Park, Place, Board, Walk
by Tony Chavira
The Trust for Public Land had a colloquium in late 2007 that lead to the development of an interesting report released this week entitled Smart Collaboration: How Urban Parks Can Support Affordable Housing.
Everyone that attended the colloquium knew that Smart Density had the double whammy of developing strong communities and significantly reducing carbon emissions (since you’re using less cars and your homes are more efficient). But no one wants to live in super-duber-density, smashed together like the workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I mean, imagine looking out your window and down a gray, canyon-like street cooridor with only droplets of trees and other assorted greenery.
Barring the development of futuristic eco-buildings, the report basically tries to come up with some creative policy ideas and a vision for density that doesn’t leave people feeling like sardines in the slums of Baltic or Mediterranean Avenue and has the added benefit of helping the earth. Five lessons were concluded from the report:
1) If states offer to fund for parks in exchange for affordable housing, they can give a built-in incentive to developers
2) Cities need to get back into fully integrating affordable housing and parks into their plans.
3) Private developers should be allowed to build more dense development overall, and give up the extra space for walking and integration into city parks.
4) CDCs (Community Development Corporations) can start thinking about parks and not just buildings.
5) Advocates for both housing and parks need to start hanging out together and aligning their goals already!
I’d highlight the release of this report with two more shocking bits of news revealed this week:
1) A Yale Study was released that found evidence that damaged ecosystems can actually recover really rapidly if we allow them to (which, as a heads up, we should). This is good in two ways: we can both lay off rural areas and watch them quickly rehabilitate and we can expect that built parks and parkspaces will develop quickly enough to take on a life of their own!
And on a much scarier note…
2) The Global Humanitarian Forum published a report that basically said that we can expect the affects of climate change to kill about 500,000 people between now and 2030, attributing the majority of deaths “to gradual environmental degradation such as crop failure leading to malnutrition, and water problems such as flooding and draughts.” Not a great time to be in the middle of a record drought in California.
So take a lesson from the pros: we need greenspace and affordable housing, stat. Or else we are literally sanctioned death though apathy. Sure, you can call me a sensationalist but the research doesn’t lie. It all depends on which side of the board you're playing on.
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2010-06-01 by wbnejwev