Posts under ‘Uncategorized’

My latest piece for Empire State Future is about the astonishing over-retailing of Upstate New York. Despite flat or even negative population growth in Upstate’s regions, new retail is coming on line at a steady clip. Most of this new retail is chain/franchise and big box stores. For example: despite having no more doughnut eaters [...]

Here’s a link to a piece I recently wrote for Empire State Future, New York’s statewide smart growth advocacy organization.  This piece was inspired by my observation that most people sincerely working to “go green” don’t have the key piece of this quest plugged into their consciousness and actions.
Read the piece at  http://www.empirestatefuture.org/geography/state/the-big-missing-piece/

From this grand, never-ending title, you might get the sense that I had something to do with this site.
Well, I did! I proudly assisted the development of Empire State Future’s new web site, www.empirestatefuture.org. Empire State Future is New York State’s first and only statewide smart growth advocacy and education organization, now in its fourth [...]

Thanks to the user friendliness of Flickr, I’ve uploaded a couple of hundred of my favorite “smart growth” and livable communities photographs. I’ve taken these photos over the last two decades, and have compiled them for Empire State Future, a New York-statewide smart growth organization. As you’ll see, the pictures feature an array of natural [...]

Spending the golden years in cities like Cleveland, Rochester, Buffalo, or Syracuse might just be wise rather than wacky. A blogger on Reuters’ Prism Money blog points out why:
I could take my Washington-Baltimore corridor housing money (median home value, $310,000) and trade it in for an average Cleveland house (median home value, $114,000). And that [...]

For decades, the City of Rochester has suffered from the flight of its businesses to the surrounding suburbs, sometimes even taking their city names with them. For example, Park Avenue Bicycles moved from Park Avenue in the city to a strip mall in a burb. (An even better example is in my hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia, [...]

A landmark smart growth bill is now law in New York State. The Public Infrastructure Priority Act (see my last post) was signed by Governor David Paterson on August 30. This means that New York State agencies and authorities must now run their infrastructure spending through a smart-growth screen to ensure that the funds don’t [...]

Green Village Consulting is proud to have supported Empire State Future’s marshaling of the groundbreaking Public Infrastructure Priority Act through the New York State Assembly and Senate. This bill requires New York State agencies to carefully examine their infrastructure programs and funding to ensure that they are not subsidizing or in other ways enabling inefficient [...]