Coalition for Livable Communities

Building Livable Neighborhoods

Check out this link to Christopher Alexander's Building Livable Neighborhoods: a website resource for anyone seeking to make their neighborhoods a better place to live.

A Tale of Two Exurbs

The American Prospect recently posted an article by Ben Adler about the desirability of walkable urban communities. Take a look at the complete article, but here is a highlight that Memphis should notice:

"There is a large unmet demand for walkable urban living. While less than 10 percent of the housing stock is walkable -- meaning that you can safely walk to shopping and mass transit -- in most metropolitan areas, academic research has found that roughly one in three Americans would prefer to live in a walkable urban environment. That is why housing in places such as San Francisco, New York, and Leesburg's neighbor, Washington, D.C., is so expensive and has been relatively insulated from the dramatic recent drop in home values. By contrast, the automobile-dependent Washington exurbs and even inner-ring suburbs have seen dramatic drops in housing prices."

Hmm. Two things:

1. I would bet that Memphis is even less than 10% walkable to start with.
2. Increased walkability contributes to stable housing prices. Let's start thinking about how we want to invest in our communities and re-invest in walkable neighborhoods.

Thank-you to our active member, Corky, for sharing!

HOT OFF THE PRESS - OUR FIRST NEWSLETTER

Check out it. Your Spring 2008 copy of THRIVE, the newsletter of the Coalition for Livable Communities is available as a pdf for electronic viewing. Download it here.
Pass it on to someone else who might be interested.

News Flash: Sprawl is Good

We're only kidding. According to the article "Suburban Cowboys" in the American Prospect, the conservative movement has identified smart growth proponents as Public Enemy Number One. Read the magazine's provocative report on a recent pro-sprawl symposium at the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank.

CLC Quoted in On Common Ground Magazine

The winter 2007 edition of On Common Ground magazine quotes CD Council and CLC's own Emily Trenholm in their "Heading Toward Diversity" Article.  The article discusses the importance of diversity and neighborhoods of choice.

New Urban Parks Web Site

The City Parks Alliance (CPA) and the National Association for Olmsted Parks (NAOP) have announced the official launch of a new informational resource on urban and historic parks.  The Parks Practices web site seeks to highlight the experiences - both successes and challenges -of CPA and NAOP members, facilitate a sharing of lessons learned, and provide opportunities for interaction among city park leaders and citizen groups.

New Smart Growth Publications from EPA

The Environmental Protection Agency has released several new reports on smart growth, designed to enhance the understanding of the impact of development patterns on water resources, infrastructure issues, and community needs. They can be downloaded for free from the EPA web site.

Let's Not Be Dense About Density

Carol Coletta's Smart City Memphis blog has an interesting post today (Thursday, November 3) about the issue of density and why it has such a bad name in Memphis. Farther down the post also includes an interesting mini-history of the Land Use Control Board. You can read it here.

New Study: Smart Growth Policies Do Not Increase Housing Prices

Countering a frequent criticism of smart growth policies, a new study from California State University at Sacramento has found that there is no evidence that further centralizing an urban area leads to an increase in home prices. If you'd like to look at the whole study, it can be viewed here.

Development Fees Presentation

Our meeting this past Wednesday was opened by a special presentation from Maggie Conway relating to development trends in Shelby County.  The presentation dealt specifically with the issues of development fees and moratoria on development.  Of particular interest to everyone at the presentation were the figures comparing development fees in the Greater Memphis area; for example, a 50 lot single-family, residential subdivision's fees would be $5,250 in Memphis, compared to $25,000 in Hernando, MS.  A copy of the presentation may be found below:

Download moratorium_development_fee_presentation.pdf