, and swanky bars, the Giants baseball stadium, and all the other centers of human commerce that blossomed in what had been the shadows of a loud, dangerous, transportation eyesore.

If I walk, with the sun rising over the bay, it takes about 25 minutes. When I ride the Muni train to 4th Street, a block from my Townsend Street office, it takes about 10 minutes and costs $1.50. Total commute time: 45 minutes to an hour. Going home, I take the Muni to the Embarcadero BART station. BART takes me to the Rockridge Station, and I walk the 12 minutes up College Avenue and Claremont, stopping by the Safeway to get something for dinner. Travel cost: $4.80. Travel time: 45 minutes. Total expense saved from not having to own or drive a car: At least $1,000 a month, after taxes.

As the dimensions of the mortgage crisis both expand and get clearer, a new picture is emerging of a nation in pain that simultaneously is coming to new conclusions about what it means to be safe and secure in America. For the first time since post-war federal policy ganged up on cities to promote suburban expansion, cities are rebounding in remarkable ways and suburbs appear to have reached some kind of new limits to growth. The evidence of this profound shift is easy to find if you look.

First, here in Michigan and across much of the country, the towering growth in homeforeclosures is hitting the newest suburbs at least as hard, and in most cases harder than it is striking the state’s cities. Foreclosures in West Bloomfield and Birmingham are occurring at the same or higher rates than the rate of foreclosures in Detroit and its older suburbs.

The same is true, according to this article in the Atlantic Monthly, in Florida, California, Colorado, Georgia and other states.

Cities meanwhile are attracting new residents and new wealth, so much so that vast tracts of the urban landscape in cities as different as New York and Salt Lake City, Boston and Denver, Seattle and Knoxville, Chicago and Atlanta, and dozens of others, are being completely rebuilt.

This is a remarkable transformation. For most of my life cities were places to dismantle, not build. I was a kid in the 1960s when city officials and U.S. housing administrators teamed up to tear down much of White Plains, N.Y., my home town, as part of the federal urban renewal program. An elegant network of narrow streets and historic offices and walk-ups was replaced by Houston-like boulevards. A windowless mall was built near the center of town that became one of the most dangerous places to shop in the whole state. White Plains gradually came to its senses and slowly began to replace the urbanism that was removed, and the city is experiencing its own economic and cultural renaissance.

Chicago, too, is undergoing more than $1 billion in new housing, retail, and commercial investment along south Michigan Avenue, an area that encompasses hundreds of acres of old warehouses, storage buildings, and light industrial facilities. Boston is building a new city above the Big Dig. Los Angeles is rebuilding Grand Avenue. New York is planning 45 million square feet of homes and offices above a rail yard along the Hudson River.

A third bit of evidence is the popular clamor for modern transit. Grand Rapids recently won federal approval for a new rapid bus system, and as much as $29 million in US support to build the 10-mile line, which could be the first rapid transit line built in Michigan since early in the 20th century.

Northern Virginia is planning to build a new streetcar line, which would join a growing number of other streetcar systems, including operating lines in Portland and Kenosha, Wisc. And Atlanta is considering a new streetcar line along its famous Peachtree Street.

What appears to be occurring in the United States? Time-wasting, costly, energy-inefficient, land-consuming, and obsolete exurban patterns of development are taking new forms. The institutions that supported the old patterns are grievously injured. Citibank today announced a $23 billion write off connected to sour loans in its mortgage business. The American auto industry continues to shrink. Developers are going bankrupt, among them Levitt and Sons, which built the first auto-dependent cookie cutter suburb after World War Two, New York’s Levittown.

Coming up in their place are builders of new transit systems, designers of new green housing and LEED certified office buildings, and the entrepreneurial high tech businesses popping up downtown in small places like Traverse City, and big places like Charlotte.

Don Chen, the very sharp founding executive director of Smart Growth America, announced late last year that he was taking a position with the Ford Foundation. Interesting move for a canny advocate and non-profit executive with the sort of keen entrepreneurial instincts to take an eight-year-old organization from a Washington-based start-up to a national leader in new designs for development. Smart Growth America has a $2 million annual budget and a 10-member staff that includes a former Democratic governor of Maryland, and a former editorial writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This week Smart Growth America announced that Geoffrey Anderson (see pix), who directed the smart growth program at the Environmental Protection Agency, succeeds Don as executive director.

