One of the fastest growing lists in Washington these days may well be the Obama administration initiatives that are under fire or have had to be pulled back. The president banded together the EPA, DOT, DOE, and HUD; the House attempted to strip all funding associated with that coordination. The president vowed action on climate change and air pollution; the EPA postponed tougher boiler and incinerator emissions rules. The president wanted to pivot to a new green economy, to encourage innovation for a post-carbon world, like the Chinese are doing — and instead we have the debacle of Solyndra.

So why should another program that so many love to deride as a liberal, elitist, slightly European idea — establishing a true, high-speed inter-city rail network in the U.S. — be any different? The president started out with over $10 billion dedicated to this grand vision, and last month the Senate penciled in $100 million instead, which might be good for some bridge and track repair. Governors in Wisconsin and Florida famously said “no thanks” to funding for high-speed rail lines emanating from Chicago and Orlando-Tampa respectively.

We’re talking about shutting down government, cutting trillions in spending, worrying about the debt ceiling. So it’s hard to talk about investing in infrastructure — again, like how the Chinese are doing, with 4,000 miles of track including a brisk new line connecting Beijing and Shanghai, about the distance from New York to Chicago. High-speed rail has always been a hard sell in America, and never more so now.

The high-speed rail initiative does need a reset, but it shouldn’t be abandoned, say Petra Todorovich, Dan Schned, and Robert Lane, co-authors of High-Speed Rail: International Lessons for U.S. Policy Makers, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

 The first move, the authors say, is to rethink the idea of spreading high-speed rail all around the country, on the model of the interstate highway system — at least for now. Instead the focus should be on the two markets that have the best chance for success: California and the Northeast Corridor. These are classic distances that are too short to fly and too long to drive. Linking major cities with truly quick trips — Paris to Lyon is under two hours using the TGV — could help jump-start economic development as businesses take advantage of the swift movement of workers and deepen their reach into labor markets.

The two projects are nothing if not ambitious, requiring difficult alignment choices, and staggering price tags — $50 billion for California (approved by citizens in a ballot measure) and about $100 billion for a Northeast corridor replacement of the Acela, using new tracks in Connecticut and Massachusetts. They would create jobs — 450,000 through 2035 in California, according to that state’s HSR Authority, and 44,000 jobs annually over 25 years, plus 120,000 permanent jobs for the Northeast corridor, according to Amtrak.

The next step is to rethink the financing — something that is arguably needed for all federal transportation spending right now, as the reauthorization can gets kicked down the road once again — and management, particularly for the multi-state Northeast Corridor. Begin with consolidating ownership of the Northeast Corridor under a single infrastructure corporation, which can attract private financing, make use of an infrastructure bank, and expanded federal credit assistance programs, the report’s authors say. And while it is not politically palatable, a portion of the gas tax — or perhaps an upstream oil import tax — could be dedicated to more energy-efficient, environment-friendly rail.

Former Interior secretary and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, a member of the Lincoln Institute board, has proposed that a gasoline tax surcharge in the Northeast Corridor states could pay for high-speed rail in that region. This alternative has the advantage of explicitly linking the revenue sources to beneficiaries of the system.

The authors’ look at the international experience also made one thing clear: high-speed inter-city rail stations can be wonderful places of activity and economic development; those located in the city center, with zoning for transit-oriented development all around have the best track record of generating economic growth.

There must be connections to bus, subway, and commuter rail, to get passengers on that critical “last mile” to their destinations, if not walkable from the main station. All those steps can contribute to economic development and livability. South Station is adjacent to thousands of square feet of office space, hundreds of homes, and the emerging Innovation District at Fort Point. Imagine if the trip to New York for a business meeting took under two hours.

High-speed rail changes the way we think about distances and regions and how we live, in some fundamental ways. A couple can live in New York, while one partner commutes to New Haven and the other Philadelphia. The idea reinforces the notion of “megaregions,” the collections of major cities as in the Boston-to-Washington corridor, or the Pacific Northwest, or around Chicago — a handy framework for all kinds of synergies, economic, infrastructure-wise, environmental — and, dare we say it, similar to the productive relationship among cities in Europe.

Todorovich, who is director of America 2050], created jointly by the Lincoln Institute and the Regional Plan Association, thinks of high-speed rail as a generational investment. The interstate highway system, she points out, required more than a decade to actually get started after it was first proposed. High-speed rail supporters must consolidate ambitions, clarify goals, and make the benefits clear — if they hope to stay off that list of things not done.

The report — High-Speed Rail: International Lessons for U.S. Policymakers, by Petra Todorovich, Dan Schned, and Rob Lane, can be downloaded free at http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/1948_High-Speed-Rail.

Anthony Flint is a Citistates Associate and fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass.

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As the world’s population hits 7 billion this fall, we are again reminded that we live on a planet of cities. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and hundreds of millions more are on the way, coming in from the countryside in search of a better life. But we also risk living on a planet of slums. Although the number can’t be pinned down precisely, the UN estimates as many as 1 billion live in informal settlement — shantytowns, squatters’ shacks, and favelas that are technically illegally occupying urban land.

