Neal Peirce / Dec 31 2009
For Release Sunday, January 3, 2010
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — The World Bank is becoming more pro-city. The strategy seems a major departure for an institution that long leaned toward rural areas, many of its governing officials and affiliated governments subscribing to the view that aid to the countryside would somehow stem the massive tide of people moving to cities in search of jobs and opportunity.
The new policy, officially announced by World Bank president Robert Zoellick at a November meeting in Singapore, boldly defines urbanization as the 21st century’s defining phenomenon. Manage the growth of developing world cities well, he said, and the challenges of climate change, jobs, poverty reduction and health can be dealt with proactively, and more effectively. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Dec 26 2009
For Release Sunday, December 27, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
Are skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants the economic stimulus that America needs? Could lowered barriers help regions like the country’s Rustbelt prosper again?
That’s the audacious case that Cleveland immigration attorney Richard T. Herman and his journalist co-author, Robert L. Smith, make in their new book– “Immigrant Inc.”
The mere thought that immigrants are an American asset, not a liability, puts a whole new face on the Lou Dobbs-style attacks on America’s 12 million undocumented immigrants that CNN so long tolerated, and right-wing media still promote. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Dec 18 2009
For Release Sunday, December 20, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — Can you imagine several hundred of this capital city’s policy wonks turning out for a two-hour discussion of bicycling?
A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable. But last week it happened, sponsored by the esteemed Brookings Institution, at a prime U.S. Capitol-view room of the fancy new Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue.
It may have helped that the program included musician-artist-cultural innovator David Byrne, whose decades of observing cities worldwide–often from the seat of his bicycle–is reflected in his book, “Bicycle Diaries” (Viking).
But the new buzz about cycling is clearly a mark of the times. You can credit snarled traffic, ennui with driving, rising oil prices and/or concern about greenhouse gas emissions. Then there’s growing popular desire to revoke the monopoly control cars and trucks have on our streets and public spaces. There’s a clear tie to the “Complete Streets” movement, advancing the ideas of shared urban turf long espoused by such groups as Partners for Livable Communities and the Project for Public Spaces. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Dec 12 2009
For Release Sunday, December 13, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
Copenhagen isn’t just host to the global climate summit this month. The Danish capital offers proof positive of a way to reduce greenhouse gases: build a district heating system.
The setup in Copenhagen, created by a regional accord of five mayors in 1984, captures heated water from electricity production that would normally be pumped into the sea, and channels it back into homes and businesses for heating through a 1,300-kilometer system of underground pipes.
The result: 97 percent of the region now gets clean and affordable heating with sharply reduced carbon emissions. The system’s steadily switched from coal to natural gas and biofuels such as straw and wood pellets. Plus, it taps waste heat from incineration plants. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Dec 05 2009
For Release Sunday, December 6, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — In the 1930s, America underwent its grinding, years-long Great Depression. Now, at a minimum, we have the Great Recession. It’s the severest downturn in 70 years. And without a fiscal lifeline to struggling cities, it could conceivably get even worse.
This is the alarming conclusion of last month’s joint study and conference of the Brookings Institution and the National League of Cities (NLC), including a panel of mayors from across the nation.
It’s true, many economists now say our recessionary downward spiral has stopped. But, warned the NLC’s Christopher Hoene, past recessions show that “the low point for cities,” in terms of their revenue and expenditure numbers, “typically comes 18 months to 24 months after the low point of the recession” –a particularly disturbing fact because, economists tell us, the current recession’s “low point” has just been hit.
The delayed impact occurs because property tax collections, the revenue mainstay for most cities, don’t decline until after an entire cycle of reduced assessments to reflect declining house values. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Nov 27 2009
For Release Sunday, November 29, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
GREENVILLE, S.C. — They’re quite a mayoral couple. From Atlanta: Shirley Franklin, Democrat, African-American, spunky, results-focused, no-nonsense. From Charlotte: Pat McCrory, Republican, white, business oriented, driving force of the new light rail system destined to remake Charlotte in the next generation.
Working in tandem, with bipartisanship rare in today’s America, Franklin and McCrory have been pushing for a common action plan to build imaginative and “green” infrastructure systems for the South’s dominant “megaregion” string of metro areas, centered on Atlanta and Charlotte but extending as far as Raleigh on the east, Birmingham on the west.
Last week, with other regional mayors, they gathered in Greenville to steer and name their new organization–the “Piedmont Alliance for Quality Growth – Mayors, Business, Academia.” Read More »
Neal Peirce / Nov 21 2009
For Release Sunday, November 22, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
Whoa!! Let’s pause and recalibrate before we equate economic “recovery” with our past practices of devouring land and consuming energy resources with near total abandon.
As a nation we’ve been wastrels, to be sure. Our mall- and big box mania, dependent on 1-to-4-ton vehicles for simple shopping trips, demanding vast acreage of paved-over landscape, left us (before the current eruption of dead malls) with six times the shopping space, per capita, of Europe.
And housing? Sprawling indiscriminately across the countryside, new residences were gobbling up 3,000 square miles of land a year before the current recession. Were we to keep up that pace from now to 2040, we’d turn territory the size of Colorado into roadways, subdivisions and apartment complexes. The cost in land, energy and added greenhouse emissions would be huge, scuttling any carbon reduction goals we aspire to. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Nov 13 2009
For Release Sunday, November 15, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
CHICAGO — There’s no escaping the horror of urban neighborhood violence–the thoughtless beatings and killings, codes of silence, bereaved and fear-stalked communities. Deep harm goes on in soaring costs for police, courts and prisons, shuttered food markets, unkempt housing.
Our visceral reaction is simple: send in more cops, deal harshly with youthful offenders, pack as many as possible off to jail.
But it’s not working. Arrests surely help sideline some especially dangerous offenders. But incarceration won’t break the culture that keeps producing murderers, some even willing to kill at the funerals of their victims.
So how can we quell extreme youth violence? Increasingly, say reformers, let’s recognize murder and mayhem as a deep public health challenge.
In Chicago, Gary Slutkin, the physician-founder of CeaseFire, an anti-violence and anti-gang operation, argues that “violence is an infectious disease”–a condition “transmitted” from one person to another socially, through peer-to-peer neighborhood social pressures, just as insidiously as contagious bacteria. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Nov 06 2009
For Release Sunday, November 8, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
Veterans of America’s recent wars left homeless, abused women and their children seeking nightly shelter, out-of-sight medical system costs, rising tides of bankruptcies. What do they have to do with each other–and America’s current health care debate?
A lot, it turns out.
By failing to guarantee a roof over every American’s head, we’ve failed the test–as Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan puts it–of “a civilized society.” On a typical night 650,000 Americans are have no place to call home.
We created this crisis ourselves, by the states emptying out their mental hospitals and cities demolishing thousands of low-income rental units. The result was a huge gap in affordable shelter. Read More »
Neal Peirce / Oct 30 2009
For Release Sunday, October 30, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s cautious if not hostile approach to climate control legislation isn’t just putting it at odds with the Obama administration. Progressive corporations like Apple and Pacific Gas & Electric have resigned their memberships over the issue.
And there’s a fresh breeze blowing at the grassroots too. A growing coterie of local chambers of commerce is pushing both members and their communities to think and act “green,” to surge ahead of the curve in cutting carbon emissions.
And why? It’s because “they see green as a huge marketing opportunity as consumers increasingly respond to firms that are environmentally responsible,” says Carly Grimm, author of a new report on chambers’ initiatives financed by the Energy Foundation and produced by Partners for Livable Communities. Read More »