The choices made by both men seem plainly apparent. How the organization and the movement it fosters will fare is less so.

The role of non-profit founder and executive director unfolds in evolutionary stages that generally occur in two-year time frames. The first two years is all youthful energy, rapid response, program building, strategic choice, and instinctive fundraising. The next two are generally consumed with hiring, training, coalition building, program expansion, and a more formalized program of donor and foundation development. The next two are consumed with the limits of growth, more intensive fundraising, the start of moderate staff turnover and replacement, and the installation of administrative procedures designed to make operations more efficient, but sometimes don’t. And then comes the really hard work of sustaining programs, budgets, board relations, coalition partner relations, formal development programs. By year eight, non-profit directors tend to get so immersed in the administrative and fund-raising programs, and so distanced from the principles and values that prompted them to start their organizations, that they begin to wonder what happened. Year eight, in short, is a long time in the life of a non-profit director and often the time of greatest peril in a non-profit’s development.

When an institution as stable, prestigious, and well-funded as the Ford Foundation comes knocking it’s easy to understand why a talented guy like Don Chen would respond.

Overseeing a government program is the other end of the spectrum. The working environment is stable to the point of being calcified. The sense of adventure and accomplishment comes from distributing grants to capable organizations that produce solid work that attracts some (but not too much) attention. Program directors like to hire good people. They are challenged by treading paths through the administrative and Congressional briars that don’t leave too many nicks. They build relationships in and out of government, in and out of Washington. They speak at the right conferences. They become expert in policy and national practice. If they stay long enough, as Geoff Anderson has, they get recognized as significant leaders in the field.

I’ve worked with Don and Geoff for years and know them well. Both are experienced, knowledgeable men who are capable managers, fair with their staff, and generous with their time. But here is the big challenge: Can the organization and the new director sell the goods?

There is no doubt that Smart Growth America and the other gold standard public interest organizations that focus their work on the consequences of growth have made an effective case for seeking changes in public and private investment that make places better. They’ve developed the ideas that have resulted in building communities and neighborhoods fit for the 21st century that are more economically competitive, use less energy, reduce congestion, invest in transit, curb pollution, establish open spaces, and provide housing opportunities for people of every income level. Smart growth is a set of policy and investment tools proven to work in more than 40 states.

The question is whether the Smart Growth movement can command these ideas and build the strong coalitions that translate them into policy and investment practice at the federal level, where the real money lies. With the exception of the transportation funding bills of the 1990s, which produced more rapid transit, the Smart Growth movement has been less successful in changing the old spending priorities for highways, housing, natural resource protection, and urban investment at the federal level. It will take a powerful alliance of untraditional allies at the grassroots — advocates for halting global climate change, improving housing, strengthening labor, transit advocates, and metropolitan business and neighborhood groups respected by both parties — to convince Congress and the White House to break with convention and alter how and where federal money is spent.

Geoff Anderson has the inside government experience to know where the pressure points lie, as well as the earnest temperament to build the coalitions to press for new policy. But it’s not clear whether he has the political instincts to step outside the safety zone he understood so well as a government manager, or the entrepreneurial energy to simultaneously lead a staff, develop new programs, and serve as the chief fundraiser. If he does, Smart Growth America will take its place among the nation’s truly influential public policy organizations. If he doesn’t, the young group will gradually decline. A lot of us out here in the provinces wish him the best in his important new venture.

Cary Moon, the founder of the People’s Waterfront Coalition in Seattle, and one of the country’s premier advocates for alternatives to wasteful highways, wrote me this week about the progress she and her colleagues are making to replaced the elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct with a less expensive, neighborhood conserving, energy efficient alternative.

“You might find this joint press release from the governor, the county, and the city interesting,” said Ms. Moon (see pix). “Quite a big shift in the governor’s intentions, eh?”

Eh, indeed. On Tuesday, December 11, Washington’s Governor Christine Gregoire, King County Executive Ron Sims, and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, all Democrats, said they had directed their aides to toss out the super expensive “one size fits all” construction plan to replace the viaduct, and consider the “entire system of streets, transit service, and freeways from Lake Washington to Elliott Bay, and from Northeast 85th Street to South Spokane Street in evaluating solutions that keep people, goods and services moving.”