The reality of informal settlement has been around for decades, and though it spans from Asia to Africa, it’s Latin America — where nearly 130 million people or one out of four urban residents live in these makeshift neighborhoods — that has had the most experience in tackling the problem. South America in particular understands the costs. Informality is attributed to many causes, including low income levels, unrealistic urban planning and building regulations, a lack of serviced land and social housing, and a dysfunctional legal system. Though romanticized by some, life in the favelas too often means constant insecurity, fear of eviction, lack of basic services such as water and sewer, environmental and health hazards, discrimination, and violent crime. The costs are high for local government as well, in fighting crime, public health, and a vast array of social problems.

So what to do? The idea of “slum clearance,” bulldozing favelas and attempting to relocate large numbers to public housing, typically in dormitory-style structures at the periphery, has lost appeal. It is seen these days as socially intolerable and economically not feasible.

Instead, Latin American nations and metropolitan areas have been trying mightily to work with these areas as they exist, on site, in place – to improve conditions, provide basic services, and begin integration into the formal city. At the same time, governments don’t want to be so accommodating that they end up encourage further informal settlement. It’s been a policy bulls eye that has been challenging to say the least.

What is known as the “regularization” of informal settlement has taken two major forms: legalizing parcels by awarding the occupants titles to the property as exemplified in Peru, and Brazil’s broader approach that combines titling with extensive upgrading of public services.

Both approaches have had an impact. But a report recently published by the Lincoln Institute, Regularization of Informal Settlements in Latin America, suggests that these efforts are very much a work in progress. Titling by itself is relatively inexpensive but has not triggered neighborhood improvements, while upgrading is much more costly and can stimulate additional irregular development by those hoping to benefit from future upgrading.

The report’s author, Edesio Fernandes, a lawyer and international expert on regularization, concludes that regularization programs need to be designed carefully to avoid either making conditions worse for the low-income residents the programs are intended to help, or stimulating the development of new informal settlements.

Peru’s approach is inspired by Hernando de Soto’s hypothesis that tenure security is a trigger for development, stimulating access to finance, economic activity, and residential upgrading. From 1996 to 2006 Peru issued over 1.5 million freehold titles at an average cost of $64 per household. Evaluations indicate that the titling programs had little impact on access to credit, but yielded some investment in housing, and may have contributed to some poverty alleviation. The programs also increased property values by about 25 percent, well in excess of the titling cost.

Brazil’s broader regularization programs combine legal titling with the upgrading of public services, job creation, and community support initiatives. At $3,500 to $5,000 per household, these programs are much more costly than Peru’s titling system, and Brazil has had more modest coverage of households. Ironically, service upgrading occurs more often with little or no change in legal tenure status, although the number of titles is increasing. The few evaluations that exist indicate that the increase in property values associated with upgrading exceeds its cost.

Many residents in informal areas feel secure with de facto property rights of ownership based on customary practices. Residents in informal settlements developed on private land often have bills of sale or related documents, and such properties are bought and sold regularly. Some residents seem to prefer this system of informal titling and often do not embrace the legal titling system.

The business of awarding titles clearly needs some fine-tuning. All this work requires careful monitoring to determine if the situation is improving or worsening, and to prevent the establishment of additional informal settlements. Some may start occupying ever more precarious land because they expect that upgrading will come along eventually.

Integrating informal areas in the formal city also carries with it an intriguing notion: that residents with titles on their property pay property taxes. Yet adjustments must be made so the system is equitable in the context of conditions on the ground — not paying full freight for truck-delivered water, for example.

As noted by Martim O. Smolka, director of the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean at the Lincoln Institute, cities in Latin America are finding that addressing informality “on site” is now a political imperative, but that the long-run challenge is to provide infrastructure and services in an affordable and sustainable manner.

The recent animated film Rio depicts favelas as essentially well-functioning, fine-grained urban areas with winding streets and low-rise housing stacked on hillsides, typically with beautiful views. There is clearly some Hollywood white-washing at work. But as Jane Jacobs observed, the organic, self-organizing character of informal settlement does have integrity. Customized, cost-effective, and sustainable approaches to shoring up these accidental neighborhoods have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people.

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The public finance crisis for local and state governments keeps rolling along, a bit like a slow-motion train wreck. Harrisburg, Pa., is on the brink of bankruptcy. In California, police departments say they must cut back on enforcement of certain crimes. Pensions and health care continue to wreak havoc on municipal budgets everywhere.

Meanwhile, the mood in the country is against new taxes, while several states have placed caps on property taxes. And as anyone who has balanced a home budget knows, it’s simply unsustainable to have expenditures going out outpace revenues coming in.

Against this backdrop comes heightened interest in collecting payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, from charitable nonprofit organizations such as private colleges and universities, hospitals and medical centers, and cultural institutions that are exempt from paying property taxes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Currently, at least 117 municipalities across 18 states have PILOT programs in place; 82 of those cities and towns are in Massachusetts. Boston has one of the longest standing and most revenue-productive programs in the U.S., and Cambridge, home to MIT and Harvard, has the oldest, dating back to the 1920s. New Haven and Yale University have worked out another model program.

The basic idea is that while these nonprofits are by law — and in several states mandated by state constitutions — tax-exempt, they might reasonably be asked to make a voluntary contribution that is a fraction of what they would pay if they paid property taxes. The payments typically constitute a very small percentage of overall revenues collected by municipalities; Boston’s collection of $15.7 million in the 2009 fiscal year, for example, amounted to .66 percent of the total city budget that year.

