Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Sprawl

Smart Growth America: Sprawl Shaves Years Off Your Life

By Tanya Snyder | Apr 2, 2014 | No Comments

Want to live a long, healthy, prosperous life? Don’t live in sprawlsville. Atlanta, I’m looking at you. Nashville, you too. Southern California’s Inland Empire: ouch. Meanwhile, break out the bubbly if you live in Atlantic City, Urbana/Champaign, or Santa Cruz — which all rank close to giants like New York and San Francisco as some […]

HUD and U.S. DOT Embrace Housing + Transportation Metric for Affordability

By Tanya Snyder | Nov 12, 2013 | No Comments

A few years ago, the Center for Neighborhood Technology gave a wonderful gift to urbanists and planners: the Housing + Transportation Index. This simple calculation clarified and popularized a key concept: that transportation costs must be taken into account in any measurement of “affordability.” Without that, potential homebuyers and renters make the mistake of “saving” […]

Paul Krugman Links Sprawl to Persistent Social Inequality

By Tanya Snyder | Jul 29, 2013 | No Comments

Is sprawl holding back social mobility in America? Paul Krugman didn’t mince words yesterday in a follow-up to a post he wrote soon after the Detroit bankruptcy was announced. In that initial blog post, he compared Detroit to Pittsburgh and concluded that it wasn’t just the loss of manufacturing jobs that hurt Detroit — it was […]

How Sprawl Got Detroit Into This Mess

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 22, 2013 | No Comments

It wasn’t de-industrialization that bankrupted Detroit, wrote Paul Krugman in a New York Times column yesterday. If that was all there is to it, then how do you explain the fact that Pittsburgh, once so dependent on the steel industry, is now recovering? No, what brought Detroit to this low point, more than the loss […]

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Strong Towns’ Chuck Marohn: Why Suburban Growth Is a Ponzi Scheme

By Clarence Eckerson Jr. | Jul 18, 2013 | No Comments

Chuck Marohn cofounded the non-profit Strong Towns in 2009. Since then he has steadily built an audience for his message about the financial folly of car-centric planning and growth. The suburban development pattern that has prevailed since the end of World War II has resulted in what Marohn calls “the growth Ponzi scheme” — a system that […]

T4A: One in Nine American Bridges Structurally Deficient

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 20, 2013 | No Comments

There’s a new report out on the state of America’s bridges, and with it a new raft of disturbing statistics. Nearly one in nine, or 11 percent, are structurally deficient — meaning a bridge inspector has rated a major component of the structure to be in poor condition. The average age of a bridge in the […]

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