A Comparison of Cities' Climate Leadership

The article includes excerpts from the "City Climate Initiative: Case Studies" panel at the GreenXchange Global Marketplace Conference, held last month in Los Angeles. The panel included Los Angeles Planning Director Gail Goldberg, Portland Sustainability Planning Manager Chris Dearth, Senior Policy Advisor, plaNYC, Amy Chester, and Author Joel Kotkin.

Gail Goldberg: "We also adopted, a few years ago, a new element of our general plan called the Framework Element that lays out a smart growth strategy for how it is that this city is going to grow over the next 20 years, and it talks a lot about congregating growth around our transit stations, our transit corridors, and in our regional centers. We have adopted ordinances over the past few years to reduce parking, although I have to say it's a big struggle in this city. We have also implemented a number of urban storm water mitigation measures and plans..."

Chris Dearth: "But to really understand what Portland has done, we have to go back into the 1970s, because much of our success is based on the planning we started in the 1970s. At that time, we started a downtown plan to increase density and mixed use. We introduced light rail, replaced a freeway along our waterfront with a park, and began to increase density and mixed use downtown. These efforts continued into the ‘80s, when Portland did its comprehensive plan, along with all the other cities in the state, as required by the state law at the time. Those comprehensive plans required planning around transportation and many other natural resources. Portland also updated its central city plan to further increase density and mixed use throughout the entire downtown area."

Amy Chester: "Last December, Mayor Bloomberg set ten goals to become the first truly sustainable city in America. He wants to create enough housing for a growing population; ensure all New Yorks live within a ten-minute walk from a park; clean up all of our brownfields; develop our water network back-up systems; open 90 percent of our waterways for recreation use; improve travel times by adding transit capacity for millions more New Yorkers; achieve a state of good repair in our transit system, which has actually never happened since it opened; upgrade our energy infrastructure to provide clean energy; achieve the cleanest air of any big city in America. All of those will add up to reduction of global warming emissions by 30 percent in 2030."

Joel Kotkin: "I think we have to admit that, unless something very dramatic changes, the vast majority of the growth in the United States will continue to go into the periphery. I think there are several reasons for this. One: the country's going to go from about 300 to 400 million people. Urban growth is hard to predict. Both L.A. and New York's population growth, at least in the last two or three years, has tapered off; it's basically fairly flat. I don't know if that will continue or not. But the country's going to keep growing. Whatever growth you're going to see in the urban centers, it's going to be dwarfed by the overall growth. We had 200 million people when President Kennedy was elected, we have 300 million today, and by 2050, we'll have something around 400 million. There's going to be a huge number of new people. So we have to think about-if we want to create a sustainable future-how we're going to deal with that 100 million people."