Nevertheless, in recent years, other cities have been getting into the PILOTs business, primarily in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, but also in the Midwest, plus North Carolina, Georgia, Montana, and California. But the process has been uneven, ad-hoc and often contentious, according to Daphne Kenyon and Adam Langley, authors of a report, Payments in Lieu of Taxes: Balancing Municipal and Nonprofit Interests, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Some cities and towns have been more aggressive than others as they seek revenue from nonprofits. Pittsburgh, Princeton, and Providence tried to establish a controversial “tuition tax,” and some state Legislatures have contemplated an “endowment tax” on higher education institutions as well. In New Hampshire, the town of Peterborough challenged the tax-exempt status of the MacDowell Colony, founded in 1907 to promote the arts and including an artists-in-residence program. Selectmen argued that all but one of the artists were from out of state, failing to meet the requirement that residents of New Hampshire be admitted to a charity’s benefits. Having gotten the institution’s attention, they proposed a PILOT program, which the MacDowell Colony refused. The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled against the selectmen, leaving nothing but hard feelings all around.

Municipalities have also of course increasingly relied on charging user fees that can help pay for basic public services, from police and fire protection to streets and their maintenance or garbage collection. Legal challenges abound in this area as well.

The better approach, the report’s authors say, is to first decide if a PILOT program is appropriate, then collaborate with nonprofits to structure the program so it’s reasonable, predictable, and transparent — all as part of a town-gown partnership that is mutually beneficial. Cities can set a target based on the cost of public services directly benefitting nonprofits, and use the assessed value of tax-exempt property or square footage to calculate suggested contributions. Boston’s goal is that nonprofits contribute 25 percent of what they would pay if they were not tax exempt.

“PILOTs can provide crucial revenue for certain municipalities, and are one way to make nonprofits pay for the public services they consume,” Kenyon and Langley say. “However, PILOTs are often haphazard, secretive, and calculated in an ad hoc manner that results in widely varying payments among similar nonprofits. In addition, a municipality’s attempt to collect PILOTs can prompt a battle with nonprofits and lead to years of contentious, costly, and unproductive litigation.”

Even in Boston’s model program, there are wide disparities in what institutions contribute: Boston University leads the way with $4.8 million, followed by Harvard University with $1.9 million. Boston College contributes $293,251, and Northeastern University a mere $30,157. Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino launched a PILOT Task Force to revamp the program and collect more revenue in a more even way from nonprofits. City Councilor Stephen Murphy says he hopes a phased-in expansion of the program will bring in $40 million per year in five years. The final recommendations of the task force are due out this month.

There are big themes at work here that go to the core of U.S. cities and their continued vitality. So-called “eds and meds” — higher education institutions and often related health care medical centers — are an economic engine for many cities, more resilient during recessions. They employ thousands of local residents and support and spin off all kinds of economic activity. But when they expand, more and more land goes off the tax rolls, while they continue to consume the services that cities provide.

Baltimore is an especially interesting case. The city recruited nonprofits to locate there as an economic development strategy — marketing the location as less expensive than Washington, D.C. but still close-by — but ended up being a victim of its own success, in terms of tax-exempt property. A PILOT program had to be established.

Luring businesses with tax breaks and incentives is a tried and true practice in the for-profit world. But tax-exempt status for nonprofits isn’t a loophole or a subsidy, says Richard Doherty, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Massachusetts. It was established going back some 200 years because nonprofits provide essential services that government does not. Many institutions provide community benefits in many ways, in the public education system or by revitalizing parks and public space, which does not get calculated sufficiently in setting PILOTs contributions.

The role of nonprofits in cities should not be underestimated, says Doherty, who suggests that they are responsible for billions in economic activity. He’s against a one-size-fits-all, systematic or formula-based approach, and favors the Connecticut and Rhode Island systems, where the state reimburses cities and towns for some of the property tax revenue they don’t collect from nonprofits. Those reimbursements are partial, however, and in hard times are easily cut from state budgets — which brings us right back to the fundamental problem of state and local governments going broke.

It’s no surprise that public employee unions are beginning to take particular interest in PILOTs. And nonprofits of all kinds may have some reason to be worried. As cities assess the practice of collecting payments in lieu of taxes, some are starting to look at secondary schools as well as colleges and universities, museums, and even churches. It’s possible only soup kitchens, which are charitable nonprofit organizations like the rest, can feel comfortable that it’s with them that municipalities might draw the line.

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NEW ORLEANS – Even with aggressive action on climate change, scientists agree that a global temperature rise of some kind is inevitable, triggering sea level rise, more intense storms, and an array of other chain-reaction disruptions to life as we know it. And in the typically sinister way that the climate cataclysm plays out, these impacts will hit hardest in the places most people live.

More than half of the U.S. population lives in 673 coastal counties. In China, the world’s most populous nation, 60 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people live in coastal provinces. Worldwide, rapid urbanization in coastal and delta mega-cities includes widespread informal settlement, a recipe for disaster for the most vulnerable populations.

The good news is that planners are paying attention. Cities, as places of density and transit, can make great strides in mitigation, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But coastal cities must engage in adaptation on a parallel, and in many ways integrated, track. There is no more urgent role for planners in the years ahead than to plan and help implement adaptation to climate change, says Edward Blakely, the former recovery director for New Orleans.

