A rendering of the Wyandanch Rising project, which used a planning grant to develop a downtown redevelopment vision that went on to win both state and federal funding.

An important heads up from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign: Towns looking to shape their future around NYC region’s extensive transit network have until the end of the week to apply for a grant from Tri-State and the One Region Funders’ Group to help turn those aspirations into a concrete vision.

This marks the second round of grants being issued by the groups. The first, given out in 2009, have helped a number of cities and towns in the region. Stratford, Connecticut turned a $50,000 grant into a plan for growth around its Metro-North train station and a draft of a new zoning code. Those plans, in turn, earned Stratford $250,000 in additional funding from the state. Wyandanch Rising, a downtown development project on Long Island, parlayed its funding into $2 million from the federal goverment and a share in the $100 million prize Long Island received from the Cuomo administration for winning its economic development competition.

Towns and cities in southwestern Connecticut, northern New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester County are eligible for the grants, as is New York City. Grants will provide between $10,000 and $50,000 for planning and public outreach. You can get more information and apply on Tri-State’s website.

With the Knickerbocker Avenue subway station visible in the background, this land is being used for a single-story building and a surface parking lot. The sidewalk, meanwhile, is blocked by federal employees headed to the armed forces recruitment center. Photo: Christopher Taylor Edwards.

This isn’t what transit-oriented development is supposed to look like.

Reader Christopher Taylor Edwards sent us these photos from two blocks of Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick. Immediately adjacent to the M train, suburban-style development  – complete with single-story buildings, drive-throughs and underutilized parking lots — marks the end of a vibrant commercial corridor.

One block down Knickerbocker from the subway is a single-story strip mall with a surface parking lot between the sidewalk and the door. The biggest tenant is a cell phone store, but for pedestrians headed to the subway, the most important might be the Armed Forces Career Center, which regularly hosts a fleet of government cars parked illegally on the sidewalk. Reported Edwards: “The cars parked on the sidewalk is a once a month or more occurrence. They are federally tagged cars generally or from Virginia and Maryland. No one is ever ticketed.”

This Burger King features a drive-through and surface parking lot, despite its location adjacent to a subway station. Photo: Christopher Taylor Edwards.

Directly underneath the Knickerbocker station sits a one-story Burger King. Behind the restaurant’s drive-through, which requires curb cuts on two sides of the intersection, sits a large surface parking lot. According to Edwards, the Burger King lot almost always sits empty.

Zoning may not be the chief culprit here. Head a block west along Knickerbocker, or follow the elevated subway tracks along Myrtle, and you’ll find vibrant commercial corridors with stores facing the sidewalk, not a parking lot. Even so, this seems like a location crying out for an intervention from New York City’s planners and economic development officials.

The City of Grand Rapids was awarded $459,224 for the Michigan Street Corridor Plan. Image: City of Grand Rapids

HUD granted nearly $96 million in 27 Community Challenge grants and 29 Regional Planning grants.

“The communities selected to receive these grants have a great opportunity to put their plans for smarter development and economic revitalization into action,” said Geoffrey Anderson of Smart Growth America in an email. “These grants are bittersweet, however, since they come just days after Congress passed legislation that did not include specific funding for another round of HUD grants next year.”

The Community Challenge grants are awarded to communities and organizations working to integrate transportation and housing, a key smart-growth goal and the focus of many livability advocates, like the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which seeks to include transportation in the calculation of housing costs. With a HUD grant, communities can update their local plans and zoning and building codes to support mixed-use development, affordable housing and the re-use of older buildings, according to HUD.

Regional Planning grants do much the same thing on a regional scale, with a priority on partnerships, including arts and culture and philanthropy. These grants aren’t just for planning, either; they’re also available for implementation of well-drawn plans for sustainable development.

As if it weren’t tragic enough to see Congress kill off the office’s funding, it’s especially sad that it had to happen during a banner year for interest in the program, in which applications outstripped available money more than 5 to 1. And, according to HUD, they’re encouraging just the kinds of partnerships they’re designed for:

This year, HUD’s investment of $95.8 million is garnering $115 million in matching and in-kind contributions – which is over 120 percent of the Federal investment – from the 56 selected grantees. This brings to total public and private investment for this round of grants to over $211 million.

In truth, HUD’s Office of Sustainable Communities wasn’t completely zeroed out – there’s enough in the budget to keep the lights on, but not enough to make grants. I’m not sure what the office will do if it’s not making grants, though. Maybe some low-level cooperation with DOT and EPA can continue – after all, it seems like a no-brainer that the efforts the three agencies have made fit well within the goals lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been trumpeting this reauthorization cycle: streamlining federal process, eliminating duplication, accelerating project delivery. Aren’t those things Republicans and Democrats can get behind?

Apparently the members of the conference committee thought such federal cost-cutting – and the livability programs the partnership supports – were dispensable. But HUD’s extensive documentation of the grants in this cycle proves otherwise.

For example, Michigan brings home more than $7 million for four different projects: corridor planning in Grand Rapids, denser housing for the county where Ann Arbor sits, tri-county sustainability planning in mid-Michigan, and region-wide data analysis in the northwestern part of the state.

Kaid Benfield of NRDC’s Switchboard blog spotlights a worthy project in Boston:

Consider the distressed neighborhooods along Boston’s Fairmount/Indigo transit corridor, for example. Ninety thousand people live within walking distance of the line (but not within walking distance of the limited number of stops), their median income some 35 percent below the state average. Two-thirds of the Boston region’s foreclosures were along the corridor. But currently the rail service lacks stops in the low-income communities that most need them; as a result the line primarily serves commuters passing through. HUD is awarding the City of Boston $1,865,160 to facilitate mixed-income, mixed-use development in conjunction with the construction of four strategically placed new stations (and improvements to existing stations) along the line.

The Sustainable Communities Initiative isn’t just about federal bureaucratic efficiency, though it is about that. It’s also signaled a sea change in mainstream thinking about planning. If even big, ossified agencies like HUD, DOT and EPA can learn to intertwine work on housing, transportation, economic development, and environmental protection, the barriers between those sectors begin to blur and fade away. Community and regional planning grants like the ones announced this week were a celebrated symbol of the long-overdue integration of those fields, and they’ve made an incalculable difference in the communities they’ve assisted. With any luck, the next Congress won’t be so short-sighted in making spending cuts.

Though the 2 train runs up White Plains Road, the Department of City Planning has proposed downzoning all the areas bounded by yellow on either side of the street. Image: NYC DCP

The Department of City Planning’s commitment to rezoning the city along more transit-oriented lines is a critical component of its sustainability agenda. Allowing more people to live and work next to transit means more people will ride transit and fewer will drive.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, upzonings have indeed been concentrated near transit. But what the administration gives with one hand, it takes with the other. Over the last decade, the Department of City Planning has also downzoned large swaths of transit-accessible land, preventing further development in these locations. Indeed, under one representative five-year period of Bloomberg and Burden’s city planning, three-quarters of the lots rezoned for greater density were located within a half-mile of rail transit, but so were two-thirds of the lots where development was further restricted, according to research by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The pattern still holds. In fact, some of DCP’s most recent rezonings are restricting development on blocks literally around the corner from a subway stop.

