Breaking “forty years of bad habits”

Coherent, walkable communities

Jon Boyd, Oct 18, 10.

“After ‘40 years of bad habits,’ the impetus for regional planning has never been more compelling, keynote speaker Peter Calthorpe told the assembly of 400 people Friday at the 10th annual Southwestern Pennsylvania Smart Growth Conference,” writes Diana Nelson Jones of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

“It takes a regional framework to link transportation to jobs to housing to infrastructure,” said Mr. Calthorpe, a principal at Calthorpe & Associates in San Francisco. “America can’t afford the cul de sac version of the American dream anymore. No region can afford to keep sprawling.”

“The foundation for solving our environmental and economic problems is to build coherent, walkable communities,” he said.

The housing needs of the lowest earners is a serious challenge to sustainable communities. A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia indicates that rental housing conditions have worsened while demand for them has grown, a situation “exacerbated by the mortgage foreclosure crisis,” the report states.

Mr. Calthorpe said the housing crash would change what has been “business as usual.” It precipitated a movement of private investment back into the urban framework, he said, but the public sector is lagging.

“Most major retail is now looking at urban areas,” he said. Pulte Homes, previously known for “subdivision after subdivision, is doing urban in-fill.”

“The private side is ready,” he said. “But existing zoning codes are outdated, favoring low density, and there is a lack of priority for infrastructure investment.”

Global climate change also drew concern, according to the article:

John Hanger, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said energy use, the environment and the economy were all warnings of a crisis. Americans are spending hundreds of billions on imported oil and adding two parts per million to the carbon dioxide in the air every year, he said.

Americans are at 393 parts per million now. “When we reach 450 parts per million, the heat trapped will pose a great danger.”

In 2008, when the price of oil reached $147 a barrel, he said, U.S. consumers paid $700 billion for oil. “It broke us,” he said. “$350 billion is stretching it.”

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