Coastal cities are already well aware – some painfully aware – of the breadth of the problem. Jakarta is confronting annual flooding that strains a colonial-era layout, and Dhaka in Bangladesh has struggled with stronger typhoons. At the Yantgze and Pearl river deltas in the Shanghai and Hong Kong regions, chronic flooding, coastline erosion and wetlands deterioration, storm surges, and punishing storms are wreaking havoc on areas that have been attracting the most intense in-migration and urbanization. Sewer overflow and saltwater intrusion, with impacts on drinking water, public health, and agriculture, are key areas of concern, as well as the vulnerable infrastructure, such as power plants, port and refining facilities, that will be flooded and potentially permanently underwater in the decades ahead.

The city ravaged by Hurricane Katrina five years ago, of course, has had the most vivid glimpse of the future. New Orleans’ path forward ranges from evacuation planning and relocation, “hard” solutions such as seawalls, weirs, tidal barrages, levees, and the redirection of waterways, to the restoration of natural systems to manage flooding. “The world is watching not only the city, but the planning field as well,” said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, who grew up in New Orleans, speaking at the American Planning Association’s National Conference in April.

The adaptation strategies detailed in the Delta Symposium symposium at the conference reflected a comprehensive approach informed by the people who know water better than anyone – the Dutch. The most promising innovations coming out of the Dutch Dialogues, with support from Waggonner & Ball Architects, the APA, TU Delft, and the Netherlands Water Partnership, are based on the concept of giving water more space – “room for the river” – in terms of spatial planning.

The approach involves lowering dikes in targeted areas to better enable flood protection in other areas with high populations or valuable infrastructure, says Tulane University’s Douglas Meffert. While this practice sounds counterintuitive, allowing certain natural habitat or in some cases, farmland areas to flood during high river stages reduces the vulnerability of nearby urban centers, he says.
A critical component is the role that nature is allowed to play. The restoration of wetlands and natural systems in coastal and delta cities has moved to the forefront. A promising model is found in the Yangtze River estuary’s wetlands and mudflats, which continue to grow due to the dynamics of riverways, tides, and sediment.

When Shanghai’s Pudong wetland was drained and developed in the 1990s to construct the Pudong International Airport, the Jiuduansha Shoals in the Yangtze Estuary were ecologically engineered to mitigate for this wetland loss and create a new habitat for the migratory shorebirds and waterfowl. The attraction of the new vegetated habitat had the added advantage of reducing bird strikes in jet engines, but the big benefit is typhoon hazard reduction for nearby
developments and infrastructure.

Other efforts in China were detailed by Lingqian Hu, senior regional planner at Southern California Association of Governments, who presented a Tsinghua University paper, “Climate Change and Urbanization in the Yangtze River Delta”; and He Canfei, professor at Peking University and associate director of the Lincoln Institute-Peking University Center for Urban Development and Land Policy in Beijing.

Future projects could not only use natural systems as flood control solutions but better use diversions for wetland restoration and creation projects, as well as improved water storage practices in population centers, such as catch basins, green roofs, gardens,
recreation parks, waters squares and pervious surfaces.

“We’re capable of doing these things,” said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, who was part of a team of researchers being led by Blakely, comparing adaptation scenarios in the U.S. and Australia – which share some similar characteristics. A century ago, Charles Eliot used a combination of hard infrastructure and natural systems to manage the Charles River in Boston, which was followed by the Charles River Dam project to further guide storm surges and flooding.

In the long haul, Yaro said, coastal cities will see dramatic changes – huge tidal barriers at the Golden Gate and ringing New York City, with the San Francisco Bay and Long Island Sound potentially turned into freshwater lakes. Large areas will be uninhabitable and water supplies will be a particular problem he said. “We basically can buy ourselves 300 years,” Yaro said. “We’re at the place where Amsterdam was in 1890.”

Taking adaptation seriously is a first step; paying for it will be the next. Blakely suggests that in the U.S. cities might pay into a national adaptation fund, on an insurance model. Those metropolitan regions that take the best protective measures get a break on their premiums.

Building on these innovations will require smart people who not only understand policy, urban planning and earth science, but the dynamics of deltas, sediment, and discharge. The challenge is so daunting that it’s hard to maintain hope, or to believe in much beyond the bright prospects of the seawall-building business. But adapting to climate change in coastal cities is shaping up to be the central project of planning for his century.

SEATTLE — Members of President Obama’s “green cabinet” were greeted like rock stars by nearly two-thousand believers in a more sustainable future at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference earlier this month.

We know this in part because Washington, D.C. city planner Harriet Tregoning–who introduced Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ray LaHood, secretary of the Department of Transportation, and Lisa Jackson, director of the Environmental Protection Agency–came right out and called them rock stars and everybody cheered in agreement.

This was a particularly friendly audience, to be sure, and predisposed to like the administration’s plans to bring smart growth and planning to the–gasp–federal level. The gathered planners and local government officials were also a technically knowledgeable bunch. Where else would it be an applause line to say that not only municipalities but regional planning entities could now apply for a particular federal grant program? Or that there are plans to put the “UD” back in “HUD”?

