 Statewide and National 
News & Events
How the evolving housing market will help sustainable communities NRDC Switchboard -April 4th, 2012 By Kaid Benfield I was privileged to be invited to participate along with some very smart urban thinkers in a recent program on the resilience of cities. The program was sponsored by the New America Foundation, and I was on the first panel. The subject of the Great Recession came up, and I volunteered that I thought the persistent economic slump had hurt both good and bad development. Link to blog Calif. high-speed rail's pared-down plan touted San Francisco Chronicle - April 3rd, 2012 The authority overseeing planning for California's high-speed rail project has released a fresh proposal with a new price tag and a scaled-back design. The plan released Monday after a news conference in Fresno merges the bullet train with existing commuter rail lines in the Bay Area and Los Angeles basin. Link to article Of soccer moms and sinister U.N. plots Grist - April 3rd, 2012 By Katharine Wroth It all started innocently enough. I saw a notice in my local paper that my small town would be holding a strategic planning meeting, part of an effort to resuscitate it from the post-industrial malaise that has left so many New England towns in the economic dumps. Link to article Selling pollution credits could raise funds for high-speed trains The Sacramento Bee - March 31st, 2012 By Tim Sheehan A new financing strategy is a centerpiece of a revised business plan that state leaders will unveil Monday in Fresno for the proposed high-speed train system. Rather than relying on the uncertainty of future federal transportation funds, money from the auction of air-pollution credits -- the state's "cap-and-trade" program -- can provide a "backstop" source of money that the California High-Speed Rail Authority could tap if needed, authority chairman Dan Richard said in a conference call with reporters today. Link to article Congress Agrees to Kick the Can for 90 More Days Streetsblog Capitol Hill - March 30th, 2012 By Ben Goldman Yesterday, before taking off for a two-week recess, Congress passed a three-month extension of SAFETEA-LU, the ninth since it first expired on September 30, 2009. It now only needs the president's signature sometime before midnight on Saturday to become law. That means that on June 26, 2012, current transportation policy will have been operating under temporary extensions for 1,000 days. Four days later, it will be due to expire yet again. Link to blog Adhering To a Status Quo City-Development Ideology Is So 'Last Century' California Progress Report - March 30th, 2012 By Alan Kandel Over the past dozen or so years, I've written on a wide range of topics covering everything from travel, transportation, climate, community and history, to agriculture and the environment. Population and population growth are often topics of discussion in terms of how these relate to community and the environment, for example. Keeping on point, California and the United States have been undergoing unprecedented and seemingly inexorable growth. Link to article Brown administration, bullet train board seek to ease environmental reviews of the project Los Angeles Times - March 29th, 2012 By Ralph Vartabedian and Dan Weikel California's bullet train authority and representatives of the Brown administration are exploring ways to relax environmental review procedures on the massive project to help meet a tight construction schedule, The Times has learned. Major environmental groups confirm they have been in discussions with state officials about some type of relief from possible environmental challenges to the project, which is falling behind schedule and risks losing federal funding if it must conduct new reviews of construction and operational effects. Link to article Parsing California's Density Bombshell in 2010 Census Data California Planning and Development Report - March 29th, 2012 By Josh Stephens You know when you're driving east on Interstate 10, past downtown Los Angeles, and all you can see ahead of you is the jumbled horizon of rooftops, trees, and overpasses? That is, according to the latest Census figures, the true face of density. Don't let any skyscraper-dwelling, subway riding Chicagoan, New Yorker, or Philadelphian say anything different. Today the US Census released a slew of city-related data from the 2010 Census, and it includes some figures about California that will be startling to anyone who hasn't been paying attention for the past few decades. Link to article | 
No comments:
Post a Comment