Livable Los Angeles
In 2000, a group of environmentalists and housing advocates founded Livable Places to promote new housing construction in neighborhoods with good transit as an antidote to continuing sprawl. With more than 150 nonprofits building affordable housing in Southern California, Livable Places is unique in its dual strategy of both advocating and developing housing using a…
A Gulf of Good Intentions
Back in November 2005, barely three months after Hurricane Katrina, the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute presented its recommendations for rebuilding a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. One recommendation called for shrinking the city footprint, envisioning new, protected green space in areas deemed unsuitable for rebuilding. With emotions still raw, a city wracked by poverty and racism…
Help Wanted — Green
There are good jobs to be had in environmentally friendly development, and construction jobs are just the beginning. Thousands of jobs are in products that go into green buildings. The job potential in renewable energy production is even more impressive. The Renewable Energy Policy Project estimates that producing 10 percent of the nation’s electricity with…
Not Just for the Gentry
We need to imagine a future in which Los Angeles is the greenest and cleanest big city in America,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in his April 2006 state of the city address. That’s a tall order when you consider Los Angeles’ long-standing love affair with the twin icons of suburbia — the car and the…
Green Buildings Matter
The building industry accounts for about 13 percent of this nation’s gross domestic product. Buildings are responsible for 48 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, they consume more than 70 percent of primary electricity and 12 percent of all potable water, and they generate about half of all municipal waste. If…
The New Environment for Housing
Starting out, Rick Goodemann was a Minnesota construction worker hired to refurbish a dilapidated building that had served as low-income housing for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He remembers feeling a sense of waste in hammering away at a project that should have been properly built in the first place but, because of…
Healthy Communities, Healthy People
I work just blocks from one of the poorest areas in Washington, D.C. There are liquor stores, convenience stores, and gas stations, but nothing resembling a grocery store with fresh, affordable produce. The playgrounds are dilapidated, with rusting swing sets and forlorn basketball poles. Kids don’t have safe places to play, and adults don’t have…
Sustainable Cities
A “green revolution” is burgeoning in America’s cities and towns. And it’s a surprise. Six years ago, as we exited an economically exuberant but perilously polluting 20th century, the idea would have seemed chimerical. True, by the 1990s we’d begun to talk about community and global sustainability; President Clinton even appointed a White House council…
Green Common Ground
Prospect Co-Editor Robert Kuttner spoke with Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Bart Harvey, chairman of the board of Enterprise Community Partners. The NRDC is one of America’s leading environmental groups. Enterprise is a leading force for community development that champions equitable sustainable development. Beinecke and Harvey created a unique…
Indictment or Challenge?
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter (Simon & Schuster, 264 pages, $27.00) Before it was even released on November 14, Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, caused an uproar. The implied analogy in the title between contemporary Israel and the old South Africa drew a chorus of denunciations from Jewish…
In Arabic in English in D.C.
Al Jazeera has been called “the terrorist network,” a “beheadings channel,” and “a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden.” Yet there was Dave Marash, 64, Al Jazeera’s improbable anchor, sitting at his computer in a seventh-floor corner office in its K Street location, surrounded by mementos from his work as an Emmy-award-winning Nightline correspondent — a…
How to Create Populists
Several years ago I had a philosophical conversation with my good friend and Cabinet colleague Bob Rubin over lunch in the White House mess. Cabinet members rarely talk philosophy. There isn’t time. Mostly, they talk about how to put out the next fire. But on this rare occasion, Bob and I found ourselves talking philosophically.…
The Real Judicial Activists
In discussions of “judicial activism,” almost everyone focuses on how often Supreme Court justices vote to strike down acts of Congress. These discussions neglect a question that is, in terms of the Court’s actual workload, much more important: How often do justices vote to strike down acts of the executive branch? We attempted to answer…
The Overrated Swing Voter
One lesson of the 2006 vote was so obvious that Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times was able to write about it two days before the election: the return of the swing voter. Karl Rove’s strategy of mobilizing a conservative Republican base while ignoring the flippable voters in the middle “lay shattered in pieces,”…
The Little Pill that Could
In the mid-1990s, the abortion wars were at a fever pitch over the impending approval of RU-486. Time magazine called it “The Pill that Changes Everything,” The New York Times Magazine dubbed it a “little white bombshell,” and anti-abortion leaders said over and over that this drug was dangerous because it would make having an…
Arms Dealers to the World
No one can accuse the defense industry of lacking audacity. Despite receiving vast sums of money from the Pentagon each year, and having much of Congress in their back pocket, arms manufacturers have been holding conference after conference of late complaining that big government is keeping them down. At a Heritage Foundation event in mid-October,…
Doctoring Health Care, II
If you’re a senior citizen or just happen to know one, you’re probably familiar with the flaws in the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA) — the legislative monstrosity that Congress enacted, after one very long night in 2003 when Tom DeLay held the vote open for three full hours to intimidate a majority of unwilling members…
Doctoring Health Care, I
For all the hype over the Democrats retaking Congress, you’d think the reemergence of that body’s liberal lions would, in short order, bring about universal health care and a host of other panaceas. Winning universal health care, alas, remains unlikely, at least in the near term. Instead, repairing the cracked foundations of Medicare and Medicaid…
January/February 2007 (PDF)
To download the January/February 2007 issue in PDF format, click here.
Murder and Migration
Development projects anywhere in the world often have a high human cost. In Colombia, the price is often measured in human lives and blood. Esperanza (she would risk her life, she says, if her real name appeared in print) saw her neighbors pay that price in 2001. Her house sits on the bank of the…
Rejecting the Right
One swallow does not a summer make nor one election a new era. But some significant new realities that emerged from 2006 merit attention. First, clearly, this was a sweeping victory. Democrats had to overcome the Republican advantages in incumbency, gerrymandered districts, money, and mobilization, and to do so in the midst of a wartime…
Taking Back the States
If the states, as Louis Brandeis put it, are the laboratories of democracy, then its only fitting that the 2006 election, which ushered in a host of eager new experimenters, fell just a week before Brandeis 150th birthday. For the first time since 1994, Democrats now control a majority of governorships in the country –…
