Working for Smart Growth:
More Livable Places and Open Spaces

 

Demographics and Trends

Metropark, and the Limits of Brookings’ Transit Accessibility Study

Monday, June 13th, 2011

Brookings’ jobs-accessibility study would be more valuable if it measured how accessible transit is to workers, not just to their jobs.

Fear of School Kids Trumps Land-Use Planning in Robbinsville

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

When the planning board voted to deny a developer’s application to convert units because it would attract too many school kids, it raised the larger issue of the role of fiscal considerations in land-use decision-making at the local level.

Is Jersey City a Suburb? Joel Kotkin Thinks So.

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

For much of the past decade, there has been a constant media drumbeat about the “return to the cities.” Urban real estate interests, environmentalists and planners have widely promoted this idea.

NJ’s Gold Coast Ranks First in “Smart Transportation”

Friday, February 25th, 2011

Fresh on the heels of Streetsfilms’ video lauding Jersey City as a leader in transit-oriented development, New Jersey’s second city is again making headlines as a leader in smart growth.

Transit-Accessible Towns In New Jersey Are More Recession-Resistant

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

image source: world.nycsubway.org

There are 140 New Jersey municipalities that host at least one rail transit station, including commuter rail (NJ Transit or SEPTA), light rail (Hudson-Bergen, River Line and Newark City Subway) and the PATH and PATCO systems.
These rail-transit municipalities accounted for 23.9 percent of all building permits issued statewide in the 1990s […]

New Jersey Leads in Farmland Loss

Monday, February 21st, 2011

New Jersey lost a greater share of its agricultural land to development than any state – more than 25 percent in the 25 years between 1982 and 2007.

Another Nail in the McMansion Coffin?

Monday, February 14th, 2011

Last month, we reported on a study by the National Association of Homebuilders showing that young people prefer to live in an urban environment with easy access to amenities, rather than the suburban cul-de-sac neighborhoods in which they grew up.

College Students as a Leading Indicator of Diversity

Monday, January 31st, 2011

The Fall 2010 issue of Rutgers Magazine featured this very interesting half-page item listing the 10 most common surnames among the Rutgers student body in 2009 and in 1990, showing how the demographic composition of the student body has changed over nearly 20 years.

BREAKING NEWS: Young People Don’t Want to Live Where Their Parents Did

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

The cast of CBS's How I Met Your Mother, TV's consummate young urban professionals. Source: purzuit.com
This is the message that came out of the National Homebuilders Association annual meeting in Orlando, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the article, young people (born between 1980 and 2000, roughly) are eschewing the suburban cul-de-sacs where they were […]

“Smart Growth” vs. “Growth Management”

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Google Labs has developed a tool it calls the Book NgramViewer, which allows a user to search Google’s book archives over a specified time period for the appearance of specific words or phrases.  Among other things, this tool can be used to compare the frequency of use of two terms that have […]

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Ingrid Reed For Our Future Fund

 

Our New Jersey Future board of trustees, our staff, and our community, honors Ingrid’s legacy with the Ingrid Reed For our Future Fund, supporting education and training for future Smart Growth leaders with a particular focus on diversifying the field.

 

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