Special Report

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The great conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke, who probably would not have been a reader of The American Prospect, once observed, “You can never plan the future by the past.” But when it comes to preparing the American workforce for the jobs of the future, we may be doing just that. For about a quarter-century, […]

On the morning of June 22, 1995, to the total astonishment of the people working and walking on Hollywood Boulevard — the sales clerks of a hundred shlock emporiums, the stoners, the runaways, and the crowds of ever-bewildered tourists who had trekked to the heart of Hollywood in search of glamour only to find one […]