Green Options

Artist Don Simon creates stark worlds that cut to the chase and make thoughtful commentary on human’s impact on animals and their habitat. Via Grist, you can see a flash movie of his work, complete with commentary by the artist.

I interview a green real estate agent about the real estate market, what’s it like to be your own boss in an unstructured setting, and how great the walkability index is.

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.

When the award-winning film The End of Suburbia was released in 2004, it was considered by some to be an amusing but exaggerated view of what Peak Oil will do to the suburban way of life. As gas prices approach $5/gallon, it doesn’t seem quite so shocking.

As a passionate enemy of suburban sprawl, I listened intently to an interview this morning on NPR with Brookings Institution demographer William Frey in which he notes that housing prices are falling faster in the areas outside cities. Is this a permanent correction that is making “exurbs” less desirable overall? And how are gas prices influencing this loss of home value? Mr. Frey was cautious in his answer, saying “the jury is still out” and that Americans have a history of moving outward from cities in order to buy more housing for less, seeing long commutes as an acceptable trade off.

However, it doesn’t take a genius to see that, when a commute costs more than one is saving on housing, while sucking up hours of one’s valuable time, (and as the saying goes, “They aren’t making more of that”) why would one buy a home in the far suburbs? Why, indeed?

Sperling’s Best Places did a survey two years ago when gas prices were at $2.90 a gallon. The following were the most expensive cities in which to commute and listed the average annual commuting cost:

City Annual Commuting Cost (2006)

1. Atlanta $5,772
2. Birmingham, Ala. $5,464
3. Orlando, Fla. $5,404
4. Jacksonville, Fla. $5,360
5. Pensacola, Fla. $5,173

So, if gas prices reach $6.00, Atlanta’s commuting cost would be over $10,000 per year. Yikes.

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.

Speakers at a water conference in San Francisco today discussed the relationship between development and water supplies. Or, more to the point, the lack of water and continued urban sprawl in much of California and other western states.

The talk given by Roger Moore and David Boyer entitled, “The Water Supply and Land Use Interface: Lessons from a Decade of Litigation under the UWMPA, CEQA, and SB 610/221″ was part of the 2008 California Water Law & Policy Conference organized by Argent Communications Group.

Moore and Boyer, both environmental lawyers, shared their perspectives on California’s Urban Water Management Planning Act, the California Environmental Quality Act, and Senate Bills 610 and 221–often called the “show me the water” laws.