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The Planetizen News Brief

27 November 2008 - 5:00am
Smart City Radio

The Planetizen News Brief is a weekly rundown of some of the most interesting and important news and issues of the past week.

The Planetizen News Brief airs every week on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Smart City", which is broadcast in cities across the U.S. Learn more about Smart City and listen to archived shows.

Full Transcript

When it comes to green ideas and progressive urban planning policies, New York City seems to be leading the nation. PlaNYC, the city’s 127-point blueprint for greening the city, is widely regarded as one of the country’s most effective planning documents aiming at a sustainable future. But one area in which New York has so far failed to innovate is congestion pricing. Earlier this year, legislators blocked a bill that would have allowed the city to charge drivers as they entered certain parts of the city. But where New York failed, San Francisco is stepping in. The West Coast city is also clamoring to up its green cred, and a congestion charge could provide a major boost. City officials this week were presented with possible tolling locations and pricing schemes, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The city received a million dollar grant from the federal government to study the feasibility of a system, and now there are options on the table. If approved, San Francisco’s congestion pricing system would be the first in the nation.

And just over a month ago we were seeing reports that nearly one out of every six homeowners owed more on their homes than they were worth. Now, that figure has risen to one out of every four. Twenty-five percent of the nation’s homeowners have more to pay on their homes than they could possibly hope to gain by selling them, according to research by the real estate data firm First American Core Logic. Florida and Arizona are feeling it the worst, with more than 29% of homes underwater, and things are almost as bad in California, with 27%, according to an article from McClatchy Newspapers. And things are expected to get even worse. Some analysts are predicting a further drop in home values by about 10 or 15%. Such a drop could bring the amount of homes worth less than their mortgages up to almost 40%.

And finally, it’s been assumed for years that bad-looking neighborhoods encourage bad behavior. New evidence suggests that that assumption holds water. The Economist reports that researchers in the Netherlands have tested the so-called “broken-windows” theory to reveal that delinquent activity actually does increase in areas that appear to be more disheveled. The experiments tested to see how people would act in different physical locations: one clean and tidy, and the other littered with trash and covered with graffiti. According to their report in Science magazine, the experiments show that the existence of litter, graffiti and other indicators of “disorder” increased the number of people who engaged in bad behavior like littering and stealing. And while completely removing litter and graffiti from a neighborhood isn’t likely to eliminate criminal behavior, studies like this will undoubtedly get the attention of law enforcement and city officials looking for more neighborhood cleanup funds.

Stories discussed in this week's Planetizen News Brief

San Francisco Weighs Congestion Pricing Options

Worse Times Ahead for Housing

Experiments Validate Broken Windows Theory

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It is worth pondering that successful downtown stadiums and hostels extend back at least to the Colosseum environs in Rome, nearly 2,000 years ago.
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