“We have been working on these issues for so long, to have this cadre of people as leaders is just amazing,” Tregoning said. “No one will work harder to make sure you are wildly successful.”

By the time the convention hall emptied, however, there remained plenty of reasons for pessimism. The reasons have to do with message, money, and politics.

The coordination of the federal agencies responsible for housing, transportation, and the environment, as well as diplomatic relations with energy and agriculture, is itself a landmark achievement. First–and this may sound trifling, but it’s important–HUD, DOT, and EPA are getting out of each others way. They have identified programs and criteria that work at cross purposes, and moved towards seamless coordination.

As LaHood pointed out, why should DOT fund a transit line in one neighborhood if HUD is investing in housing a mile away? Why not bring them together? Several states have seen the virtue of aligning capital budgets on one page in this way. LaHood also touted inter-city high-speed–or perhaps we should say “higher-speed” rail, and a halt to transport projects that are environmentally damaging.

To implement these coordinated policies, each of the agencies has created sub-units–although inexplicably, given them slightly different names in each case (I guess some federal agency habits are just ingrained). HUD has the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which will mete out $140 million in grants for local smart growth efforts ranging from the redevelopment of vacant lots in cities to home financing that includes energy efficiency upgrades and location-efficient mortgages. DOT has the Office of Livable Communities, and EPA the Office of Sustainable Communities.

It may be a small thing, but any marketing campaign needs a strong, consistent, clear message. That seemed to be lacking in remarks prepared by three different staffs. Just how is the administration going to move a sustainability agenda forward? Emphasize jobs and economic prosperity, the three cabinet members wrote an op-ed essay in the Seattle Times. It’s a similar new-green-economy approach flagged in a recent report on planning for climate change.

At New Partners, though, there was no honest talk about the two things clearly standing in the green cabinet’s way: concern about staggering budget deficits, and a political-cultural shift away from taking action on problems like climate change, made clear by the election in my home state of Massachusetts by Republican Scott Brown. (Brown said he would vote against not only health care reform but cap-and-trade legislation as well).

Plans for inter-city rail were clearly music to the ears of those gathered in Seattle. Is it really going to happen? Will transportation reauthorization truly be transformed? Between legitimate worries about the deficit and national debt, and earmarking ways of Congress, there’s no clear path. Similarly, the money devoted to supporting local smart growth is $140 million more than what was there before. But it’s still not a lot, even when properly leveraged.

It’s obviously hard to move into Washington and change the way of doing business. But there was something about the nature of the presentations–Jackson canceled at the last minute and spoke by video, despite heading the agency that co-sponsors the New Partners conference–that suggested something less than a big-time campaign of change.

“It’s time the federal government spoke with one voice,” said Donovan–to wild applause. Was it epic poetry? No. But it may be the extent of incremental change we can expect in these perilous times.

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There’s cap-and-trade, the international accord emerging from Copenhagen, wind farms, hybrid vehicles, green buildings, solar panels, and carbon sequestration. But planners know well there’s another fundamental strategy in the challenge of climate change: achieving greenhouse gas emissions reductions through better land use planning.

Metropolitan regions across the country are now aligning growth plans with that one goal in mind–reduced emissions in both redevelopment and new development, linking land use, urban form, and transportation to help head off the planetary emergency. Good tools to help decision-makers at the local and regional level, however, are only beginning to emerge.

This is work in the trenches, and planners need help. Now more than ever, they need to rely on modeling and forecasts to make sure standards, guidelines, rules and regulations will get the most bang for the buck. There’s no point in making requirements that don’t truly result in emissions reductions, through lower vehicle miles traveled (VMT) or other means.

Initiatives at the local and regional level must be comprehensive, capable of being tested and evaluated, and intelligible to a wide range of stakeholders, says a new report, Urban Planning Tools for Climate Change Mitigation, which details four case studies–in North Vanccouver, suburban Chicago, Superstition Vistas in Arizona, and King County, Washington–that illustrate pathbreaking efforts to link urban form and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The report was authored by Patrick M. Condon, Duncan Cavens, and Nicole Miller, all at the University of British Columbia, where the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Design Centre for Sustainability have convened a series of meetings to assess tools to support land use policy and decision making in the context of climate change mitigation and urban planning at both the local and regional scale.

All the tools use cutting-edge technology to give planners a climate readout on development. INDEX, a planning support software for land use and transportation modeling used in Elburn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and hundreds of other locations, makes quick and easy-to-understand calculations about the energy use and carbon emissions associated with different types of land uses, varying density, and transit availability to reduce vehicle miles traveled.

I-PLACE³S, a Web-based, publicly available modeling platform for measuring the climate impacts of the built environment, developed by the State of California and administered by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, has been tested in the King County, Washington HealthScape initiative to analyze the transportation and public health impacts of land development alternatives in Greater Seattle.

Envision Tomorrow, a suite of urban and regional planning tools developed by Fregonese Associates that models land use decisions ranging from the scale of a specific development site to a much larger area, is being used in the development of Superstition Vistas, the 275-square-mile expanse of former state trust lands near Phoenix. The tool includes analysis of the physical and financial feasibility of development, and provides data on the carbon footprint of different scenarios–development using green building techniques, for examplle, or with greater density, walkable neighborhood design, or multi-modal transportation options.

