Recent Streetsblog SF posts about Sprawl

Third Houston Outerbelt Would Turn Prairies Into Texas Toast

By Angie Schmitt | Apr 28, 2011 | No Comments

There’s a place just outside Houston where the vinyl siding and attached garages thin out and recede into grasslands. In this place — one of the country’s few remaining tall-grass prairies — something amazing happens each fall. First hundreds, then thousands, then millions of birds arrive here at Katy Prairie, an international wintering grounds for […]

Bay Area Governments Begin Developing Regional Smart Growth Plan

By Aaron Bialick | Mar 16, 2011 | 2 Comments

Local governments in the Bay Area have begun a coordinated regional effort to shift toward more sustainable urban planning mandated by the state’s landmark anti-sprawl bill, SB 375, which set ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and called for better integration of land use and transportation planning. Last week, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission […]

A Metro Detroit Business Owner on the Talent-Repelling Effect of Sprawl

By Angie Schmitt | Mar 14, 2011 | No Comments

The owner of a patent law firm in recession-battered metro Detroit may have to leave Michigan, and it’s not because of the taxes, says Andrew Basile, Jr. His firm, which employs 40 people in the city of Troy, spends “more on copiers and toner than we do on state taxes.” The problem, Basile says, is […]

Report: Want to Ease Commuter Pain? Highways and Sprawl Won’t Help

By Noah Kazis | Sep 29, 2010 | No Comments

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow […]

In Historic Vote, CARB Adopts Targets Under Landmark Anti-Sprawl Bill

By Bryan Goebel | Sep 24, 2010 | 6 Comments

In a historic and unanimous vote yesterday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 2035, a move that will compel the state’s metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to better integrate land use and transportation planning. “These targets are ambitious, achievable and very good news for California […]

Sprawl Anemones

By Matthew Roth | Sep 24, 2010 | 11 Comments

Rarely would one describe sprawl as beautiful, but photographer Christoph Gielen managed to find some of the more incredible developments in the country and depict them in aerial photographs as a testament to the land use patterns he finds so distinctively and disturbingly American. Gielen, born in Germany and living in New York City since […]

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