Visit the Are We There Yet? home Trends underway in the housing and jobs market portend a need for more transportation choices to help people get where they need to go as well as to enhance this country’s economic competitiveness. Market trends confirm the shift in demand away from single-use, single-family neighborhoods, corporate campuses and shopping centers connected by highways, and toward compact mixed-use neighborhoods where streets are not the sole province of fast-moving cars but are shared with pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users. Providing more transportation choices is critical to supporting this 21st century lifestyle and it seems to be what both younger and older generations want. For the younger generation, traffic congestion, $5 a gallon gas prices, and the popularity of smartphones and social media have made driving far less appealing than it was to their parents. According to the U.S. department…

The June 2012 report "Growing Station Areas: The Variety and Potential of Transit Oriented Development in Metro Boston" has been added to the Resource Center's best practices database.

Smart Growth & Economic Success The EPA's Smart Growth Program has released a new report, Smart Growth and Economic Success, on the economic advantages of smart growth development. As this report shows, smart growth development -- compact, walkable, and diverse -- is attractive to developers, investors, local governments, and communities because it offers new opportunities for economic growth that is also environmentally sustainable: Compact: Using land and resources more efficiently and redeveloping old or neglected areas while retaining existing infrastructure can create economic advantages for real estate developers and investors, businesses, and local governments. Compact development can generate more revenue per acre because it uses land more efficiently. It can reduce the costs of land and infrastructure for individual projects and the costs of providing fire and police protection, utilities,…

Visit the Are We There Yet? home Just as Americans are changing their ideas about what makes a house a home, there’s a new “9 to 5” with the emergence of “knowledge-­based economies” and an “information society” that capitalizes on the generation and distribution of new ideas, technology and other creative content to provide a competitive advantage. The main players in this new economic order are the “creative class” and a growing service sector that works at all hours. As the industrial age has drawn to a close the global economy has come to rely less on proximity to natural resources such as timber, coal and oil, and cities and their suburbs are assuming a heightened role as a result. “For more than 30 years, the American economy has been in the midst of a sea change, shifting from industry to services and information, and integrating itself far more tightly into a single, global market for goods,…

The 12th annual New Partners for Smart Growth Conference will be held Feb. 7-9, 2013, in Kansas City, MO. Reconnecting America is an official cosponsor.