Development Pattern Approach, a database of parcel-scale examples of streets, open space, and buildings across a range of densities, was developed by ElementsLAB in the Design Centre for Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, and used in North Vancouver’s sustainability master plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The spatial modeling incorporates GIS and Google SketchUp to produce dramatic visual and quantitative results when changes are made–replacing a single-family house with a duplex, for example.

Producing comprehensive, three-dimensional, accessible urban planning tools for climate change mitigation is a daunting task. A crucial need is for tools that can be applied to a range of scales–from an individual building, major project, or new neighborhood, right up to a broader region, where there are many more moving parts.

Planners need to be able to say definitively whether development and future urban form will result in reduced emissions. Software developers of planning support tools have begun to provide some answers. Political leaders need to insist on applying all available tools, and reports on alternatives, before they approve new developments. Technology is central in building a smart energy grid or a more fuel-efficient vehicle, but these innovators have become some of the most important foot soldiers in the fight against climate change.

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As we stare down the economic recovery and a post-carbon future, we’ve got a lot of retrofitting to do.

Water heaters, furnaces, windows, and older buildings await energy efficiency upgrades. Transit systems need technology overhauls to communicate with riders on their mobile phones. Underground, aging water, sewer and steam pipes can’t stand much more deferred maintenance. Automakers need to revamp assembly lines to produce low-emission buses–and maybe even streetcars and trolleys.

Add one more thing that badly needs an update: governance.

At the local level, a more regional approach is necessary to marry land use and transportation, for example. “How else would we govern, except the way that we have settled?” asks Portland Metro councilor Robert Liberty in the recently released documentary film, Portland: Quest for the Livable City.

But it is the federal government that truly needs a version 2.0, to meet the energy, climate, transportation, and economic development challenges of the 21st century. After a few weeks on the job, Xavier de Sousa Briggs, associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, is astonished at how Washington’s agencies were “invented for 1977.”

“We cannot partner [with cities] better … unless we’re more integrated in how we function,” Briggs said at a conference for journalists, “The Next City,” sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

More detail on the conference is available by Robert Campbell at The Boston Globe, Tom Condon at The Hartford Courant, Citiwire contributor Alex Marshall, Mary Newsom at the Charlotte Observer, and Tim Halibur at Planetizen.

Briggs, on leave from MIT and in a position of significant influence on urban policy for the Obama administration, says it’s imperative that agencies “cut across the silos.” There is already evidence of this mandate, in the coordinated initiatives between the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation, and HUD and the Department of Energy. If the housing of the future is to be energy-efficient and located near transit, this kind of integration seems to make a lot of sense.

Coordination would have been helpful in the $787 billion stimulus package, to achieve multiple policy goals in energy, climate, and transportation. Coordination will be critical in the reauthorization of the federal transportation bill, if it is to be transformational as the group Transportation for America is advocating–a more holistic approach linking land use and transit, and a “fix it first” policy for the nation’s metropolitan regions. Any climate bill plowing back revenues into green infrastructure would also benefit from federal agencies working together in ways that break from the past. Silo-busting sounds like a familiar refrain. That may be because over the past several years the states, including California and Massachusetts, have already been experimenting with such overhauls. In Massachusetts, the Office of Commonwealth Development coordinated housing, transportation, energy, and the environment, aligning them all, both operationally and in capital projects, in a smart growth agenda. It was an uphill battle–I was a policy adviser in that effort–because government fiefdoms are well known for not playing well with others. State DOTs in particular rather infamously go their own way (and often that literally means the highway). Talk of coordination won’t suffice; it has to flow through the budget and the chain of command.

Taking the cue from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Arizona roped together similar agencies, in the case of Connecticut including economic development. New York and Virginia considered the coordination model as well. Back in Massachusetts, however, incoming Governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, dismantled the Office of Commonwealth Development, set up by his Republican predecessor, Mitt Romney.

And so Briggs and Co. will have their work cut out for them, just as those refitting subway tracks or ripping out old furnaces face a staggeringly arduous task. Rewiring Washington may be the hardest retrofit of all.

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BOULDER, Colo. — For those concerned with sustainability, some big things are on the way from Washington. There’s the distribution of the $787 billion economic stimulus package for public works infrastructure. The reauthorization of federal transportation funding, which could finally shift significant funds from highways to transit. The Obama administration’s ambitious clean-energy plans, and its interest in a cap-and-trade system to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We haven’t been used to such heavy lifting from the federal government. For years, the action has been at the local level, in metropolitan regions that have been engines of innovation focused on green, compact, transit-oriented settlement. In fact, during the final stages of the Bush administration and into these first days for President Obama, the bottom-up dynamic has led to a kind of Sustainability 2.0.

Consider the innovative practices of two Denver-based developers, Urban Villages and Zocolo Community Development. They’re building mixed-use, walkable, dense infill development that is integrated with transportation and open space, with all buildings constructed to last 100 years, powered by state-of-the-art heating and cooling systems–solar, radiant, thermal–that will use 80 percent less energy than the typical building today.

Efficient urban residences rely on location–the city–to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, so much so that the LEED standards for green building are already seen as out of date.

“LEED was a good start. But we need a whole new scorecard,” said Grant McCargo, president of Urban Villages. “I don’t get credit for embodied energy. I’m penalized for retrofitting in LoDo (Denver’s Lower Downtown district) because I can’t collect rainwater. That’s absurd.”