Take the Williamsbridge/Baychester rezoning in the Bronx, which the City Planning Commission certified last month. There, an elevated train, the 2, runs up White Plains Avenue. Along White Plains itself, DCP proposes to either maintain the existing rules or allow slightly more growth. But turn the corner off the main street even a fraction of a block, and the department is seeking to sharply curtail the opportunity for growth.

At the 219th Street station, for example, the allowable floor area ratio (or FAR), a measure of density, would drop from 2.43 to 1.25 as soon as you move east off of White Plains. Parking minimums would rise, requiring 85 parking spots for every 100 homes (up from a 70 percent ratio). To the immediate northwest of the station, the proposed zoning would be even stricter, with a FAR of 1.1 and a parking space required for each new residential unit.

The story is the same one stop further north at 225th Street. Walk one short block south of the station, turn left and the allowable FAR drops to 0.9, again with a parking space required for each unit.

Two sides of the Baychester Avenue stop on the 5 line are slated for the same extremely restrictive zoning, but in that case there won’t even be any upzoning along a main street to compensate for it.

Those neighborhoods are in the northeast Bronx, near the end of the subway system. Even so, transit is heavily used in the area; in that City Council district, less than half of residents drive to work.

Moreover, DCP is tightening its zoning precisely because developers want to build in these areas. Explaining the need for the new restrictions, the department writes on its website that “the residential neighborhoods in the rezoning area have been experiencing development pressure” and that the new rules are needed to “preserve the scale and context of these areas.”

Richard Gorman, the chair of Bronx Community Board 12, put it more explicitly. “We are all extremely excited about the proposed rezoning,” he told the Bronx Times-Reporter. “We have low-density communities, and we would like to keep that character alive here.”

Surprisingly, City Planning claims that this rezoning is transit-oriented. Said DCP Commissioner Amanda Burden to the Times-Reporter, “In keeping with our commitment to transit-oriented growth, this rezoning would direct development away from residential side streets with small homes, to blocks than can accommodate new commercial and housing opportunities.” DCP did not respond to Streetsblog inquiries for this story.

Williamsbridge and Baychester are far from exceptional cases. Another DCP proposal currently working its way through the public review process will change the development rules for Sunnyside and Woodside in western Queens. That plan includes some significant upzonings near transit, near the 40th Street 7 station, for example. But while DCP pushed for more growth near some rail stations, it proposed restrictions near others.

In the four-block area between the 65th Street station on the M and R lines and the 69th Street station on the 7, for example, DCP is seeking to reduce the allowable density of development while adding a requirement that all new residences include a front yard. The yard must be at least as deep as that of the yard next door and no less than five feet deep.

Every time the Bloomberg administration restricts development near transit, it means people who would want to live or locate businesses there cannot. The forestalled development will be pushed somewhere else, perhaps away from transit, out in the suburbs, or out of the New York region altogether. Those would-be transit riders will drive and New York housing prices will rise. It’s hard to see how actively halting or shrinking development near transit squares with the goals of PlaNYC.

Chicago's GO TO 2040 plan to link transportation, land use, and economic development was awarded a $4.25 million Regional Planning grant from HUD last October. Image: CMAP

That’s still a significant reduction from the $150 million the partnership had last year, but in this time of shrinking budgets, it’s a lot more than some livability advocates feared. If the Sustainable Communities program had been killed in this budget, it would have been all the more difficult to revive it for inclusion in the upcoming reauthorization of the transportation bill.

The president wants to keep the partnership going, and indeed, within the administration and among reformers, the funding for the partnership is seen as a money-saver, consolidating duplicative agency programs, cutting through red tape, and using outcome-based metrics to identify and fund effective projects. Still, it’s an administration program labeled “livability” and was, therefore, extremely vulnerable to the GOP ax.

The Partnership for Sustainable Communities is the name for the coordination among DOT, EPA, and HUD to promote planning and infrastructure investment according to their six tenets of livability: transportation choices, affordable housing, economic competitiveness, support for existing communities, coordination of federal policies and investing in healthy communities. The two planning grant programs, which are funded and managed out of HUD, are a centerpiece of the entire partnership. The other main part of it, TIGER, is run through the DOT and also saw the bulk of its funding — the lion’s share of TIGER, if you will — preserved (perhaps somewhat surprisingly, in the current budget bill), suffering only a 12 percent cut.

Meanwhile, transit capital funding (the FTA’s New Starts program) was reduced by about a quarter, high-speed rail was zeroed out completely, Amtrak took about a 10 percent hit, and TIGGER (a greenhouse gas reduction program for transit) got cut from $75 million to $50 million.

State and local recipients of partnership grants deserve much of the credit for keeping these programs alive. They made a powerful case to their members of Congress for the necessity of continuing the grants. According to Geoff Anderson of Smart Growth America, more than 60 national organizations signed a public letter to members of Congress in support of the partnership’s programs, and over 150 state and local organizations sent letters to Congress voicing their support as well.

Of course, with this round of the budget fight over, it’s time to regroup for the next one, starting now. “Congress will decide budget provisions for 2012 in the coming weeks and funding for the Partnership will once again be at great risk,” Anderson said. Indeed, the lines are drawn. House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) is pushing for his brand of deep and painful cuts, the Democrats have released an outline of a gentler budget, and the president released his budget proposal, only to get behind a deficit reduction plan last week which would amend his previous budget.

Another notable aspect of the FY2011 budget passed (at long last) by Congress: It contains no earmarks. And as if it were trying to exorcise the ghost of past earmarks, it even cancels previously allocated transportation earmarks that hadn’t been spent. That’s a big shift for a legislature that used to be addicted to pork as members’ way to prove their worth to constituents before re-election time. Still, there are some good programs out there that historically get funded through earmarks, and their future in an earmark-free world is uncertain. Biking and walking paths, some transit projects, Safe Routes to School and the Job Access and Reverse Commute program to provide transportation to work for low-income people are just some member-designated projects that may not have received adequate funding if it weren’t for earmarks, since they’re often ignored by state DOTs.

The New York and Connecticut region have the best transit and rail network in the country, explained Robert Yaro of the Regional Plan Association, which is administering the collaboration, but also the largest income gaps and most expensive housing. For the region to continue to prosper in the 21st century, he said, it needs to embrace its transportation system as the backbone for continued development, including affordable housing.

By mid-century, said Adolfo Carrion, the regional HUD administrator and former director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, the country will need an additional 200 billion square feet of development to house its growing population and economy. “It has to be vertical,” said Carrion. “It has to be reliant on mass transit.”

For that to happen, local government needs to lay the groundwork now, so that when the economy recovers from recession and the real estate market again kicks into high gear, dense and transit-oriented projects are built. This grant makes that kind of planning possible.

In New York City, for example, the Department of City Planning will develop strategies to encourage transit-oriented development at Metro-North stations in the Bronx and at the East New York LIRR station. “Growth in New York City in the right places actually takes cars off the road,” said Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden. The Bronx was selected due to its strong growth in recent years, she added. “The logical place for the Bronx to grow more is along its Metro-North corridors.”

In East New York, fantastic transportation resources are paired with major economic challenges and strong community organizations to partner with. The area near the train station will become what Burden called “a really complete neighborhood, live/work, mixed-income, mixed-use, that’s really walkable, bikeable with strong mass transit.”

