Green Options

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When the award-winning film The End of Suburbia was released in 2004, it was considered 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.

Imagine you are Vancouver. Or Beijing. You have this obscure little event called the Olympics to host. There will be a short term high volume burst of people coming. Or you’re hosting a conference that regularly outstrips the available hotel capacity of the city you host it in, producing frustration, high costs, and long commutes for those having to stay out of town.

What do you do? Build more hotels? That’s one solution, but what about the rest of the year, when there is a lower, more typical demand, and you’re left with capacity far exceeding needs, and resources were used to build these hotels that could have been used elsewhere?

Abilmo, a French company, has a possible solution: They make foldable hotel rooms. Come again? Yes, they have been able to fabricate accommodations that can be set up, without a crane, as many as 25 erected in a day. And they’re not shabby, either.

Perhaps encouraged after their recent success in hosting the European Union and Latin American and Caribbean Summit, the office of Peru’s President, Alan Garcia Peréz, announced last week that Peru would bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Never mind that the application deadline was in September of last year.

Critics of the plan emerged quickly, and Peru’s prime minister was equally fast to label the critics as “the same ones that some time ago said Peru couldn’t host the EU-LAC summit and were pessimistic when it was announced.” Peru’s current infrastructure does raise numerous doubts about how successful the Olympics could be in Peru. Lima would no doubt host the lion’s share of events, while Cuzco, Trujillo, Arequipa, and others cities might play a part as well. Traffic problems, environmental and social issues, and financial difficulties could all make the Olympics a disastrous and harmful event for Peru. But, also, despite what the critics might say, the move to bid for the Olympics might have been a brilliant and ingenious action thought up by President Alan Garcia’s staff.

Over the past few years, Witold Rybczynski has penned some of the more fascinating pieces that I have read online. He writes about a range of urban planning, architectural, and landscape design topics with an acute sense of how these fields are intrinsically connected to social and environmental issues. Rybczynski publishes many of his pieces in Slate. They often come in the form of well-crafted “slide-show essays” that use photographs to expertly illustrate the themes and ideas that he chooses for discussion.

Several of my favorites have included his essays on “Central Park South: New York Selects a Design for Governor’s Island” and “The Spire of Dublin: A Modern Monument That Points Up What’s Wrong With the World Trade Center Memorial.” Unlike his other pieces, his latest slide-show essay, “If You Build It: Two Visions of the Ideal City Rise in the Persian Gulf,” was his first that left me disappointed.

You’ve heard all the arguments about why you should ride your bike: It reduces auto traffic, shrinks your carbon footprint, decreases your transportation costs, and gives you killer calves. But there’s one niggling problem: theft. It seems no matter how many locks, cables, and snakes you use, at one point or another, you’re likely to return to your bike, to find one lone orphaned tire, the rest long gone.

Whether or not this has been your experience, it’s a perception that many people hold, and it’s a factor in holding back bike riding from being more widely used mode of transport. What to do? Enter the Bike Tree. These devices address several issues at once, but let me start with the primary: it stores your bikes high up in the air, for all the world to see, and thieves to be foiled, looking like, yes, a tree made of bikes.

How does it work? Simply.

‘UniverCity‘ might sound like an imaginary place, a conceptual model confined to the framework of academia. It is, however, the name of a very real community located in Burnaby, British Columbia. UniverCity came into being through a 1995 agreement between Simon Fraser University and the Province of British Columbia, in which forested land owned by the university was exchanged for the right to build new housing near the University campus. The 820 acres transferred from the University to the City of Burnaby became part of the Burnaby Mountain Conservation Area.

UniverCity recently received the 2008 National Planning Excellence Award for Innovation in Green Community Planning from the American Planning Association (APA). Utilizing mixed-use planning principles, the finished project will consist of several neighborhoods, each with its own town square, as well as its own school, community and childcare center, and parks. Once completed, UniverCity is expected to house 10,000 people on 200 acres.

Portland has been recognized for decades as a leader in urban planning. Today its progressive philosophies are being applied to environmental policy-making. Tackling sustainability on an urban scale, the Portland Development Commission has conceived a model neighborhood known as the Lloyd Crossing Sustainable Urban Design Plan. A massive undertaking, the Plan sets goals and objectives that are intended to guide development over the next 45 years.

Bill McKibben's highly successful Step It Up campaign may have overshadowed the release of his latest book Deep Economy, which probably overshadowed the recent paperback re-release of one of McKibben's earlier books, 1995's Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. Luckily, this second edition of Hope (Milkweed Editions), largely in part because of a new afterword [...]