McCargo was among the leaders in urban development and climate change gathered for ELEVATE 09, a symposium the University of Colorado hopes to put on every year. The goal–to take advantage of the forward-thinking development practices percolating in the Denver-Boulder-Fort Collins corridor. The idea is to gather mile-high, and take the discussion of sustainability to the next level.

While early green efforts had a trial-and-error quality, the latest exhibit a get-down-to-business sharpening of focus. One strong new trend: a real wariness of greenwashing, and the need to analyze initiatives to test not for good intentions, but for impact.

Local policies such as plastic bag bans, restricting lawn watering and tree-planting must be evaluated to judge their actual outcomes in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the quality of city life, said Judy Layzer from the urban planning program at MIT. Otherwise, “it’s just so much easier to do ‘sustainability lite’,” she said.

Metropolitan regions also need to be guided through the maze of grants, rebates and tax credits available for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. In the midst of the current economic tumult, green leases and green loan documents will become central to development financing, requiring sure-footed modeling that shows the savings of going green over the long term.

Another challenge: green affordable housing. Low- and moderate-income families can’t shoulder the burden of re-engineering our energy use and built environment. The Congressional Budget Office says that policies that reduce emissions by 15 percent would impose a $750 to $950 a year increase on families in the bottom 20 percent of the income spectrum. “We simply can’t continue to make green buildings only for the wealthy,” said Trisha Miller of Green Communities at Enterprise Community Partners.

And yet another: the barriers that stand in the way of sustainability. “It’s not the tools–we have those and we know what works–it’s implementation,” said Peter Pollock, the former Boulder city planner, and now a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a co-sponsor of the conference. Success requires regional collaboration, strengthening federal-state-local connections, confronting the problems of the local collection of sales and property tax revenue, and reforming zoning, which in most communities is outdated and needs to be fixed.

John Cleveland, co-founder of the Innovation Network for Communities, said that green initiatives are only now on the verge of scaling up. “I don’t know of a (fully) sustainable community anywhere in America,” he said. “Mother Nature doesn’t give a rip about relative progress; she needs hard targets, and if they are missed, there are going to be some very violent corrections.”

Currently it’s more in fashion to talk more about cost savings, security from volatility, quality of life, and economic development than climate change, he said. “The problem is, when you start talking like that, you lose all rigor.”

With the economy disintegrating, and the impacts of climate change advancing beyond all predictions, the imperative for new policy directions has never been clearer. Local innovations have been fruitful, but we need rigor more than ever now.

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Comment by David Crossley of Houston Tomorrow

Timing is everything.

As architects, planners, journalists, and city and nonprofit leaders gathered at the University of Philadelphia last week for the conference “Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil,” the staggering challenges of our time prompted a subdued mood.

The gathering marked the 50th anniversary of the same conference attended by Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford and many others to chart a course of the urban future; this time around, Elizabeth Kolbert, Robert Socolow, Andrew Revkin, Alex Steffen, William J. Mitchell, David Orr, Harrison Fraker and many others, including Neal Peirce, sought to piece together what was needed to get us out of climate-change, peak-oil, financial-meltdown mess.

They could take comfort in the fact that a leader is about to take office who says he is serious about all these issues. President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to act on climate change, bringing the U.S. in from the sidelines after eight long years. He has promised to end dependence on oil and support renewable energy. And he seems to recognize that cities and metropolitan regions will play a crucial role, in these challenges but also as centers of innovation, economic activity, and housing opportunities, and that they deserve support.

But everyone at this conference and all environmentalists and urbanists everywhere have the same question shared by so many Americans: how in the world is he going to do it all?

The crisis in the financial markets, big business tailspins, the downturn in the economy and rising unemployment are all clearly the first priority. He’s got a budget, a deficit, national debt and two wars to worry about, to say nothing of health care and Social Security.

It’s clear the new president and his team intend to walk and chew gum at the same time. Any economic stimulus plan will include investments in cities and infrastructure and the new energy economy that is envisioned in our post cheap-oil, post-carbon future–the so-called “green New Deal.” For example, a bailout of the automakers could include a fundamental re-engineering of the business plan to include full emphasis on hybrids, electrics, hydrogen.

The brightest light on the horizon may be the promised White House Office of Urban Policy, which takes a cue from the smart growth movement of coordinating multiple themes–housing, transportation, energy, environment–under one roof. Cities represent a big part of America’s green and economic future: dense, walkable, compact, and based around transit. But managing big cities is increasingly difficult, as New York, Philadelphia, and others make dramatic budget cuts. Cities are looking to Washington for a coherent metropolitan policy, something that has also been missing for the last eight years. They crave cooperation on things like green-building retrofits.

Transportation and infrastructure will be key. One of the first tests for the new administration will be to confront the highway lobby and push for transit in the upcoming SAFETEA-LU reauthorization. Transportation is the lynchpin for the post-carbon future of American cities, like the Interstate Highway Act 50 years ago, as the group Transportation for America is trying to make clear.

Many groups, including the Regional Plan Association and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, have been posing the question of whether we need a national plan for infrastructure, organized around megaregions like the Boston-to-Washington corridor. There’s no doubt a $150 billion plan for 21st century infrastructure–rail, energy, water, repairing roads but not building new ones–would translate into jobs and serious investment.

