The folks at the Drum Major Institute hosted Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and NYC Council prez Christine Quinn for a discussion on how a city can “go green.” Very interesting conversation. Here’s some video and a liveblog on DMIBlog:
The Obama transition team is already being pretty aggressive in its outreach with the ground-breaking Change.gov web site. But outside groups are organizing to pass on their best ideas, too.
One of the cooler versions of this is www.ObamaUrbanPolicy.org, which enables users to suggest policies for the soon-to-be-open White House Office for Urban Policy. But even cooler than that, it allows folks to vote on which ideas they like the best — giving more prominence to and putting more strength behind the ideas with the most backing.
I first heard about this from David Goldberg, the always-ahead-of-the-curve communications director at Smart Growth America and the leading communications voice at Transportation for America. There’s already some great ideas churning around there. here are the top three, as of Thursday just after noon.
1. Invest in a world-class rail network
Build a world-class rail system between cities and within them to transport people and goods more efficiently.
2 comments | by frontseat | created about 21 hours ago2. Change zoning laws to promote walkable development
Change zoning and land-use regulations to promote mixed-use walkable developments.
5 comments | by frontseat | created about 21 hours ago3. End subsidies for car-dependent development
Walkable developments currently subsidize car-dependent developments. End the subsidies for car-dependent development by requiring developers to pay the true cost of utilities and transportation in sprawling developments.
1 comment | by frontseat | created about 21 hours ago
Like these? Vote for them. Don’t like them? Suggest your own.
But whatever you do, check out the site. Submit your ideas and support other people’s. Hopefully, they’ll make it all the way to the White House.
A piece in the July issue of The Atlantic is stirring up quite a controversy. In “American Murder Mystery,” journalist Hanna Rosin tries to find the root cause behind the crime spikes in many of the nation’s mid-sized cities.
Her controversial culprit: the demolition of public housing and the spread of those using Section 8 vouchers out into other neighborhoods.
The article focuses largely on the surge of violence in Memphis, Tenn., and the findings of two married University of Memphis researchers — Richard Janikowski, a criminologist who had been tracking emerging crime patterns in the city, and his wife, Phyllis Betts, a housing expert who had been evaluating where residents went after the city demolished its public-housing projects.
Over dinner conversations, the couple realized the geography of their work was overlapping. They wondered if it was more than a coincidence.
About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals….On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.
Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.
The piece generated a fascinating back and forth on NPR’s new morning show The Takeaway today. The show’s host interviewed both Hanna Rosin and Xavier de Souza Briggs, an MIT professor of sociology and urban planning, to rebut Ms. Rosin. It’s definitely worth a listen.
Also, you can watch researcher Phyllis Betts talk about her findings in Memphis:
