• Ambitious plan to replace tree canopy lost to storm

    In just over an hour, Cedar Rapids lost more than half of its trees—the recently adopted plan has lessons for many cities.
    Cedar Rapids, Iowa, will plant 42,000 street and park trees and advise private landowners on how to replace a half million more to recover from a major August, 2020, derecho storm. The 10-year equitable tree recovery plan, ReLeaf Cedar Rapids , is a collaboration of the city, nonprofit Trees...Read more

  • The remarkable potential for retrofitting strip malls

    Redeveloping the most favorable 10 percent of suburban strip malls in the Boston region would meet a major portion of the area’s housing needs in the next decade, according to a study.
    An analysis of the Boston region showed that retrofitting just 10 percent of strip malls could provide 125,000 housing units—boosting local annual net tax revenues by $481 million. Retrofit would avert an estimated 10 square miles of impervious surface and 400,000 metric tons of carbon emissions...Read more

  • The cost of crashes is higher than congestion

    Congestion costs drive highway expansion decisions, but these costs are dwarfed by the impact of automobile crashes. Comparing the two points to a better strategy than widening thoroughfares.
    In 2019, the last full year before the Covid pandemic, the US lost $190 billion due to traffic congestion—mostly in urban areas—according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual Urban Mobility Report . The report provides an economic rationale for expanding highways and urban arterial...Read more

  • A tool for better zoning in Wisconsin

    CNU’s Project for Code Reform completed a report for Wisconsin municipalities, Enabling Better Places, building on similar reports for Michigan and Vermont, and one upcoming in New Hampshire.
    The League of Wisconsin Municipalities worked with CNU and a range of statewide organizations to produce Enabling Better Places: A User’s Guide to Wisconsin Neighborhood Affordability . The goal is to help the state’s more than 1,800 cities, towns, and villages revise their zoning codes to promote...Read more