Ms. Moon has been advocating just that. She is convinced that the best solution for moving people and goods north and south along Seattle’s waterfront is to replace the aging and earthquake-damaged viaduct with a waterfront park, a boulevard, and re-establishing the grid network of local streets. It’s certainly the least expensive alternative, likely to cost billions less than replacing the elevated six-lane highway with a new structure, or building an even more expensive tunnel.

When it was opened in 1953, the 2.2-mile-long viaduct (see pix above) represented the country’s economic development priorities, providing drivers efficient routes from the central city to growing suburbs. Similar shoreline freeways were built in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Cleveland and other cities.

But in the early years of the 21st century, Seattle’s old wall of concrete has come to be viewed as a barrier to the city’s quality of life. The viaduct has been accused of various civic offenses, including separating residents from easy access to natural resources, especially a spectacular shoreline.

Ms. Moon’s critique of the viaduct reflects new thinking at the grassroots about the sanest way to move people and goods. For all intents and purposes, the era of massive highway building is nearing its end in the United States as construction costs soar well beyond the ability of the federal and state governments to pay. Highways are not only seen as bad investments, they also are accused of impeding local economies and diminishing the urban experience. Why” Because they are so intrusive, ecologically damaging, energy inefficent, and generally do nothing to relieve congestion.

This is essentially the argument that Ms. Moon has been making for several years. Though Washington State’s Big Three lawmakers haven’t yet conceded she is right, the announcement this week indicates that they are moving in Ms. Moon’s direction. And why not? Seattle is setting new trends in public policy that promotes walking, biking, new transit options, mixed use development, curbing on street parking, progressive zoning that promotes a mix of housing types, and other steps that have turned it into one of the most prosperous urban landscapes in the world. An obsolete idea, like a $6 billion (or more) highway or tunnel just doesn’t fit into Seattle’s 21st century plans.

NEW YORK – The day after Thanksgiving it was as though no one had ever eaten a square meal, judging from the lines that formed at Zaro’s Bread Basket or the Little Pie Company or Two Boots Pizza. Like everyplace else in midtown Manhattan, the ground floor, the “dining concourse”  of Grand Central Station was mobbed.

Some of what New York City presents to the world these days is familiar to those of us raised there in the 1960s and 1970s. Men and women, wrapped in cardboard or blanketed in grimy carpeting, huddle against the cold and sleep in doorways. Street vendors, their tables heaped in knock off pocket books and designer watches and gloves and hats, line 34th street where Macy’s is located. The spire atop the Empire State Building is lit in the colors of Christmas.

But much about New York is new, like the dining concourse at Grand Central. Many of the roughly 700,000 people who visit Grand Central every day spend at least a few minutes drinking coffee, or eating sushi, or salads, or fresh fruit in the company of hundreds of other New Yorkers. They sit without fear of the stranger.

In the 1970s, this airy and classic space beneath the main waiting room, defined by arched entrances and marbled walkways, was a place of gloom and loitering. Working people hurried through — collars up, eyes straight ahead– on their way to meet a commuter train to the suburbs.

The great terminal, like the city itself,  was a dying place full of decay and crime and fear.  Grand Central’s dire condition reflected what happens when a rich nation fueled by cheap energy and a national dream of cars and highways and picket fences, directs its people to seek refuge in its suburbs.

Two generations later Grand Central remains a potent symbol for a way of life that is fast changing again. In an era marked by high energy prices, high land values, growing population density, and remarkable constraints on time, the American Dream looks a lot different than it once did. The old train station as a result is a rare study in how and why people gather in public places in the 21st century, as well as an example of energy and time efficiency, two of the new operating principles of the era.

First and foremost, the station is about moving people. Nearly 600 trains depart daily and carry over 500,000 commuters to communities in two states. About a third of that number also find their way into the subway system.

Secondly, it is a grand building that fascinates and satisfies. In 1998, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority completed a $259 million renovation that turned Grand Central into a glittering market. Fresh food is a big draw. There’s a market full of good stuff, almost half a dozen fine dining restaurants and bars, nearly a dozen specialty food shops and bakeries, and more than 20 restaurants on the dining concourse.  The station has become a destination, even for the commuters who once did nothing more at Grand Central than hurry through. 

Third, people feel safe because they are. New York City is safer today than almost any big city in the world. According to the New York Times, the city will likely record fewer than 500 murders in 2007, the fewest since record-keeping began in 1963. To date, just 35 of those killings involved assailant and victim who were strangers to each other. The rest were perpetrated by murderers who knew their target. 