In Stamford and Bridgeport, the grant will fund feasibility studies for new rail stations, which could catalyze the redevelopment of entire new neighborhoods.

Nassau County will develop plans for infill development at three Long Island Railroad stations, which County Executive Ed Mangano called “a new model of suburban growth that both protects existing communities and open space while generating job opportunities, workforce housing, and property tax revenue.” Suffolk County will work to expand its much-lauded transfer of development right program, which is currently used to protect the Long Island pine barrens.

The other projects funded by the partnership, all of which look impressive, can be found at its new website.

Politically, the partnership is also notable for who isn’t involved. First, the federal government cut out state government from the funding process, turning instead to a non-profit to facilitate cooperation across state lines.

“It’s hard for states to give up control,” said New York State Department of Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald, who also supported this project while in the Connecticut state government. Working directly with cities and counties, however, is a “gamechanger,” said Carrion, empowering the local governments that are the “natural partners” in efforts to build livable communities.

Also absent was one-third of what is normally considered a tri-state region: New Jersey. “We hoped that this would be the Newark to New Haven corridor,” revealed Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, “but then one of the states dropped out.” New Jersey ultimately applied for a Sustainable Communities grant on its own, said Yaro, who wryly noted that New Jersey’s application was not a winner.

Proximity to downtown and employment centers, and the availability of developable land, are what lead to big real estate impacts from transit expansion. Source: CTOD

“Transit alone is insufficient to make a real estate market,” said Dena Belzer, the president of Strategic Economics, an urban design consulting firm. Her group is a partner in the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD), which this week released a new report on the effects of transit expansion on real estate markets.

Transit won’t, on its own, create a booming market for compact, mixed-use development, but if a city has a good, walkable grid and simply needs better access to jobs and centers of activity, it can do wonders. “There are sites where you can see that opening up access just really ‘popped’ things,” Belzer said. For the best chances of success, you need to use transit to connect underutilized land with walkable downtowns and employment opportunities.

The new CTOD report, “Rails to Real Estate: Development Patterns along Three New Transit Lines” [PDF], picked corridors in the Southeast (Charlotte, NC), the West (Denver, CO) and the Midwest (Minneapolis) to see how transit affected development patterns.

Residential units under construction near Charlotte's Blue Line. Photo: Willamor Media/Flickr

The big success story was Charlotte’s Blue Line – where transit “popped things,” as Belzer said. It’s the newest of the three lines, having just opened in 2007, at the height of an ongoing real estate boom. (It went bust along with the rest of the country, and all the big investors pulled out, but until that happened, everything was going great.)

Even in that short timeframe, this corridor saw the biggest spike in development after the opening of the transit line – nearly 10 million square feet of new development, compared with 6.7 million in Minneapolis and 7.8 million in Denver – and that’s along a rail line that’s only half as long as Denver’s (though tightly packed with 15 stations, compared to Denver’s 14).

Charlotte was destined for greatness because the city aligned its transit along all the right places, according to Belzer.

“Charlotte was much more intentional about pairing these infrastructure improvements with the line and placing their stations in locations that would be accessible and enhance development opportunities,” she said. Light rail was built in the midst of a housing boom where demand was focused on high-density housing.

The biggest factor, Belzer said, was that “the line itself went through neighborhoods that were ripe for development.” Even so, that corridor didn’t develop evenly. Most of the development occurred in the downtown district, with some in the South End, an old manufacturing area. “Once it got into places with a more suburban development pattern – less street connectivity, the line is elevated and the stations are no longer at ground level – you see very little impact. The development activity drops off.”

A pedestrian-friendly street grid is a defining quality of places where TOD flourished. In addition to financing light rail, Charlotte voters have approved bonds for station area infrastructure like streetscaping and sidewalks.

That was where Denver came up short. The Southeast Corridor runs along I-25 and I-225, linking suburbs with office jobs. Given that the line follows a highway, and that stations are located in areas without a walkable street grid, perhaps it’s not surprising that development was more dispersed than in Charlotte, with much of it happening on greenfield sites. “The accessibility value there came from the highway,” Belzer said. “Transit was just frosting on the cake.”

The authors do speculate, however, that the transit line’s greatest impact may have been in the design of the new projects and a greater mix of uses.

Of course, transit is often built in places that have already experienced a significant degree of development, where there isn’t always room for much more. Belzer pointed to Denver’s West corridor, under construction now, where several of the station stops are being built in well-established, densely developed neighborhoods. “And there isn’t much opportunity for new development there,” Belzer said. “In that case, the opportunity is to have people who live in that neighborhood be able to use transit, and not have to own a car. So pedestrian connectivity would be a more important thing to focus on – it’s not about reframing a real estate market or enhancing development. It’s just about making a tighter connection between the land use and the transit.”

Square footage of all new development completed or under construction during the specified time period. Source: CTOD

Minneapolis’s Hiawatha Line is the oldest of the three case studies, having opened in 2004. At the time, skeptics noted that the new light rail line would only go from the airport to the Mall of America and downtown – a benefit for tourists and businesspeople but not the majority of city residents. Regardless, ridership has far exceeded expectations. In fact, the 30,500 average weekday trips already exceeds Metro Transit’s goals for the year 2020.

Most of the new development that came in with the Hiawatha rail line was in the form of downtown condos and apartments – very little commercial development occurred. In some places outside of downtown, the relative inaccessibility of the stations from the neighborhoods meant that not all the station areas saw property values go up, as transit was less integrated into the neighborhood.

“There are still opportunities for infill development on sites in Minneapolis,” the report states, “many in neighborhoods with a need for better streetscape, pedestrian connections and other ‘placemaking’ investments.”

To date, most transit-oriented development has occurred in or near downtowns or major employment centers, according to the authors, in part because those places allow for “investments in neighborhood infrastructure and amenities [that] are critical for unlocking the potential for TOD, especially in areas where land use patterns were previously automobile dependent.”

The report is especially useful for localities looking to finance transit using value capture, a strategy by which the private sector, anticipating economic benefits and increased property values, helps pay for a new transit line. Value capture is tricky business, and having some added clarity about when TOD takes off – and when it falls flat – is enormously helpful for developers and planners.

For the first chapter in Streetfilms’ Moving Beyond the Automobile series, we’re taking a look at transit-oriented development, more commonly known by the acronym TOD.

Streetfilms headquarters is a short train ride from some great TOD success stories taking shape along a stretch of New Jersey’s Hudson River coast. Across the river from NYC, transit-oriented development has been booming for the last two decades, and transportation options are as diverse as you can get. The Hudson-Bergen light-rail, multiple ferry lines, PATH, NJ Transit commuter trains, and buses provide plentiful service, while in some areas car ownership is as low as 40 to 45 percent.

This series is made possible by funding from The Oram Foundation’s Fund for The Environment & Urban Life.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is investing in a new system of transitways and priced traffic lanes instead of traditional highway expansion. Planners there say the region will never be able to build its way out of congestion with highways.

Like many communities throughout the country, Minneapolis-St. Paul is moving beyond the decades-old assumption that the only way to eliminate congestion is with more outward-stretching asphalt. This fall, officials in the Twin Cities voted to roll back highway expansions and increase access to transit options instead.

Local planners say it’s time to acknowledge that the region simply can’t afford to accommodate growth by building new highways.

