It was late afternoon at Opower headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, but the energy start-up’s hive mind was thrumming steadily. “Let’s take a walk,” said Marc Laitin, senior director of consumer marketing. “I think best when I’m moving.” Laitin is a typical Opower manager — Harvard educated, safely under 40, animated like a street theater puppet, and dressed like he was going to a Decemberists’ concert. He set off down the hall on a talking jag, punctuating his ideas with wild arms. He wanted to make an idea about turning down the heat in winter go viral. People ... Read More
Rescuing the Rural Edge — It Takes a Village
September 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Where suburbia merges into countryside typically looks peaceful enough, with lawns giving way to forests and fields. But in most places, this is a zone of conflict and dysfunction. The steady loss of farmland and natural habitat to sprawl-pattern development endangers food supplies and other resources, as well as the health, wealth and survival prospects of individuals and even whole communities. Take California's fifth-largest city, Fresno, located in one of the most productive areas on Earth, the San Joaquin Valley. Agriculture is the principal industry in Fresno County — generating ... Read More
Suburban Poverty, Served Chicago Style
April 9, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
"The suburban dream often fades for poor families because old support systems are severed, and access to programs and services — day care, after-school programs, job training, drug treatment and counseling — are greatly hampered by shear distance." Those are the thoughts of Ed Goetz, a housing policy specialist at the University of Minnesota interviewed for David Villano's recent Miller-McCune.com piece, "The Slumming of Suburbia." A new report conducted for The Chicago Community Trust backs up the gist of that depressing scenario, at least in America's Second City and its ... Read More
The Slumming of Suburbia
February 14, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
The financial meltdown has produced a vast patchwork of foreclosed and abandoned single-family homes across America, accelerating the decades-long migration of our nation's poor from cities to the suburban fringe. In 2005, as rising property values reduced affordable-housing stock in inner-city neighborhoods, suburban poverty, in raw numbers, topped urban poverty for the first time. The trend will continue. By 2025, predicts planning expert Arthur C. Nelson, America will face a market surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (a sixth of an acre or more), attracting millions of low-income ... Read More
Suburbs in Decline
February 27, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Can the suburbs be saved? It's a question few politicians expected they would need to answer — until just more than a decade ago, when socioeconomic data began to show population and income declining in the suburbs surrounding major American cities. Many of these "first suburbs," built during and after World War II, now suffer from old age and neglect, with crumbling infrastructure, outdated housing and poverty on the upswing. They face city-sized challenges without the tax base, political clout or other resources to easily combat them. As Sen. Hillary Clinton, a proponent of federal aid ... Read More
Sprawl Increasing After All
January 24, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Sprawl, Elena Irwin freely admits, is a “buzzword” — a vague description of a troubling phenomenon. “It gets people’s attention, but it really doesn’t mean much,” she noted. “You can define it in a lot of different ways.” While Irwin is open to different definitions, the associate professor of environmental economics at Ohio State University has no doubt that Americans are living further from city centers, and further from one another, than ever before. Her previous studies suggest as much; so does common sense. So she was shocked by a 2006 study that found residential ... Read More
