Livability Links is an ongoing feature highlighting a selection compelling stories throughout the livability realm.
An Economic Defense of Old Buildings
Emily Badger, Wonk Blog
"Cities need old buildings so badly," Jacobs wrote in her classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," "it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.”
Ever since, this idea -- based on the intuition of a woman who was surveying her own New York Greenwich Village neighborhood -- has been received wisdom among planners and urban theorists. But what happens when we look at the data?
Do Health Impact Assessments Make a Difference?
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Center for Community Health and Evaluation
HIAs provide decision-makers an opportunity to minimize health risks and enhance health benefits, allowing for informed decisions related to agriculture, transportation, housing, education, land use, and energy.
Cities need to adapt as senior citizens’ housing needs change
Roger K. Lewis, Washington Post
Cities must adopt land use, zoning and fiscal policies that encourage and support private-sector development or redevelopment specifically tailored to meet the housing and health-care needs of seniors. Such policies must address urban location considerations to ensure that the benefits of city living — for elderly residents and the city as a whole — are realized.
At the same time, real estate developers, investors, lending institutions and health-care providers must expand their thinking about the evolving nature of the urban residential market. They must recognize that seniors who want to live in cities could represent a sizable and growing share of this increasingly diverse market. And many of those seniors will not depend on subsidized housing.
The Future of Evacuations in the Climate Change Era
Dan Glass, City Lab
The report notes that the evacuation network as a whole still "lacks adequate communication and coordination across modes."
But the range of stakeholders and interests, compounded by a fickle marketplace, makes a coordinated investment in this realm a daunting task. A key problem is allocating resources, says Wolshon. Nobody wants to spend money, time, and effort on an event that may not happen, even if it seems that 100-year storms are coming at much shorter intervals. We know that nature (and we ourselves) will throw more and bigger challenges our way, but anticipating them takes imagination, and implementing them takes will and money.
New Report: Every Bicyclist Counts
The League of American Bicyclists
As they shared each awful tragedy with us, we too felt frustrated and powerless. We also realized how little we really knew about the circumstances of serious crashes between bikes and cars, and how woefully inadequate (and late) the available data was at the national level.
For a 12-month period, we set about the grim task of tracking and documenting every fatal traffic crash involving a bicyclist captured by relevant internet search terms. We also wanted to offer a place to remember the victims and raise the hope that their deaths would at least inform efforts to prevent such tragedies in the future. The results are sobering, eye-opening, and critically helpful in informing the current debate about the need for a non-motorized traffic safety performance measure.
Smart Growth America
In 2012, pedestrians accounted for nearly 15 percent of all traffic deaths, up 6 percent from 2011 and representing a five-year high.
Dangerous by Design 2014 takes a look at where these fatalities happen and who’s most at risk, presenting data from every county, metro area, and state. As in past years, Sunbelt communities that grew in the post-war period top the list of most dangerous regions. These areas developed rapidly, with many low-density neighborhoods overly dependent on extra wide, fast arterials to connect homes, schools, jobs and shops. Such roads rarely feature the facilities needed for safe travel by foot. The report also calls out the unacceptably high number of pedestrian deaths seen in nearly every major metro region.
The fact is that even our most walk-friendly communities can—and must—do more.