“We couldn’t keep going on acting as if we were going to get money to build our way out of congestion,” said Arlene McCarthy, Director of Metropolitan Transportation Services for the Twin Cities Metro Council, which drafted and approved the new plan. “One county alone could easily consume all the money the region has. That’s the reality.”

With vehicle trips expected to increase 35 percent by 2030, regional planners estimate it would cost approximately $40 billion to even attempt to tackle congestion with traditional road projects. But only about $8 billion is expected to be available to the regional planning agency over the next ten years.

The goal of the Twin Cities 2030 Transportation Plan is to maximize the use of existing freeways by adding bus lanes or priced traffic lanes in shoulders wherever possible. The new framework will require increased emphasis on transit and other non-automotive modes.

Rather than measuring transportation capacity in terms of traffic volumes, planners have focused on moving people. The 2030 plan calls for using congestion pricing to help encourage transit, carpooling, walking and biking. The Twin Cities envision a network of “transitways,” which will serve the region through passenger rail, bus rapid transit or express busways. Compact, transit-oriented development will be built in clusters along these corridors. The plan also calls for clustering jobs near transportation centers and encouraging mixed-use development, McCarthy said.

The overall strategy is to pursue high-benefit, low-cost projects. “We’re asking the question, ‘Can we provide the majority of the benefit at a much lower cost?’” McCarthy said. “We’re finding that we can do that.”

As part of the new framework, 14 previously planned highway expansions totaling $2.3 billion have been tabled. However, six “high-impact, low-cost” highway projects are still slated to move forward. Many of the remaining projects focus on the building of high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes, but traditional highway building is included to a limited extent as well.

Local environmental and business groups have been supportive of the proposal. Jim Erkel, director of the land use and transportation program at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, said it will help ease water and air pollution in the region and prevent sprawl from consuming farmland. The plan, he said, should also help the region stay in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

“We’re going to be looking at less impervious surface,” he said. “Building in already developed areas should mean fewer vehicle miles traveled.”

In addition, Jeremy Estenson of the regional chamber of commerce told the Star Tribune in September that despite some reservations, overall the business group is behind the plan.

This map outlines the downsized number of highway expansions planned for the Twin Cities under the 2030 Plan. Map: Twin Cities Metro Council

Of course, not everyone is thrilled. A group of suburban political leaders raised strong objections, noting that without highway expansion plans in place, the suburban counties would not have been eligible to apply for windfall funds like the federal support that flowed from the 2008 stimulus package.

“Some of us felt that we should have a more aggressive plan,” said Dennis Hegberg, a commissioner with suburban Washington County, which is growing rapidly. “There are a number of state and federal highways that need attention and I feel they’re not being paid attention to.” Still, Hegberg said he and his counterparts have accepted the result of the council’s vote.

One major catalyst for change was the tragedy that took place on August 1, 2007, when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis and seven people were killed. The event prompted a tax increase to support bridge maintenance, and more generally, forced political leaders to take their responsibility for infrastructure maintenance seriously.

“After August 1, 2007 the ground shifted tremendously,” said Erkel. “It seemed to take that to make the legislature realize that we had a lot of things to take care of.”

The 2030 Plan, and its emphasis on maintenance, should help ensure the community avoids such tragedies in the future.

The plan puts the Twin Cities ahead of the curve in regional transportation policy from a national standpoint. But Minneapolis still lags behind places like Portland, Oregon; Arlington, Virginia; and Montgomery County, Maryland on issues such as land use and transit, said Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota and author of American Metropolitics.

Though the traditionally progressive Twin Cities benefit from having very strong land use statutes, they haven’t been aggressive enough in enforcing those standards, he said.

Will Schroeer, policy and research director for Smart Growth America, agreed that the Minneapolis plan has room for improvement. Priced lanes offer some advantages, including the ability to recoup expenses, manage congestion, and create priority space for buses, Schroeer said. But the additional lanes still reinforce auto dependence.

Twin Cities officials acknowledge within the plan that the region already has a greater number of highway miles per capita than many comparable areas. The region built hundreds of miles of new highways in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. While the 2030 plan is a step forward, Minneapolis could have gained more ground on the nation’s best-planned regions by just saying no to any new highway lanes. “It’s new capacity in an area which doesn’t really need new capacity,” said Schroeer. “It’s better than regular capacity but it’s still not great.”

This intersection, the most dangerous in Syracuse, can't inspire too many people to walk or bike. If Albany passed a complete streets law, one of many green transportation policies they haven't acted on, it could be safer. Image: Google Street View.

“Getting Back on Track,” a new report by Smart Growth America and the Natural Resources Defense Council, ranks New York 21st of all the states when it comes to environmentally friendly transportation policy, right between Nevada and New Mexico (check out Streetsblog Capitol Hill for a national perspective on the report). Though the state does a decent job of spending its money in the right places, New York lacks almost all the legislative cornerstones necessary to move our transportation system towards sustainability.

Transportation accounts for a full 32 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. American transportation emissions alone are greater than the total greenhouse gas emissions of any other country except China and Russia. State policy is crucial to cutting that figure. The report cites one study which found that if Maryland built a new outer beltway through the D.C. suburbs, those 18 miles of tolled highway would increase the total greenhouse gas emissions of the entire Washington region by 11 percent.

But because of Albany inaction, New York is an embarrassment when it comes to policies other than spending and investment. At 44th, our infrastructure policies are rated worse than South Dakota’s (consolation prize: we just barely edge out North Dakota).

Thanks to the State Assembly, we don’t have a complete streets law, so in many areas, people don’t feel safe making even the shortest trips without getting in a car. We’re one of only nine states that doesn’t allow pay-as-you-drive insurance, which creates a big financial incentive to drive less. We don’t offer incentives to carpool or telecommute and we don’t offer incentives for transit-oriented development.

The report’s authors made special note of New York’s poor performance. “One of the states that fared less well than I might have expected is New York State,” said Smart Growth America’s Neha Bhatt on a conference call with reporters. “It was outperformed by a lot of rural states.” The Assembly’s killing of congestion pricing in 2008 received special attention from the report authors as a case study in state-level obstructionism.

When it comes to state spending, at least, New York does much better, beaten out only by Rhode Island and Delaware. New York earns top marks for being the only state to spend more on transit than highways. On top of that, more of that highway spending goes toward maintenance, as opposed to trip-inducing road expansions, than in any other state.

Even so, “Getting Back on Track” finds that New York State is failing to adequately fund transit, leaving riders reliant on what comes from local governments and the feds. These days, that means the numbers just don’t add up. And New York was one of 15 states given the lowest ranking on using federal road money for bike or pedestrian infrastructure. Despite the state’s relatively high score on spending, we’re not doing nearly as well as we could be in terms of the budget; it’s just that most states are doing even worse.

To be fair, New York isn’t getting all the credit it deserves. Our newly passed smart growth law wasn’t counted because it hadn’t taken effect when the report was being prepared. “If they pull the implementation of that off well, it’s going to become a model state policy for the entire country,” said Bhatt. If effective, the smart growth law would bump New York up a few slots, though it would still be well outside the top tier of states.

With so many transit riders — and perhaps more importantly, transit-riding voters — New York should be a leader in green transportation. “Getting Back on Track” shows that instead, we’re in many ways at the very back of the pack.

