This great handbook provides some quantitative research on difference approaches to dealing with the significant rise in gas prices our affliction of asking the government to come to the rescue…

Appropriate Response To Rising Fuel Prices
This paper evaluates public policy options for responding to rising fuel prices. Price-minimization policies tend to harm consumers and the economy by encouraging transportation system inefficiency.

Oregon has been the first state to officially experiment with Smart Growth. - since then it has been a wild road of planning efforts, repeals, and now laws that put planning back in the limelight. Here is an article written by Dave Hunnicutt from the Oregonians in Action, the primary sponsors of Measure 37 which repealed the zoning laws initially in place to encourage smart growth urban development.

One step back on an irreversible path

One step back on an irreversible path

Page link

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

T he passage of Measure 49 marks another chapter in Oregon’s long struggle with land-use planning.

The dark side of last week’s vote is the impact it will have on the 7,500 families and Oregon businesses who filed Measure 37 claims. But despite the fact that Measure 49 is a bitter disappointment to many, its passage puts Oregon on an irreversible path toward greater protection of individual property rights.

Why? Because for the first time in Oregon’s 34-year-old experiment with statewide centralized land-use planning, its most zealous advocates have acknowledged that there is a need to balance the rights of the individual property owner with the desires of the planning community, and that Oregon’s system has done a poor job of balancing those competing interests.

In the past two months, these land-use advocates have spent nearly $5 million to pass a measure that explicitly recognizes that Oregon’s experimental land-use laws have created unfair hardships on many Oregon property owners.

They’ve sent mail pieces, run television ads and given speeches assuring us all that it’s only fair that these longtime property owners finally see a return on their lifetime investment that has been slowly and systematically stripped from them by one new land-use rule after another.

They’ve worked hard to pass a measure that claims to provide protection to Oregon property owners if state or local governments adopt new land-use regulations in the future.

What a topsy-turvy world.

Of course, there’s a simple reason why land-use planning advocates are finally acknowledging that the system needs to change. That reason is Measure 37.

As the Bend Bulletin wrote in its editorial in favor of Measure 49, “The Legislature wouldn’t have approved Measure 49 if voters hadn’t supported Measure 37 first. If lawmakers have demonstrated anything when it comes to land-use reform, it’s that it takes a bulldozer to move them an inch.”

No kidding.

Prior to Measure 37, every effort to change the Oregon land-use system to correct some of its most glaring inequities was met with opposition by the same urban legislators and groups who supported Measure 49.

But thanks to Measure 37, those inequities are no longer being ignored. Finally, there seems to be universal recognition that our laws must change. It took 34 years, but the time has arrived.

Thanks to Measure 37, the governor, Senate president and speaker of the House formed the “Big Look” task force to review Oregon’s land-use laws and recommend changes. The task force was well into its work in doing just that when its funding was mysteriously cut by the Legislature. Funding for that Big Look should be fully restored.

So now is not the time for gloom and doom. Today, despite the passage of Measure 49, Oregon property owners have far more property rights than they did a decade ago, thanks to Measure 56 (land-use notification), Measure 7 (compensation), Measure 37, and Measure 39 (protection from eminent domain). Now is the time to hold Measure 49’s proponents to their word.

Measure 37 was a giant leap forward. Measure 49 is a small step backward. That’s a win. If we keep fighting, better days are ahead.

Dave Hunnicutt is president of Oregonians in Action, sponsor of Measure 37.

The ULI does it again in this piece from their annual meeting held in the urban sprawling metropolis of Las Vegas…

http://thegroundfloor.typepad.com/the_ground_floor/2007/10/gen-y-and-housi.html

The first observations are interesting to note. I don’t know where they obtained these data and how valid they are, but I can relate to what these data indicate. The vast majority of my colleagues and friends desire similar such areas to find a home.

Some takeaways from this session:

What Gen Y members don’t want: big houses on big lots, isolated from everything.

What they do want:
housing that fulfills their need for instant access and convenience.

With the oldest members of Generation Y (those in their mid-20s)
starting to enter the housing market, the characteristics of this
demanding, strong-willed generation provide many clues to their
preferences in living arrangements.
For instance, they:

    Favor the quirky, unique and different.
    Seek diversity in all aspects of their lives.
    Prefer urban over suburban environments.
    Multi-task (One observation: “Most don’t wear watches because watches only do one thing.”

The second interesting observation is the change in demographics - changing households from couples, young males being replaced by single-women households.

One key signal of a housing shakeup resulting from Gen Y: changes in
household formation and more single Gen Y women entering the housing
market. In the years ahead, look for the decades-long prevalence of
married couples with children to be increasingly replaced with
single-women households. With more women than men now graduating from
college, women in many markets will soon be making more than men,
placing women in a position of affluence and authority that will affect
housing decisions. Because they will likely delay marriage to pursue
careers, their housing choices will be far different than those made by
their baby boomer mothers. The likely favorite: close-in multifamily
rental or for-sale units in mixed-use communities that emphasize
communal space and social interaction. “This bodes well for urban
communities,” one panelist said.

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This post from the economist Greg Mankiw helps to describe a bit of the recent phenomenon of high oil/gas prices and the seeming resiliency of the US Economy (… at least stock market).

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/10/where-have-all-oil-shocks-gone.html

 Where have all the oil shocks gone?

Oil prices are near record highs, which raises a fascinating question. In recent years, the U.S. and world economies have typically shrugged off oil price increases. By contrast, oil price increases are a major part of the conventional story of the economic turmoil of the 1970s. Why the difference?