The crowds of people eating lunch at Grand Central are players in a story of a city that cultivates diversity and has found strength in community. That, too, is a new idea.

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 more sense. 

Dallas opened a 2.8-mile streetcar line in 1989, and since then eight cities have built new streetcar lines, including Memphis, Little Rock, San Francisco and Tampa, all serving growing numbers of riders using restored cars or replicas.

Portland, which opened the first section of what is now an eight-mile loop in 2001, was the first to use modern streetcars, designed and built in the Czech Republic.

A new 2.6-mile streetcar line is scheduled to open in Seattle in December; a new line is to open in Washington in 2009; and a four-mile line is to begin operating in Tucson in December 2010. Miami, Columbus, Cincinnati, Phoenix, Missoula, Grand Rapids and some 70 other American cities are studying the feasibility of opening lines, according to Reconnecting America, a national nonprofit transit research group in Oakland, Calif.

Not since the turn of the 20th century, when metropolitan regions built elegant urban-rail networks, which were later dismantled, have streetcars generated such intense interest, according to the American Public Transportation Association, a Washington trade group.

Much of the reason lies in what happened after Portland decided that a streetcar, operating on fixed tracks and sharing the right of way with cars, was not only a new option for getting from one end of town to the other, but also a boon to developers as a new rail corridor for building homes and offices downtown. The Portland region also has a 44-mile network of light-rail lines, using faster and larger cars, that runs through the center of the city to the eastern and western suburbs. An 8.3-mile, $575.7 million extension is under way, scheduled to open in 2009.

John Carroll, a local home builder who is on a committee that oversees the streetcars, told me earlier this month, ”All I can say is that the stars lined up the right way for Portland. The Portland streetcar demonstrated that the city was serious about developing downtown at a time when the core was much quieter than it is now. Our last seven or eight projects have been within a block, block and half of the streetcar line.”

The city-owned streetcar line, which cost $100 million to build, has helped sweep in $2.4 billion in new commercial and housing development, with 7,248 new housing units, according to city statistics. A former vacant railway yard and grimy light-industrial sector on the line’s northern end was transformed into a hip area called the Pearl District. On the other end, industrial ground along the Williamette River has become the South Waterfront, a neighborhood of high-rise condominiums, town houses, offices, parks and a tram with spectacular views.

Although riding the Portland streetcars now seems like a logical step to urban prosperity, getting the line built took 11 years of promoting the idea.

A major task included convincing residents that pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers and streetcars could co-exist in the same right of way. Miami, which plans to open a line in 2012, put the problem to rest by producing videos of Portland streetcars as they operate without a hitch, and posting them on a Web site, miamigov.com/MiamiStreetcar/pages/Videos.asp.

Another challenge was raising money. Portland financed its line almost entirely with local taxes.

Two years ago, Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Portland, convinced his colleagues in the House of Representatives to approve a new funding provision called Small Starts in the federal transportation bill to help pay for the line. This year the program is providing $100 million for building streetcar lines and bus rapid transit systems. Portland wants to use $75 million in Small Starts money to partly finance a 6.7-mile, $146 million extension of its streetcar line.

Portland’s streetcars carry nearly 10,000 passengers a day, almost four times the number it anticipated when the line opened, said Rick Gustafson, executive director of Portland Streetcar, the nonprofit corporation that operates the line. “There’s no question that we are part of the combined investment over the last 20 years that produced the infrastructure that made it possible for people to park their cars and turn Portland into a walking environment,” Mr. Gustafson said. “When you create that, amazingly enough the market responds.”

According to the Portland Oregonian, about 140 miles of the city’s busiest streets show potential for new streetcar routes. Streetcars could make more neighborhoods resemble the popular retail corridor along Southeast Belmont, built originally along a streetcar line in the early 20th century.

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 do so. When a group of nationally-renowned architects stepped away from the land-consuming, oil-soaked, dispiriting strip mall and subdivision design juggernaut to form the Congress for New Urbanism in 1993, Notre Dame was waiting for them. The weekend conference  not only featured the ideas and energy of young architectural students fully aware of the need for their skills in a coming age of transformational change, it also focused on several presentations that made clear how central the practice of New Urbanist design and planning has become across the United States.

