smart growth

Because affordable housing doesn’t yield acceptable profits to real estate investors, the only way a substantial amount of it is going to get built is if it’s publicly funded.

As I embarked on my journey the other day to a planning conference, I carried a dog-eared copy of James Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere in my bag. This book […]

Smart growth principles can’t be imposed from the outside.

New end-of-year data confirm what some of us have been reporting for a long time: central cities in the U.S. are no longer in decline. This is great news for […]

A major challenge that has come with sprawl over the last half-century has been that growing up, maturing, and growing older has required, more often than not, moving to a […]

Here are 11 key principles for measuring how well schools and school policies fit in with their communities.

Smart Growth Schools expert Nathan Norris lists 11 key principles for measuring how well schools and school policies fit in with their communities. I really like them: Restoration Preference: Will […]

I was struck by two hugely contrasting stories in Sunday’s Real Estate section of The Washington Post. If you want evidence that John Edwards’s “two Americas” campaign theme had substance […]

[Editor’s note: The links in this post to Barack Obama’s campaign position papers are no longer active. The Obama White House archives are here, and will have documents related to […]

Imagine a country of walkable neighborhoods, transportation choices, healthy homes, less time in traffic, and more disposable income, complemented by a beautiful landscape of conservation lands and working forests and farms. That is still within our reach with vision and leadership.

It’s an old joke, but in the development sense, the term “smart growth” is an oxymoron in many cases. There’s a reason we celebrate things like adaptive reuse, transit villages, […]

Smart growth and affordable housing advocates can work together.