Plus, there’s the ultimate shame for New Yorkers. The third-place state to our number 21? New Jersey.

The Paterson plan calls for enormous reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve the targets would require a total transformation of how New York grows and how residents get around.

As Andrew Cuomo transitions into the governorship, David Paterson just handed him a parting gift: a comprehensive blueprint for how the state can tackle its greenhouse gas emissions. The plan, which has been in development since a Paterson executive order in August 2009, goes into spectacular detail about how the state might reach the ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels over the next forty years.

With Paterson exiting the stage soon, the plan carries little weight, but it shows what it would take for New York to tackle climate change with the urgency it deserves. While emissions from buildings are the largest contributor to climate change in New York, the team of experts who authored the report make clear that it will take an all-out transformation of the state’s transportation and land use systems to reach the climate goal. Transit expansion, smart growth, complete streets, and congestion pricing (for New York City, at least) all figure into the plan.

The biggest transportation-related reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would come from a total shift to clean vehicles powered by clean fuels by 2035. Over the next 20 years, moving toward that goal could eliminate 130 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, more than every other transportation and land use proposal combined.

The other big-ticket reduction in the transportation sector would come from a massive expansion of transit. That includes everything from bus rapid transit in every metro area in the state, to new subways and the roll-out of high-speed rail. All that new transit would cut greenhouse gas emissions by a large amount, though the report notes that it couldn’t reduce driving very much in more rural parts of the state.

The transit expansion would cost an additional $25 billion over the next two decades, making it the most expensive transportation-related suggestion. “Achieving these goals would require funding well above what is available today,” the authors write. Of course, the report, which is more scientific than political, doesn’t specify where the funding for this transit expansion would come from.

Under the plan, the biggest greenhouse gas emissions reductions would come from changes to how cars are fueled. Smart growth policies offer the state big cost-savings and could be an appealing early action for Andrew Cuomo.

Smart growth initiatives, without which the transportation emissions targets would be impossible, loom large in the plan. “Without significant changes in land use and development patterns in New York State, the level of VMT reductions and mode share changes contemplated in the entire suite of transportation and land use policies will be difficult to achieve,” the report states. If New York keeps sprawling, we won’t be able to build well-used transit systems, and increased driving will eat away at fuel efficiency gains.

The report offers two principal strategies to combat sprawl. First, the authors recommend the creation of “priority growth centers” where compact, mixed-use, walkable and bikeable development can flourish. These centers would exist in urban, suburban, and rural forms. Again, the goals here are extremely ambitious. The report calls for half of all new construction to take place in these priority growth centers by 2030 — a tough bar to clear considering the state can provide smart growth incentives but can’t directly regulate land use.

Even so, the plan emphasizes that smart growth initiatives need to be implemented as soon as possible, especially in fast-growing downstate areas. If action isn’t taken quickly, all that new sprawl gets baked into the cake. “Land use patterns are difficult to change once established,” says one understated passage.

Putting growth in the right parts of the state, however, doesn’t get you across the finish line. You also need to take what the authors call “a micro-planning approach by creating specific, people-friendly/oriented network/land use connections.” That means endorsing complete streets, for example. While more compact development makes it far easier to walk to the store, on a terribly designed street it might still be dangerous or unpleasant.

The plan also endorses two policies particularly important for the densest urban environments in the state: congestion pricing and parking reform.

Congestion pricing, the authors propose, should be instituted in New York City with the revenues going to pay for some of their other recommendations.

The plan also calls for a major revision of parking policy across the state. In the downtowns of all the state’s major cities, smarter pricing of on-street parking could reduce a major incentive to drive. Off-street, employers can offer their workers the option of cashing out their parking benefits rather than only offering free parking. The authors suggest that “the true cost of parking should be reflected in municipal development policies and zoning ordinances.”

Neither congestion pricing nor parking reform offers a large reduction in statewide emissions. In fact, they offer the two smallest reductions of any land use or transportation policy. However, a place like Manhattan already has the best transit and most compact development in the country. The most important policies are already in effect, essentially. Congestion pricing and parking reform would push it a step even further and allow the very green, very massive, very densely populated regional core to function more smoothly.

This climate plan doesn’t have any sort of binding power or even an abstract commitment from the state to eventually follow its specific recommendations, though Paterson’s executive order does promise to reach that 80 percent reduction somehow. Even so, it could serve as a blueprint for the new administration to follow as it tackles climate change and a yardstick against which to measure future environmental efforts.

For the fiscally conservative Cuomo, the report also makes clear that a number of these efforts will actually help the state’s bottom line. In particular, by reducing the cost of new infrastructure, the smart growth initiatives save the state billions over time. If Cuomo wants a way to burnish his environmental reputation without compromising on fiscal discipline, there’s no better place to start.

The addition of light rail has been linked to higher rates of car ownership, as compared to the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as a whole, but that doesn't mean we should stop building light rail. Image: Dukakis Center (PDF)

Even when the new development is built around transit, which can lower transportation costs for low-income residents, unintended consequences can ensue.

Researchers with the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy have recently reached some provocative conclusions from their study of gentrification and transit-oriented development. Without proper planning, they found, TODs can lead to stratified neighborhoods and higher rates of car ownership. They also offered some solutions to ensure that transit-oriented development achieves its intended goals, such as preserving affordable housing and restricting parking in new developments.

Historically, the authors note, transit-rich neighborhoods tend to be diverse. The low-income people and people of color who live there often don’t have cars and they depend on public transportation. They also usually rent their homes — and since rental housing turns over faster than owner-occupied homes, this speeds along the process of gentrification when new transit options come to a neighborhood.

Rents go up as transit arrives (often along with new shops and restaurants) and more affluent people move in. And guess what? Those wealthier people tend to have more cars. That’s the fundamental paradox: the people who are attracted to transit-rich neighborhoods – and have the money to pay more to live there – don’t use transit as much as less affluent people who can get priced out.

The authors stop short of calling this pattern “displacement” – they point to “normal processes of housing turnover and succession.” But what’s clear is that the people moving in are from a different income demographic than those moving out (though the researchers say the racial makeup tends to stay the same).

Income-based housing stratification and more cars are not the outcomes planners want from transit or transit-oriented development. The challenge is to keep development around transit from becoming too exclusive and too car-oriented. How can communities do this?

The report comes with an entire policy toolkit for communities planning new transit (especially light rail, which, according to the research, brings about even more profound change than other forms of transportation.)

In San Leandro, California, they’ve implemented a comprehensive strategy to preserve existing affordable housing and add more. In Minneapolis, the Longfellow neighborhood negotiated benefits that the city then incorporated into the development approvals — making the deal binding. In all cases, ensuring broad public participation in the process was essential.

But having your say is one thing — actually being able to afford your own home next year and the year after — that’s what counts. In Denver, Charlotte, and the Bay Area, communities used transit=oriented development acquisition funds to buy or preserve affordable housing before transit projects came in and drove up land prices and property values.