One important measure of the New Urbanist influence is the market, which increasingly looks to traditional neighborhood and town designs to meet buyer expectations and solve some of the long-standing economic, environmental, and cultural challenges faced by communities. New Urbanist town centers, housing developments, and commercial districts are under construction in at least 40 states now. The South Lake Union neighborhood in Seattle, once an underutilized light industrial sector, is redeveloping along a traditional urban street grid with homes and shops and offices mixed together, and served by a new streetcar line scheduled to open in December. Harbor Town in Memphis, a city that has attracted nearly 10,000 new downtown residents in recent years, and which also boasts a baseball district featuring hip streetlife and mixed residential and business uses, is another of the formative projects gradually changing how American cities redevelop.

Both Seattle and Memphis, and so many others — Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Boston, Charleston, Atlanta, Grand Rapids, – benefit from what James Kunstler, the movement’s chronicler, said was the “the most valuable things that the New Urbanists recovered along the way: the knowledge required to create a human dwelling place with a future.”

Another measure of New Urbanist influence is that two national architecture and planning firms, Torti Gallas and Partners (based in Silver Spring, MD, and Los Angeles) and Looney Ricks Kiss (offices in 7 cities nationally) embraced New Urbanism as central to their business strategies. Both have emerged as very large multi-dimensional players in American design and development practices.  

J. Carson Looney designed much of Harbor Town, which started in 1989 and was one of the first large mixed-used new urban developments in the United States. Torti Gallas has amassed a similar collection of important projects. It just won a $250,000 contract from Ocean City, Miss., to develop a master plan for an area hammered by Hurricane Katrina along Biloxi Bay. The firm’s designs have collected a showcase full of awards from the Congress For the New Urbanism, the EPA, and other organizations. One of their most recent honors is the Governors’ Smart Communities Award for a mixed-use affordable housing project in Tacoma, Wash. A principal, John Torti, spoke at the weekend conference and is a graduate of Notre Dame’s architectural school.

As the new narrative of the 21st century unfolds, there is so much for architectural students to worry about — peak oil price shocks, global climate change, soaring population, flat personal incomes, financial market turmoil, diminishing government wealth, scarce natural resources. But the skills they are developing also offer some measure of hope. The walkable, beautiful, energy-efficient, land and resource-conserving, culture-enhancing places they are poised to design and build offer so many of the solutions.

There’s never been a time in my life, which now spans 51 years, when the conversation in communities is so distanced from what state lawmakers choose to talk about. And the gulf only gets wider between the concerns knocking around state capitols and what Congress and the White House think is important. This isn’t a partisan problem. It’s a national disgrace.

Our state government here in Michigan, for example, is led by a two-term Democratic governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, who began her administration with a very solid and popular economic development program. It called for investing in the state’s cities, protecting natural resources, securing open spaces, fixing roads instead of building new ones, promoting public transit, improving public education, and strengthening the state’s terrific public universities. Ms. Granholm also talked about leveraging public and private funds to encourage entrepreneurism and recruit new knowledge-based companies. The idea was to overcome the state’s hierarchical economic principles, forged in the factory floor/front office clashes of the 20th century’s auto culture, and produce clean, green, prosperous cities and inner ring suburbs that could attract the highly educated young people who rule the 21st century economy.

The three most prosperous regions in Michigan — Ann Arbor, Traverse City, and Grand Rapids — actually thought highly of Ms. Granholm’s new strategy, embraced its basic principles, and have emerged late in the 21st century’s first decade as among the best places to live and do business in the country. Lesson: it worked.

Ms. Granholm, meanwhile, was buffeted by her conservative opponents, a state economy that faltered, the nation’s largest fiscal deficit, and abandoned the strategy almost entirely. The new core of her economic plan is expressed by a scary sounding slogan to “go anywhere and do anything” to generate new jobs.

This tendency of political leaders to govern as though they were at a buffet, picking and choosing almost indiscriminately from a myriad of interesting dishes, is emblematic of our drift as a nation. Great organizations develop core strategies and stick to them over time. Those that are most successful anticipate and adjust to new market signals, incorporate new ideas, and update their vision and goals in a careful and logical process. The same goes for successful businesses and productive lives. The idea is to write a strong narrative for yourself, your company, your state or nation that makes sense. Having a strong story, effectively and courageously executed over time, generally gets people close to what they’re after. Sharp changes in goals without consideration and anticipation is a story that has departed its narrative track and generally leads to failure in business and disappointment in governing.

