Green Options

Sprawl is a constant issue at the outside periphery of every city in the country. Although matters have abated temporarily in the midst of the housing and mortgage crunch, new construction continues to decimate the countryside at further distances away from the city centers. However, the state of California is weighing a measure in the state legislature that might help curtail the growth of exurban sprawl developments.

The extension of suburbs further and further out from the core of businesses and services not only consumes acres of land, with its attendant loss of woods, fields, wetlands, farmland, and animal habitat, but it also requires miles of pavement, and the attendant infrastructure (sewers, phone and power lines, etc.) to support the new development. Residents of these displaced communities are forced to rely on cars for more and more of their access to various services and amenities, and very often travel greater distances to work as well as other destinations. This increases both the consumption of fuel resources and the pollution caused from the extra travel.

While gas prices have dropped from their historic highs of earlier this summer, many believe they’re never likely to return to the low levels that made the U.S. such a motor-happy nation for decades. Because of that, social observers like James Howard Kunstler and others see a bleak future for car-dependent suburbia, with the sprawl degrading into vast slums or being abandoned altogether.

But does that have to be the case? Suburbs might not have been developed with New Urbanism in mind, but maybe they could be reinvented. Perhaps they could become the 21st Century version of the 18th Century farm community, with lots of individual homesteads dotted across a wide swath of agricultural land.

Sometimes, some of the greenest solutions come from the simplest of ideas.  Take the cottage community.  What could be simpler than the idea of building houses that are radically smaller in square footage than the national average?  Not everyone wants all that extra space, and many would rather have a smaller home built well than a cheaply made box full of emptiness.

Cottage communities are [...]

(This is another installment in this week’s “Walk This Way” series on walkable neighborhoods in the U.S.)

If you missed the news last week, Google Maps has added a new feature letting users request walking directions rather than car or public transit directions for trips of less than 10 kilometers (a little over six miles).

The appeal of the new feature is that it gives you directions that don’t make you go out of your way because of one-way streets or paths that aren’t drivable. While a set of car directions might have to follow a circuitous path to get you from Point A to Point B, a set of walking directions lets you take advantage of routes that cars can’t travel but people can.

Every summer when I go to visit my parents at their home on the Gulf Coast just off of Highway 30-A in the “Panhandle” of Florida, I see tons and tons of weddings. It really shouldn’t be surprising that so many people choose this gorgeous (and very eco-savvy) region of the country as the place to get married.

There are a string of eco-friendly New Urbanist developments along Highway 30-A, a long and well-kept secret until stars, like Sheryl Crow, Britney Spears and most recently, Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo began vacationing in the region. Seaside is one of the first and perhaps best examples - it is such a beautiful and surreal community that it actually serves as the backdrop for Jim Carrey’s movie, the Truman Show…yes. It is a real town, not a movie set.

(This is another installment in this week’s “Walk This Way” series on walkable neighborhoods in the U.S.)

Here’s a shocker (not really): living in a walkable neighborhood reduces your chances of being overweight.

It should seem obvious, but a new study from the University of Utah has tracked the connection between walkable neighborhoods and weight statistically. The researchers found that the average guy living in a walkable neighborhood weighed 10 pounds less than his more car-dependent counterpart, while the average woman weighed six pounds less.

By now, we all know it’s cheaper — and more environmentally friendly — to walk or bike to places than to drive a car or SUV. But is the low-cost, low-impact way always feasible in the motor-happy, open-freeway-obsessed U.S. of A.? That’s what we’ll be exploring this week at EcoLocalizer in a feature we’re calling “Walk This Way.”

The question of whether to walk, bike or take public transportation is a no-brainer if you live in a city like New York, where driving can often be more of a pain than a pleasure. But what about the rest of the country? Not every community is large enough or dense enough to offer the auto alternatives the Big Apple does. And what about people who live in rural areas where everything is a half-hour’s drive away or more? Can we refashion our country’s way of getting around to be more European? Or are those of us in unwalkable communities doomed to either move elsewhere or live like so many billions do in the rest of the world, consigned to life in a radius of space measured in only a few miles?

In my post of May 6th, “Traditional Neighborhood Development and LEED Go Hand in Hand,” I made the point that smart growth and new urbanism are helping give a ‘boost’ to green building practices. While conducting research for that article, however, I did find several assertions to the contrary.  So, for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, I will here take a look at some of those assertions.

In the 1980’s, New Urbanism catapulted into the national consciousness. Today, a site called The Town Paper lists hundreds of Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) Neighborhoods from all over the world. And this surge of interest in mixed use planning may be helping pull environmental building practices into the spotlight.

Climate change and its impact on Florida will take the stage, front and center, when the Florida chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) holds its 2008 statewide meeting later this month.

“As greater awareness of global climate change emerges, each [...]