Some other tools in the equitable TOD toolbox:

• Housing trust funds, which are dedicated sources of public funding for affordable housing
• Low-income tax credits, allocated by state housing agencies to developers to provide money for affordable housing
• Tax increment financing districts, which use the revenue from the higher property taxes in the surrounding area to help finance the building and preservation of affordable housing
• Inclusionary zoning ordinances requiring some proportion of new units to be affordable (usually 10-25 percent, but sometimes more)
• Housing incentive programs that fund transportation-related livability infrastructure in affordable housing projects, which reward local communities for the creation of affordable housing near transit

These are ways to maintain affordability and to keep the existing residents from having to leave. But you also have to incentivize transit use among the new residents, who have the means to drive a lot if they choose. Stephanie Pollack, the lead study author, says it’s just as important to have “transit-oriented neighbors” as to have “transit-oriented development.” One of the most important levers, it turns out, is parking policy.

Here’s what she told an audience at Rail~volution about one transportation package she negotiated in Boston.

This is what the package looked like: it was designed to get at the issue of creating transit-oriented neighbors who would use the transit. One parking space per unit, priced separately from the condo… shared parking spaces in the same garage so people would make their second car a shared car; and a free annual transit pass for your first year after purchase, provided by the developer, who by the way will spend way more on a second sub-surface parking spot for each unit than that annual transit pass will cost them. You have to think about the market housing in transit-oriented neighborhoods. We’re so focused on ‘we need affordable housing’ – because we do – but we still want the people living in the non-affordable housing to be good transit neighbors.

“Unbundling” parking from the price of the unit is key. People don’t notice the cost of car ownership when it’s folded into the cost of their housing, and car-free residents effectively end up sharing the cost of providing parking for car owners — they don’t get the full financial pay-off of eschewing a car. But when faced with the prospect of paying $100 a month for parking in your own building, the benefits of going car-free – especially in a neighborhood newly equipped with good public transportation – suddenly sound like a good deal compared to the costs of owning a car.

Fort Worth's critical Tower 55 rail intersection will get badly needed upgrades, increasing freight capacity and train speeds. Photo: Star-Telegram.

The largest grant overall went to Atlanta’s streetcar project, as Tanya reported on Friday. Salt Lake City’s Sugar House Streetcar project also got a big win, nabbing a $26 million grant. The line, which will be integrated with the larger TRAX transit system, is expected to have a daily ridership of 3,000 and take 800 cars off the road, according to the U.S. DOT’s project description. In keeping with a commitment to multi-modalism, the line is being designed with room for links in the region’s trail system.

After the Atlanta streetcar, the next largest grant went to Fort Worth, Texas, for improvements to the freight rail system. The Tower 55 project would add freight capacity by building new track and improving signaling where two railroad lines cross in downtown Forth Worth. That’s expected to increase the number of trains that can pass through the intersection by 40 percent, allow train speeds to increase from 10 mph to 30 mph, and ease delays on freight, AMTRAK and commuter rail lines. The project will also build pedestrian and bike underpasses to eliminate dangerous at-grade crossings.

The TIGER II grants aren’t limited to urban areas. In rural northwest Tennessee, for example, the program is providing $13 million to build a port at Cates Landing, on the Mississippi River. That’s intended to encourage barge shipping and spur economic development in an area where 37 percent of residents live below the poverty line.

Nearly half of the TIGER grants given out weren’t for construction but for supporting the planning process. Many of those planning grants were jointly given out by DOT and HUD, a sign of the ongoing integration of transportation and land use policies by the Obama Administration. For example, Denver received a joint $1.1 million grant to support affordable housing and transit-oriented development along the new West Corridor light rail line. The Denver Housing Authority owns 62 acres of land along the line, and this grant will enable it to spur transit-oriented development while creating an affordable housing land bank — so that as the corridor grows, it will do so equitably.

Overall, 29 percent of TIGER II funding went to road projects, 26 percent to transit, 20 percent to rail, 16 percent to ports, four percent to bicycle and pedestrian projects, and five percent for planning grants. Importantly, the largest road projects weren’t highway expansions but fix-it-first bridge repairs. In Seattle, for example, TIGER II money will replace the South Park Bridge, which was declared unsafe and closed in June; the new bridge will have both sidewalks and bike lanes in each direction.

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced the winners of nearly $100 million in grants from its new Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program, intended to connect “housing with good jobs, quality schools and transportation.” The grants are meant to either help regions develop sustainability plans or to assist with the implementation of plans where they exist.

Minneapolis-St. Paul got $5 million to support development along transit corridors. Finance & Commerce

Last month, Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt wrote about the promise these grants offer to urban areas like Cleveland that have been hollowed out by highway-oriented growth in far-flung suburbs. They represent an opportunity for regions to turn sprawling patterns of growth into targeted development that fosters walkability and viable transit options.

“Regions that embrace sustainable communities will have a built-in competitive edge in attracting jobs and private investment,” said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan in a statement accompanying the announcement. “Planning our communities smarter means parents will spend less time driving and more time with their children; more families will live in safe, stable communities near good schools and jobs; and more businesses will have access to the capital and talent they need to grow and prosper.”

The grants announced yesterday are the same kind that would be funded by the Livable Communities Act, introduced last year by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT). That bill would offer grants to foster coordinated land use and transportation planning across the country. It is currently hanging in limbo, with Dodd about to leave the Senate. No one knows how long Congress will re-convene for its lame duck session after the elections, or what they will take up.

But bill or no bill, the HUD grants are filling a gap.

A sample of the regions that won grants today:

* The Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Council received $5 million to support planning “along the growing network of transit corridors.” According to Met Council chair Peter Bell, “The funds are a means to focus our efforts on shaping development along transit corridors in ways that make transit more successful, promote housing and transportation affordability and availability, and make communities more vital.”

* Cleveland received $4.25 million to rein in the devastating sprawl Angie described last month. Metro Cleveland’s regional planning agency hasn’t actually been doing much regional planning — and the result has been a depressed, abandoned urban core surrounded by rapid growth on the suburban fringe. This grant requires a more proactive approach to planning for future development “with an eye toward sustainability.”

* The Chicago region also got $4.25 million for its GO TO 2040 plan. HUD didn’t want to dictate livability prescriptions to regions, and in Chicago, at least, the regional agency is leaving a lot of the details up to the locality. But the idea is to “support more compact development and redevelopment” by improving transit and options for walking and bicycling. They’re also keeping an eye on protecting green space and local historic character.

The winners weren’t all major metropolitan regions. From Anniston, Alabama to Urbandale, Iowa, small towns and rural areas got a boost too. You can see the full list of winners here. [PDF]

Last week, the Livable Communities Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee, a milestone for legislation that would fund local efforts to plan for growth while curbing sprawl. But the 12-10 party line vote raised the prospect that the bill might also encounter unified Republican opposition in the full Senate, where the threat of a filibuster has become the norm.

One GOP senator's "no" vote seemed especially incongruous -- Utah's Bob Bennett. The vast majority of the people whom Bennett represents live in the region centered around Salt Lake City, which has made significant strides in recent years to coordinate housing development and transit investments -- exactly the sort of initiatives that the Livable Communities Act would reward.

“There are many, many things in this legislation that I strongly support," Bennett said during the subcommittee vote, before explaining why he would not support the bill. “There are things in this legislation that... would get in the way of what we are already doing in our state. So I will reluctantly vote against it.”

The remarks provoked some head scratching from advocates familiar with the regional planning efforts underway in Bennett's home state.