I’ve had the chance to apply these lessons to the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the Republican who was born in Detroit 60 years ago, raised in a political family, and governed for one term in Massachusetts. What’s interesting is that Mr. Romney’s first gubernatorial year, 2003, was distinguished by several acts which might otherwise be called progressive. Two are of particular note. Mr. Romney hired Doug Foy, the head of the Conservation Law Foundation and arguably New England’s most important environmentalist, to head a new Office For Commonwealth Development. And second, Mr. Romney charged Mr. Foy with developing and enacting a new economic development strategy for Massachusetts based on Smart Growth principles very similar to those that Governor Granholm talked about at the start of her administration the same year in Michigan.

Though critics and supporters argue about the success of Mr. Romney’s initiative, one of its important achievements was embedding the idea that where state government decides to spend money for transportation, water, housing, offices, education, and the environment has a lot to do with where people choose to live, and where businesses choose to locate.

The Environmental League of Massachusetts counts among the achievements in the last year that it made in collaboration with the state a $30 million investment in a state brownfield redevelopment fund, a major help for developers seeking to build on land in the Commonwealth’s older industrial cities and core suburbs. The state agreed to consider carefully the consequences to communities and land use for extending new water lines. The state also raised its Historic RehabilitationTax Credit to $50 million annually from $10 million, helping developers build in existing neighborhoods rather than promote sprawl.

These and a host of other Smart Growth policies and investments helped to stabilize the state’s economy and contributed to the growing number of highly educated young people who’ve settled in Boston and Cambridge, both of which are experiencing moderate population growth, according to the Boston-based Metropolitan Area Planning Council. It’s a strong record of sound governance that produced real results. You’d think a former governor running for president might want to take note of what he’d done.

But Mr. Romney doesn’t mention a word of it in his campaigns, on his Web site, in his speeches. His campaign is a dullard’s banquet of the same old — lower taxes, oppose abortion, support the surge, defend the family. His energy policy is about more nukes, liquifying coal as a fuel, and drilling for oil in Alaska. I travel in moderate liberal and conservative circles. There isn’t anybody I know who thinks that this governing formula will make America better.

The Canadian province of Ontario, which lies across Lake Huron from Michigan, and is home to about the same number of people (10.3 million there, 10 million here), has supported one of the planet’s active conversations on the ties between a strong economy and a clean environment. Much of the dialogue centers of global climate change and the province’s coal-fired power plants, one of which, the Nanticoke plant on Lake Erie, is among the largest on the continent and each year pours thousands of tons of sulfur, mercury, nitrogen, and oxides on New York and New England.  

Four years ago, when he was running on the Liberal Party ticket for provincial Premier, Dalton McGuinty promised to shutter Ontario’s five coal-powered generating stations by 2007 in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels and comply with the Kyoto protocols. Premier McGuinty suggested replacing the power — coal burning plants accounted for 24 percent of the province’s electricity production – with a combination of hydro, wind and other renewables, and generating new commerce and jobs. Roughly 45 percent of the province’s electricity is produced from nuclear energy generated by 10 reactors housed at three enormous plants, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. 

Though Premier McGuinty succeeded in 2005 in closing the Lakeview coal-fired plant in Mississauga – and demolishing it with explosives on June 28, 2007 — he missed the 2007 deadline for the other four.  Last month, as another electrion approached, he announced in Toronto that wouldn’t happen again. His government just approved a regulation that requires all of the province’s coal-powered generating stations to close by 2014.  ”There is only one place in the world that is phasing out coal-fired generation and we’re doing that right here in Ontario,” he said.

It’s important to note that as coal is phased out as a fuel source in Ontario, the province’s economy is surging because of a new green, clean, land-conserving, transit-focused economic strategy. The provincial government announced last month a $17.5 billion program to expand Toronto’s commuter and light rail rapid transit system by nearly 600 miles. The provincial unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been in more than 30 years. More than 1 million acres of open space are being conserved and set aside in the Toronto suburbs to slow sprawl and improve the quality of life.

Now let’s turn to Michigan, which is representative of the economic conditions in all of the Great Lakes states and is slipping to the back of the American economic pack according to most economic and quality of life measures. Let’s talk just about coal-fired generating stations. Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin have the highest concentration of coal-fired power plants in the nation and produce one-fifth of the carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Department of Energy. These states also have among them the highest rates of unemployment, lowest rates of job growth, highest rates of outward migration by young people, and Michigan has the largest state budget deficit in the nation.

