Some of nation's most talented writers explain the Smart Growth movement's significance, defend it from critics, and report on new and promising trends. Elm Street commentary has been published in more than 60 major newspapers nationwide, more than 40 Web sites, and in dozens of magazines and newsletters.
Sunday, October 08, 2006 Don’t Try This at Home
It all started when I got a summer job in the suburbs. I thought biking to work would be great exercise, but it was awful. Semi-trucks. Highways. Dead-ends. No wonder everyone else was driving—and missing out on a chance to save money, exercise, and help the environment. Half of America’s population is stuck behind the wheel, because biking to work, school, and shopping just isn’t safe in most suburbs.
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Sunday, August 06, 2006 True Adventure, Happy Ending
Your car’s engine is lurching. You’re three hours from home. It’s after closing time, and you have no idea how to find a trustworthy mechanic or anyone else in this unfamiliar town along this busy highway who might help a stranger.
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Monday, April 17, 2006 The Boardman's Eagles: Evidence of the End of Carelessness?
On this Earth Day, we should be immensely encouraged by the fact that the values, principles, and citizen involvement that protected the Boardman River valley from unwise development are securing wild and human habitats in many other places across northwest Michigan. The era of exploitation is gradually being replaced by a powerful new ethic driven by a fresh set of economic and environmental priorities.
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Saturday, March 18, 2006 Trapped in the 20th Century
Except for a brief period when auto sales soared and the state’s manufacturing sector employed 908,000 people, Michigan has been sinking since the late 1970s. This is happening because of Michigan’s wasteful patterns of spread out development, reckless neglect of cities, foolish disregard of the new, 21st century economy, and political gamesmanship. Each offers a vivid warning about the futility of defending the obsolete cars-fuel-highways-parking lot-drive-through economic development strategy.
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Friday, February 17, 2006 Out of the Car and Into Shape
Me. I like to walk. Yeah…it’s all my mother’s fault. When my family moved from the Deep South to the Upper Midwest almost 20 years ago, my mother shocked our Carolina relatives by taking the baby ice skating and making my sister and I walk to school in all weather. Unless the wind chill dipped below zero, we walked a mile to Randall, a handsome red brick elementary school built in the early 1900s. My grandmothers worried that we would get frostbite or hypothermia. Instead, we got the first glimpse of snowdrops, purple crocuses, and little blue scillas each year.
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Saturday, January 21, 2006 Could Smart Growth Tip the Next Presidential Election?
Virginia’s new governor is stirring the state, and perhaps the nation, to rein in sprawl. Governor Kaine’s Smart Growth platform garnered support from the fast-growing, conservative counties that decide elections, and political strategists say these issues may affect presidential elections as early as 2008. Already, Democratic and Republican candidates from Michigan to Massachusetts are winning elections by promising transit instead of traffic, scenery instead of sprawl, downtown businesses instead of drive throughs.
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Friday, December 30, 2005 Car Trouble?
In most cultures around the world cars offer a potent symbol of privilege and progress. People everywhere are enraptured by the idea of speedy personal mobility that automobiles seem to offer. But the experiences of London, Madrid, Prague, and Rome also illustrate that residents and city leaders are gradually coming to recognize that automobiles can actually stand in the way of greater mobility and a better life.
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Tuesday, November 01, 2005 In New Orleans’ Mud, A Ward Determined Not To Slip Away
One doesn’t have to talk to too many residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, which was wrecked by Katrina and Rita, to discover that this historic, mostly African-American New Orleans enclave is a remarkable human community. Like the threads of a sweater that keep the whole from unraveling, the Lower Ninth Ward was woven together by a network rich in family history, social connections, and proximity to relatives and friends. Yet in spite of the allegiance residents have for the Lower Ninth, businesses and city leaders have targeted the community for major bulldozing, asserting that its location at the lowest part of the Mississippi River flood plain puts it inevitably in harm’s way. The idea is fiercely resisted.
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Sunday, September 25, 2005 Ground Zero Should Celebrate Life, Not Memorialize Fear
If any city should know how to build to meet the needs of people, respond to an ever changing and complex economy, and inspire the world about what is possible, New York should. Every urban lesson about how to construct a durable, efficient, and functioning modern civilization is here, in plain view. The prescription for future development at Ground Zero should draw on the proven lessons of what has evolved over time in the lower Manhattan neighborhoods that border the site.
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Tuesday, September 20, 2005 Smart Growth and National Security
For the second time in four years a national calamity is forcing the country to understand that the very resources that made the 20th century’s economy and suburban way of life possible -- cheap land, cheap fuel, good working wages, and government know-how – have vanished in the 21st. Yet our zeal to cling to a petroleum-intensive, land-consuming, resource-wasting lifestyle is clouding our vision. We have not yet developed the capacity to recognize and respond to 21st-century global environmental, economic, and political trends that imperil us. Katrina’s arc of destruction across an area as large as Italy is the most recent case in point. In the wake of the storm, Smart Growth promises a safer, more prosperous future.
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Some of nation's most talented writers explain the Smart Growth movement's significance, defend it from critics, and report on new and promising trends. Elm Street commentary has been published in more than 60 major newspapers nationwide, more than 40 Web sites, and in dozens of magazines and newsletters.
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