“I can’t imagine why he would say that,” said Kate Rube, policy director at Smart Growth America. "You would think a state like Utah would really stand to benefit from that bill."

“I’m not sure what he was referring to,” said Alan Matheson, executive director of Envision Utah, a non-profit that advises municipalities on smart growth strategies. The group’s planning work focuses on coordinating transportation and housing policies while preserving open space. In the past, Matheson said, Bennett “has been a great supporter of the collaborative approaches we have taken in Utah.”

The Livable Communities Act, which would disburse competitive grants to communities of all sizes to both plan and build projects that reduce car-dependence and provide better access to transit, would stand to benefit the planning work that Envision Utah has facilitated. "If there was a way to supplement local funding, it would enable us to go beyond regular planning efforts to go to important implementation work," Matheson said.

Bennett’s office had no further comment as of yesterday afternoon.

Conservatives like Bennett may look at the bill and frown on the $4 billion in federal grants that it would distribute. “One could be in favor of high-density neighborhoods with transit, but it's another thing to say the federal government should be pushing that,” said Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

But the bill creates incentives, not mandates, and it has strong backing from local governments who need the resources to plan for more sustainable growth. Only communities who apply for grants and meet funding requirements will get money, said Daria Daniel, associate legislative director for the National Association of Counties, a strong supporter of the bill.

“Some states have passed their own sustainability efforts,” Daniel said. "This would not usurp what state or local governments have already done."

Envision Utah built support for transit-centered growth in part by communicating the high public costs of development based mainly on building detached housing (scenarios A and B). Graphic: Envision Utah

“It could cost you more in the future not to plan for the future,” Daniel said.

The Senate bill now awaits a vote on the floor; the corresponding House bill has yet to pass a committee vote. In his remarks at the Senate committee hearing, Bennett said he would be open to continuing discussions on the bill.

Donovan, LaHood, Jackson: Together forever? The Livable Communities Act would codify the partnership between HUD, US DOT, and the EPA. Photo: EPA

Most of the action would flow through HUD. This year the agency is funding $150 million in grants supporting regional efforts to improve access to transit and promote walkable development. The Livable Communities Act promises to scale up that program significantly, creating a new office within HUD, called the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, that will distribute about $4 billion through competitive grants.

The initial round of grants would fund comprehensive plans -- local initiatives to shape growth by coordinating housing, transportation, and economic development policies. Most of the funding -- $3.75 billion -- would be distributed over three years to implement projects identified in such plans.

While some Senators from rural states had expressed skepticism about the benefits of the bill for their constituents, yesterday's vote split strictly along party lines, with Democrats Jon Tester of Montana and Tim Johnson of South Dakota both voting in favor.

To make the case for the bill to his rural and Republican counterparts, Dodd singled out Envision Utah, a campaign that has built public support for smart growth policies in one of the country's reddest states. Not a single GOP Senator voted for the bill, however, even Utah's Bob Bennett, who told UPI, "I think the overall philosophy is wise, but I will be voting against it."

Some of the strongest backing for the bill has come from AARP, which sent a letter to committee members on Monday pointing out that the country's aging population will be poorly served if development patterns don't evolve to make driving less necessary. "Nine out of ten of our members tell us they want to stay in their own homes as they age -- most are living in suburban or rural areas and don't have access to public transportation," said Debra Alvarez, senior legislative representative for AARP. "There's a lot of things that can be done in small towns: co-locating things like post offices, grocery stores, pharmacies, and putting housing there too."

Advocates for transportation reform are now looking at the path forward for the bill. "We applaud the Committee for taking this major step forward on behalf of communities both small and large, and for American families looking for affordable homes in healthy neighborhoods with reliable transportation options," said Transportation for America director James Corless in a statement. "We urge the full Senate to follow their lead and give final passage."

Dodd has vowed to shepherd the Livable Communities Act through to become law before he retires in January. With Congress about to adjourn until September 13, he'll face a tight timeline. In addition to awaiting a vote in the full Senate, the bill has yet to clear a committee vote in the House, where Colorado representative Ed Perlmutter is the sponsor.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) (Photo: The Washington Note)

At today's committee hearing representatives of the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the National Association of Development Organizations, and the National Association of Regional Councils each strongly endorsed the goals of the bill. 

Witnesses drew on professional experience -- from trying to revitalize barren neighborhoods in Indianapolis to managing the growth of a rural Maryland county -- to explain how federal policy could spur better development where they live. The Hartford region, for example, is investing in a new bus rapid transit line, said Lyle Wray, the executive director for the region's council of governments, but they haven't been able to tie the transit project to broader goals. "Linking that opportunity to affordable housing, jobs, and sustainability is what the Livable Communities Act would allow us to do," he said.

Describing the bill today, Dodd stressed that integrated transportation and land use planning can help address a host of challenges: high foreclosure rates, climate change and oil dependency, deteriorating infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the loss of farmland. Those problems, Dodd argued, aren't urban or rural. "One community can use the grants to develop brownfields in a post-industrial area," he said, and "another might create a livable town center or main street." 

Even so, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), expressed doubt about whether his rural state would benefit under Dodd's legislation.

After acknowledging that sprawl is a problem, lamenting that in Montana housing has replaced some of the best farmland, Tester pressed the witness panel to explain how the Livable Communities Act would work for a town like his, with only 700 people. The two representatives of rural areas on the panel each suggested some sort of funding set-aside for rural communities, an idea which seemed to intrigue Tester.

Two other senators spoke who are not already sponsors of the bill. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) primarily discussed his own legislation specifically tailored to shrinking industrial cities, of which there are many in Ohio, but seemed supportive of Dodd's legislation. Mark Warner (D-VA) told the committee that he supports the goals of the Livable Communities Act, but would like to make sure that the bill is rigorously defined. "Is it just squishy livability?" he asked. "Is there a way that we can define this with metrics?" Witnesses assured him that results like the volume of reduced greenhouse gases, acres of preserved open space, and rises in property values can be measured.

The Crossings at Gresham brought transit-oriented development to Portland's suburbs, opening the door for financing to flow to similar projects. Image: Myhre Group Architects.

Metro -- Portland's regional government -- decided that wasn't good enough. They bought the site outright. Then Metro proceeded to double down on the original plans for the project, which it called The Crossings. Four stories became five, making the development the tallest building in Gresham. Condos became a mixed-use development with ground-floor retail, sidewalk cafés and engaging street-level facades.

There was still one big problem: financing. Charlotte Boxer, director of commercial real estate at Pacific Continental Bank, was skeptical of Metro's project. "What would draw people to live there, or what would make a retailer decide to lease there?" she asked. "There was substantial risk on Metro's part and on ours as the lender, because we had no comparables to go to that would say this would work." For the project to succeed financially, they'd have to charge rents 25 percent higher than the going rate in Gresham, for a type of development no one had ever tried there.

In many parts of America, efforts to build transit-oriented, walkable communities are foiled because financing can't be secured for projects that differ from the templates lenders have become used to since World War II. In Salt Lake City, for example, the local government's push for transit-oriented development has been stymied because local banks won't lend to projects without huge parking lots.

Why do lenders balk at development that reduces car dependence? In a word, inertia. "The lending industry appears to be very conservative, if your definition of conservative is doing the same thing this year as you did five years ago," said David Goldstein, the co-director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's energy program and an expert on environmental real estate financing. Because banks have no institutional memory of lending to transit-oriented development, they are reluctant to do so going forward.