Is there a relationship between a region’s decline and the fact that it generates most of its power from a dirty 19th century boiler technology and an 18th century fuel source?  It’s not just the practice of making power from coal, it’s the moribund thinking. Michigan spends $18 billion on energy every year, most of it importing fuel — coal, oil, natural gas, uranium — from outside the state.

Shane Lopez, an energy researcher and senior at the University of Michigan who’s working with us this summer at the Michigan Land Use Institue, prepared a grounding memorandum that found the state’s 15 coal-powered plants larger than 100 megawatts, and five that produce under 100 megawatts, provide 65 percent of Michigan’s energy. According to a 2006 national energy efficiency scorecard, Michigan ranks 33rd among states. Vermont, Connecticut, and California were national leaders, and not surprisingly their economies are much stronger. Shane also found compelling documentation, including a 2001 study by the Regional Economics Application Laboratory at  the University of Illinois, that a concerted state project to boost energy efficiency and renewable energy would produce 38,000 new jobs in Michigan and increase the gross state product by $3.4 billion annually by 2020.

Michigan, though, is having none of this. At the moment state officials are poised to begin reviewing applications to build two and perhaps three new coal-generating power plants — Rogers City on Lake Huron, and Midland are sites that have been publicly announced. Governor Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, has said little to date about the projects though her aides have privately said the governor is committed to “going anywhere and doing anything”  to generate new jobs. Governor Granholm proposed the 21st Century Energy Plan for Michigan in January.  It recommends spending $68 million a year for energy efficiency improvements. The administration and the Legislature blame the state budget deficit for preventing them from investing in the program.

The 21st Century Energy Plan also calls for generating Michigan’s electricity from coal. Late last month, the state Department of Environmental Quality issued a statement that said it would require new plants to meet tougher emissions and operating standards. 

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 into a full-fledged green economic development strategy that not only helped Chicago become, arguably, the most beautiful city in America but also among its fastest growing and most prosperous. Lots of great Chicago organizations were involved included the Metropolitan Planning Council and its A list dynamic leader, Mary Sue Barrett (see pix).

Now comes the state General Assembly and state Senate, which last month approved The Green Neighborhood Grant Act, an experimental economic incentive to encourage developers to build healthy, energy efficient, environmentally sustainable, walkable, beautifully designed new neighborhoods. In becoming the first state to approve a LEED-ND incentive package Illinois had some very big 21st century ideas in mind, according to Mandy Burrell, the communications associate at the Metropolitan Planning Council.

Ms. Burrell told me that the Legislature is seeking next year to provide three builders of sustainable LEED-ND developments grants of up to 1.5 percent of their total cost. Of the three projects that qualify for the grants not more than one can come from Chicago. Legislators expect to encourage the construction of 300 new households in Illinois, said Ms. Burrell, and more than $944,400 could be redirected annually into the state’s economy because of the money that home owners will save in energy and vehicle expenses alone because of where they live. 

Other interesting forecasts:

• A family living in a LEED-ND certified neighborhood stands to cut annual costs by $3,148, due to savings from their well-designed, energy-efficient homes, the easier access they have to transit, jobs, schools, and recreation - meaning they won’t spend nearly as much money on cars. 
• LEED certified developers also earn more for their homes, and buyers gain higher resale premiums, according to a number of studies and realty assessments.

Jennifer Henry, who manages the LEED-ND project for the U.S. Green Building Council, said she knows of no state other than Illinois that has adopted  publicly financed incentives for LEED-ND. And while the pilot project is small, the consequences can be huge.

You may recall that the LEED idea itself, promoting better design through environmental sensitivity and energy efficiency started small. But in certifiying standards for green design LEED had the effect of creating a market that never existed previously. The LEED idea is now written into zoning standards and building codes. Cities, like Chicago, compete to be the place that has the most LEED-certified buildings. Neighborhoods that promote walking rather than riding, energy efficiency rather than profligacy, healthy living rather than conventional toxic design just make sense in a world of higher expenses and scarcer resources, space, energy, and time. And Illinois, right here in the economically scarred upper Midwest, was the first to get there.  Nice work Illinois.