Talking Headways Podcast: The Urban Policy Translator

This week we’re joined by Shelley Poticha, director of NRDC’s Urban Solutions Program, who tells us about the organization’s new programs like SPARCC and the City Energy Project. We get into federal policy like the Clean Power Plan and the story of how FTA and HUD were finally connected, and we talk about The Next American Metropolis, the 1993 book about transit-oriented development she wrote with Peter Calthorpe.

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Team Obama Adviser: Here’s How to Make Sustainability Mainstream

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Shelley Poticha, head of the Obama administration’s inter-agency sustainable communities push, is so new to the job that the legislation creating her office has yet to be officially approved by Congress — but she has already hit upon two goals aimed at remaking the way Americans, and their government, view local development. Shelley Poticha (Photo: […]

EPA and HUD Make Big Investments in Sustainable Development

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The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are making significant progress on their joint effort, with the U.S. DOT, to connect cleaner transportation options with affordable  housing and denser urban development. A future commuter rail station along Boston’s Fairmount Line, one of five areas selected for EPA sustainable […]

How Congress Can Help Create Suburbia 2.0

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As Obama administration adviser Shelley Poticha noted this week, building more energy-efficient and hospitable cities — not to mention suburbs and rural areas — starts with clear terminology. "Sustainability" and "livability" are positive concepts that can be hard to define, but how can "transit-oriented development" be brought home to someone unfamiliar with the nuts and […]

The 2009 Capitol Hill Streetsies: And the Nominees Are …

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The year-end Streetsie Awards are a time-honored tradition at Streetsblog — check out New York’s first round of honorees, hot off the presses today — and Capitol Hill certainly has provided plenty of material. Without further ado, here are the nominees for Washington’s brightest and bleakest moments of 2009. Winners will be announced on New […]

Transportation for America Launches Legislative Campaign

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Today marks the start of Transportation for America‘s "Build for America" campaign, which will work to influence the transportation funding legislation that goes before the next Congress in 2009. (You’ll be hearing a lot more about it here in the coming months; we have received a grant from the T4America campaign to kick-start the development […]