We economists do not have a complete answer, but we have some clues. One important clue is below (via Carpe Diem):

The economy is far more energy-efficient today than it was in the past, in part because economic activity is based more on services and less on manufacturing. As a result, energy prices matter less today.

In their research on the topic, Blanchard and Gali also give credit to more flexible labor markets, better monetary policy, and a bit of luck.

Another hypothesis: The macroeconomic effect of high energy prices may depend on whether the high prices are the result of reduced supply or increased demand. Perhaps in the 1970s high oil prices were largely the result of supply restrictions, whereas in recent years high oil prices are driven more by increased demand from a booming world economy.

One final conjecture: Maybe the recent increase in oil prices has been less sudden, making it easier for other prices to adjust. In particular, it may not have affected the skewness in the distribution of relative-price changes in the same way as previous oil shocks did.

We have no shortage of theories. The definitive study on the macroeconomic effect of oil prices is still waiting to be written.

Recent news from the Environmental Building News bringing new studies to light regarding the full emissions profiles of Green Buildings - with the focus on Transportation.

That’s right—for an average office building in the United States, calculations done by
Environmental Building News (EBN) show that commuting by office workers accounts for 30% more energy than the building itself uses. For an average
new office building built to code, transportation accounts for more than
twice as much energy use as building operation.

LEED buildings - while a great step, and with recent advances in viable buildings with minimal GHG footprints - transportation remains the biggest hurdle to develop sustainable, green buildings. The article describes eight key factors that contribute to the energy intensity of buildings… “D-factors,”
including density, distance to transit, diversity of uses, and design
of streetscapes.

Given recent documented improvements in building efficiency can be done economically and marketed

The answer: for newly built multifamily housing, virtually all of it.
At the annual ULI Shaw Forum (endowed by the late Charlie Shaw) held
last week, Solara,
an affordable housing development in San Diego with 56 units and a
2,100 square foot community center, was showcased; its operating carbon
footprint has been reduced by 95%.

We still need to be aware of the location of our new buildings….

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UNH Professor John Carroll teaches in the UNH Department of Natural Resources.

Link to the article appearing on the 24th of September, 2007.

He reported the New Hampshire Department of Transportation will be cutting its maintenance budget by 30 percent because it is too costly to maintain roads when oil is $81 a barrel.

A couple of towns in New Hampshire have decided to revert to de-paving, or returning to gravel or dirt roads, because paving is so expensive, he said. While there are many alternative energy sources available such as wind, geothermal and solar, Carroll said combined they would only produce roughly half the amount of energy that is currently fueled by oil.

For the United States to move beyond its complete dependency on oil, Americans will have to make big changes, he said. Carroll touts localization, direct marketing, supporting and buying from local farmers.

He also said halting suburbanization and focusing on the rail system will alleviate the reliance on cheap oil.

Carroll promotes public transportation and would like to see bus lines increase in New Hampshire that are partially subsided while they build ridership.

At the lecture he handed out a schedule for the Amtrak Downeaster, to encourage people to use the train rather than drive.

“Actions speak louder than words,” he said. “The way you bear witness is better than what you advocate.”

the ideas of some areas of infrastructure not being maintained to the level that we all may except raises some serious questions for sustainability of small rural towns in New England. As the new, service based economy has moved to the urban areas - many rural communities have been left to fund their infrastructure on their own. As this article highlights the decisions are becoming difficult - such as not-paving roads and deferring needed infrastructure work.

These decisions affect the economy of the area by limiting the ability for trucks (the dominent mode of freight in rural areas) to reach communities and raising the costs of goods in the community.

article from Env. News Network
Regulation key to greener buildings

Melinda Moulton interviewed David Sellers an architect in the Waitsfield area on her live TV show on Channel 17 in Burlington, vermont. You can check out all the shows here: http://www2.cctv.org/rss/index.php?cat=1.Live@5:25Shows

David Sellers -

what can we do to reduce sprawl and improve?

“Citizen’s Group (that can gather some identity) to lobby Montpelier to put a moratorium on some things such as the ‘Circ’, put in passenger rail, put pressure on new high-tech connections between Cities.”

David has an interesting view of sustainable living - be sure to check him out on his blog -

Check out his blog at http://sprawlfreevermont.blogspot.com/

This post will include a follow-up as more information becomes available. However, The Grist has published a great article today about the interesting effects of globalization on the US Fruit market - rather than exporting our subsidized corn and cotton out to developing counties - we are experiencing the reverse effect - Cheaper foreign goods changing our markets.

Once piece of this of direct interest and concern to me is the question: - How can we maintain a rural landscape that can either (1) support working farms to provide a source of local, sustainable, and reliable food; and (2) support a diversity of environmental resources important to our long-term survival as a species.

The Grist states the following:

What happens when farmers can no longer work their land profitably? They generally sell it to developers, and land under cultivation succumbs to low-density sprawl. Again, that’s already happening in California. In the state’s lush Central Valley, home to probably the nation’s most valuable territory for growing fruits and vegetables, developers bulldozed 100,000 acres of prime farmland in the 1990s alone, according to American Farmland Trust. If present trends continue, AFT warns, another million acres of farmland could vanish within a generation.

Now, I am very opposed to using subsidies to skew the market for US Fruit to a point of being able to compete with foreign fruit because the true cost of growing our US fruit just IS that much higher and should not a burden on the US taxpayer. However, with appropriate buy-local economic programs, readily available labor force, and land use regulations in place - we should be able to maintain our working landscape and prevent the sprawlification of our landscape.