In Portland, officials and activists have begun to escape this cycle. The policies they've pursued to foster walkable development are instructive for many American cities looking to grow without making traffic congestion worse.

Even in transit-rich New York, economic development officials have subsidized developers who import car-oriented standards. They are happy to secure favorable lending terms, underwritten by the U.S. government, for multi-story parking decks. It's safe to say that goals like enhancing the pedestrian environment or attaining sustainability targets are not motivating these decisions. Portland development officials do things differently. When planners there decided that urbanism and sustainability were good outcomes, they went out and started convincing lenders to change the way they do business.

Megan Gibb runs Metro's transit-oriented development program, which works with developers and offers financial incentives for TOD. The Crossings, for example, received discounted land, tax breaks, and other financial incentives from Metro. "Our whole program is to build more market-comparables," said Gibb. "The more TOD projects there are, the more it builds on itself." Each project that gets built makes the next one easier to finance.

Gibb also highlighted the centrality of public-private partnerships to Portland's success. According to Gibb, banks normally look at standard, car-oriented development models and say, "We know this worked in the past. Why would we want it to be any different?" When the public sector commits to smart growth, however, bankers instead see that the government "thinks this is really important and is willing to put their money where its mouth is." For financial institutions that are often quite risk-averse, government action provides the security necessary to move forward.

John Warner, who manages most of the TOD projects at the Portland Development Commission, argues that at first, government may have to push the envelope to convince banks that walkable development pays off. "Until you've got examples that lenders can look back in time at," he said, "you have to be doubly conservative and oversubsidize something to prove the concept." Warner added that in Portland, where lenders have bought into a consensus about the need for sustainable development, they've been able to walk back many subsidies.

At The Crossings, Metro's vision -- and incentives -- turned the project into reality. Financially, it's a complete success, with 100 percent occupancy and a sizable waiting list. It's won awards for transit-oriented design and earned the praise of Gresham's residents and politicians. Perhaps most importantly, however, it set an example.

Boxer, the initially skeptical executive at Pacific Continental Bank who provided The Crossings' financing, now says she is "very proud to say I have financed the project." She also calls it "truly pioneering," providing a model for how to bring walkable development to suburban locations. The Crossings, itself possible because of the successful projects that preceded it, helped pave the way for more and better transit-oriented developments that followed.

The Beranger condos, a new transit-oriented development in Gresham, wouldn't have been possible without The Crossings' success. Image: Gresham Downtown Development Association.

Moving forward, then, Portland will have to craft policies that expand the comfort zone of lenders. Gibb and Anderson saw shared parking and car-share as tools to mitigate banks' fears about financing projects with fewer parking spaces than normal.

There are also structural reasons that banks avoid transit-oriented development, which can't be overcome by building a few market comparables. Because profits from transit-oriented development tend to materialize more slowly than from typical suburban development, new financing methods are needed to make TOD more attractive to lenders. And of course, banks respond to the regulatory environment. Portland makes many developers adhere to principles of walkable development near transit lines.

It's true that Portland area bankers have yet to embrace the full range of development needed to reduce car-dependence. But as the region attempts to grow sustainably, it benefits immensely from development officials like John Warner, who talks passionately about "the community organizing needed to get all the stakeholders on board with the absolute necessity of transit-oriented development." While here in New York, where growth is ostensibly shaped by a citywide sustainability plan, the chair of the local Economic Development Corporation still thinks that not providing enough parking is "the worst thing we could do."

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, right, with Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) at left and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed at center. (Photo: White House Press)

Donovan's announcement came during an address to the Congress for the New Urbanism's (CNU) annual meeting in Atlanta. During his visit, the former New York City housing commissioner also toured the BeltLine project, an ambitious local effort to convert former rail track into new light rail and trails.

In his remarks to the CNU, Donovan depicted the integration of "location efficiency" measures as a way to encourage housing developers to pursue more mixed-use, denser construction.

"[I]t’s time that federal dollars stopped encouraging sprawl and started lowering the barriers to the kind of sustainable development our country needs and our communities want," Donovan said. "And with $3.25 billion at stake in these competitions, that’s exactly what they will start to do."

Evaluating the range of transport options available for prospective residents of urban and suburban areas was among the central recommendations of a foreclosures report released in January by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). That study was aimed at mortgage lenders rather than the government, but Democratic lawmakers last year began pushing for HUD to insure more mortgages based on the properties' "location efficiency."

Donovan said that HUD would use the new LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) system, created by the CNU, the NRDC, and the U.S. Green Buildings Council, to measure the transportation potential of grant proposals. LEED certification has become an increasingly popular method of tracking the environmental sustainability of new buildings, although skepticism about the range of energy consumption of buildings with the LEED imprimatur prompted some revisions to the format last year.

NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert Lieber. Photo: New York Daily News

Lieber has been a central figure in the administration's planning and development policy since taking the helm of EDC in 2006. In December 2007, he assumed his current post, succeeding PlaNYC architect Dan Doctoroff. From mega-developments like Hunter's Point and Willets Point to smaller rezonings around the city, Lieber's had a hand in guiding what gets built in New York City, and where.

Lieber's replacement will inherit responsibility for two of the city agencies doing the most to add more traffic to New York City's streets. DCP has shown no inclination to reform parking policies that devour real estate, inflate housing prices and increase car ownership rates across much of the city. EDC continues to subsidize projects that add massive amounts of parking for no justifiable reason. All this new off-street parking creates incentives to drive, generating traffic that impedes bus service and degrades the appeal of streets for walking and bicycling. These policies stands in clear opposition to PlaNYC's goal of reducing automobile use and prioritizing sustainable transportation.

The next deputy mayor for economic development can complete some of the biggest missing pieces in PlaNYC. Here's what two of New York's leading transportation advocates say Lieber's replacement can do for sustainability.

Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White highlighted the Economic Development Corporation as particularly in need of a sustainability shakeup. "The EDC's inexorable march towards more parking and car-oriented development is tarring the mayor's otherwise green record," said White. "This is the mayor's last, best chance to reverse course and bring land use policy into alignment with PlaNYC."

Lieber's successor could do more to make New York City's growth both environmentally sustainable and socially equitable, said Tri-State Transportation Campaign director Kate Slevin.

"In stark contrast to his environmental and transportation policies, Mayor Bloomberg’s development policy has largely favored the elite," she said. "Loosening parking policies for the richer half of New Yorkers who own cars, pushing forward large, controversial development projects, and allowing suburban-style development to occur in transit-dependent neighborhoods all point to the need for a different approach from the new deputy mayor."

Slevin put forward one development project she'd like to see Lieber's replacement put his muscle behind -- tearing down the Sheridan Expressway. "The replacement of the underutilized Sheridan Expressway with affordable housing and parks," she said, "is one of the city’s best opportunities to promote economic development and smart growth in a manner that benefits the working and middle classes."

The mayor's office says that no decision has been made yet about who will replace Lieber, but the speculation has begun. Crain's reports that current EDC head Seth Pinsky could be a top internal candidate, but that Bloomberg may follow his recent hiring pattern and choose another outsider like Howard Wolfson or Stephen Goldsmith.