But it’s also the point where one has to ask: where is the money going to come from?

The issue of money raises troubling questions about the president-elect’s climate policy as well. The Warner-Lieberman cap-and-trade legislation, the first step towards a new regulatory regime over greenhouse gas emissions and putting a price on carbon, will be reconsidered in 2009. But it means higher energy prices, as the energy system in the US evolves from coal and oil to renewable energy sources like solar and wind. That’s a hard thing to ask of middle-class Americans in this economy.

The planet’s big GHG emissions culprits need to stabilize emissions within five years and then do the hard work to get the trend line heading down–and even then many parts of the world will suffer from inevitable warming.

I’m a big believer in the “silver buckshot” theory on climate change–that it is no one policy but a bunch of them, integrated, that will make a difference. A new day on transportation, infrastructure, energy and urban policy will be welcome. But most believe there’s no way to reduce emissions without putting a price on carbon.

Politicians like to talk about going in to “clean up the mess” in Washington. In this case, the wreckage and debris is everywhere. The climate and energy challenge requires a paradigm shift and a fundamental systems change–and quickly. It will be expensive and painful. It may be too much to ask for the first 100 days, the first year, and perhaps even the new president’s entire first term.

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If there were ever compelling evidence that cities, regions and the natural world are co-dependent, take a look at the climate change news of the last year.

On the one hand, accelerated ice melting in the Arctic, plus growing concerns about the Antarctic’s long-term stability, raise fears of rapidly rising seas that could threaten many of America’s and the world’s oceanside cities.

And now comes the case of Dendroctonus ponderosae, otherwise known as the mountain pine beetle. By laying its eggs under the bark of mature jack-pine and lodgepole pine trees, this voracious insect is laying waste to millions of acres of forests in the Rocky Mountain West, from Colorado to British Columbia.

Previously, the beetle population was kept in check every fall when the temperature drops below freezing and the larvae is killed. But rising temperatures and delayed frosts have allowed the beetles to flourish, not only in their traditional habitat but further northward. Foresters are seeing the beetle in places never seen before, and the ravaging populations may even start to infest different species of trees. This summer, aerial photographs show the tell-tale brownish red swaths of dead forests over thousands of square miles.

The consequences are grim. The dead trees no longer soak up carbon dioxide, release carbon as they rot, and a create a tinderbox for forest fires. Yet as people have left towns, building homes at high and exposed elevations, controlled burns to eradicate the beetle often become too risky to undertake.

The destruction wrought by the pine beetle is just one example of climate change’s spreading impacts. Two-thirds of California’s unique plants – 2,300 species that grow nowhere else – will be wiped out due to rising temperatures and changes in weather patterns, according to a recent study.

Severe weather is spoiling recent advances in soil conservation and the management of working landscapes and agricultural lands, as soil nutrients and pesticides run off into waterways. In the U.S. Southeast, drought is stressing water supplies, throwing a long shadow over the growth of the “Piedmont Atlantic Megaregion.”

The discussion of global warming has focused, appropriately, on mitigation efforts – regulating carbon, alternative energy, building transit, sequestering carbon from power plants, and changes in land use patterns for more compact development. Setting and adhering to goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been difficult: it takes major effort and expenditure of political capital for local and metro leaders to sell the public on steps today that may head off a crisis seen years in the future.

But the other half of the challenge lies in adaptation – managing and responding to impacts of climate change as they happen, and changing the way we do business in every area from town layouts to land conservation across broad regions. And the urgency of that task is right in front of us. Like mitigation, adaptation will require innovation and serious funding.

The land conservation community has already begun to rise to the challenge. A wide range of organizations and conservancies has done a stellar job in recent decades of protecting millions of acres of land. Now that work is threatened, because global warming has changed all the rules. For example, wildlife protected by conservation easements has begun to migrate elsewhere.

Yet there are common sense ways that a city or region can plan and achieve a robust green infrastructure to help address climate change through adaptation, argues Mike Houck, director of the Urban Greenspaces Institute in Portland, Ore. And the issue is not just parks and recreation areas, as vital as they are. “Containing residential development within compact urban areas will reduce the need to spend huge sums of money bailing people out of flood-prone areas and fighting fires where the only reason to fight the fire is to protect sparsely developed exurban residential territory,” Houck contends.

James N. Levitt, director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, says that adaptation to climate change must necessarily become part of the land and biodiversity conservation agendas in the years ahead. Levitt has been gathering land conservation leaders at Lincoln Institute conferences in Washington, discussions targeted specifically at finding creative pathways toward adaptation that protects our natural heritage. Initiatives to protect landscape-scale corridors for species migration, safeguards against spread of invasion species, and new water usage and fire regimes are being crafted.

All too few urban leaders are engaged in parallel discussions — especially on a scale larger than their own communities. They might think about the example of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (www.y2y.net) — a guide and connector for environmental groups, businesses, foundations and citizens concerned about a grand piece of North America’s landscape.

There are other reasons to work across boundaries — and to think of cities as they interrelate with the natural world. Climate change – both on adaptation and mitigation — looks like it will be our biggest motivation yet.

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Anthony Flint’s e-mail is anthony.flint@lincolninst.edu

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