Urban Planning

The SoHo Partnership is a non-profit organization that hires homeless and jobless people through the BRC Human Services Corporation, another New York City-based organization that provides rehab and treatment programs for the homeless. The program cleans a 30-block area daily, removing over 15,000 pounds of trash, and also plants and maintains trees and other greenery and administers various recycling programs. Yesterday, the organization announced that it has entered into a supply agreement to purchase Perf Go Green’s biodegradable trash bags for use in its operations. The Perf Go Green bags debuted earlier this year at the International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, and are manufactured from recycled plastics. The film that’s applied to the bags is biodegradable, and causes the bags to break down when disposed of in soil. SoHo Partnership founder Henry Buhl said that the organization is “absolutely delighted to announce SoHo as the city’s first neighborhood to use biodegradable trash bags.”

Tishman Speyer’s loss is now the Related Companies’ gain. The MTA announced today that it has selected Related and Goldman Sachs to develop Hudson Yards into a $1 billion mixed-use neighborhood that will revolve around a central nine-acre grand plaza similar in concept to Tishman’s proposed “New York Steps.” Related will seek LEED Gold for the project (pursuant to the MTA’s RFP), though no specific details are available regarding whether that rating will be for individual towers or a broader LEED-ND application for the entire project.

Popular Science ranks the country’s 50 Greenest Cities in its latest issue and New York comes in at a respectable #20, despite being beaten out by Boston and Chicago. The magazine used raw data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Geographic Society’s Green Guide, which collected government statics and survey data across 30 different sustainability categories. Pop Sci then distributed these statistics across four broad categories: electricity, transportation, green living, and recycling and green perspective. Cities earned points for items such as their number of LEED-certified buildings, how much energy they draw from renewable sources, how many commuters use public transportation or carpool, and how much land they devote to public green space.

The Newark Downtown District Streetscape Improvement Project is a $17.5 million effort to upgrade 56 blocks of downtown Newark, New Jersey. The project broke ground back in June and includes three distinct phases over the course of the next three years. The first phase, which wrapped up back in October, included areas adjacent to the new [...]

On Monday, Streetsblog reviewed Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning by George Monbiot, a columnist at the UK newspaper Guardian. In it, Monbiot sets forth what Streetsblog calls a “215-page brisk and compelling case for why we should all be very worried.” The book posits that in order to prevent environmental degradation on [...]

Written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Gary Burns (Kitchen Party) and journalist Jim Brown, Radiant City is an 85 minute documentary about North American suburban sprawl. Reviewed in yesterday’s New York Post by V.A. Musetto (who gives it three stars; it was also reviewed in the Times back on April 13 by Stephen Holden, who [...]

For your perusal on this dreary weekend here in New York City, I’ll point you to two wildly different projects, both of which will seek LEED certification despite their vastly different scopes.
The first, a thirty-four story, $160 million luxury high-rise developed by Donald Trump, is slated to become Stamford, Connecticut’s tallest building. The Trump Parc [...]

I’ll present my detailed thoughts on Mayor Bloomberg’s Earth Day speech that he delivered on Sunday at the Museum of Natural History in an upcoming post, but in the meantime I’ll point you in the direction of a few links (see below) that describe the 127-part plan, including the proposed congestion pricing scheme. I do [...]

On Tuesday evening I had the opportunity to attend an Urban Land Institute of New York event at 5 Times Square. Transportation Transformed: Innovations in the Tapestry of Urban Transit presented a panel of four speakers who discussed different transit-related projects in various stages of development across New York City. It struck me while listening [...]

An article in today’s New York Times discusses the Los Angeles City Council’s decision to plant close to a million trees indigenous to Southern California (sycamores, crape myrtles, etc.) instead of replacing or even maintaining many of the city’s palm trees as they die off over the next several years. As the article details, palm [...]