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You may have heard that in the face of high gas prices, there’s been a fairly dramatic sea change in public opinion when it comes to offshore oil drilling. And it’s true that poll after poll shows increasing willingness on the part of Americans to lift the moratorium on domestic oil exploration. (57 percent favored drilling in August compared to 35 percent in February). But public opinion is often far...

My backyard garden is giving me mixed results this year. I did okay with the strawberries and snap peas, but the peppers are only so-so and the tomatoes are downright pathetic. Personally, I’m chalking it up to the lousy spring, not my laissez-faire attitude toward vegetables. Still, I love it. My garden is definitely not saving the world or anything, but there’s something weirdly profound about coaxing food from the ground. (Or in my case,...

It’s here! The largest 40 cities in America, ranked by their walkability. Plus, every single neighborhood in those cities — all 2,508 of them—rank-ordered for your walking pleasure. ** In a surprise upset, San Francisco edges out NYC for top honors in walkability. Who else made it into the Top 10? ** The Northwest’s most walkable neighborhood is in Portland. It’s the Pearl District, no suprise, ranking as the 15th best neighborhood for...

The gist: Drew Westen has said, “Wherever you’re heading, ideas provide the roadmap, but emotions provide the fuel.” In his acclaimed new book, The Political Brain, Westen shows, through careful scientific observation, that emotion is one of the most potent sources of motivation that drives human behavior (there’s a reason they share their Latin root). “[The brain] is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures,...

Every so often, we get criticized for being too fixated on fostering compact neighborhoods. “Density goes against what the housing market wants,” say some—ignoring the fact that most downtown housing developments around these parts get snapped up pretty quickly.  Or, “Density is driving up the cost of middle-class housing,” which is simply backwards—density is a response to high housing prices, not a cause.  So we think there are plenty of...

My head is about to explode from reading this newspaper article. The article includes a lengthy “explanation” of climate fairness from Duke Energy. But it doesn’t bother to point out to readers that the reasoning is just, you know, completely false. …[Duke Energy Chairman James Rogers] would oppose any effort to auction off carbon allowances… That could raise rates for Duke’s Indiana customers by 35 percent by 2012, Rogers said,...

In 2004, Oregon enacted Measure 37, a pay-or-waive property rights law that requires that a property owner be paid whenever a rule or law reduces their potential profit-making. The law had a huge implication for community planning in the state, and become the first of many that spread across the country.

So you’ve probably noticed that we write about walking and “walkability” pretty often. If that’s your bag, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve just made your life a little easier: All of our walking-related stuff—research, publications, web tools, and blog posts—can now be found in a single place. Check it out. And walk on, dude.

There’s something energizing about midsummer. If it’s not the camping trips, or the afternoon concerts in the park, then it must be the flurry of property rights campaigns gearing up for the fall election. Here’s the latest: In Oregon, the “Yes on 49” campaign kicked off yesterday. (Measure 49 is the state legislature’s referendum that will trim back some portions of Measure 37.) I can’t find a website for the “No on 49”...

As I mentioned last week, greater Vancouver leads the Northwest in transit ridership, with somewhere between two and three times as many annual bus and train rides per person as Portland and Seattle. So the obvious question: how come? Why does Vancouver do so much better in transit statistics than its southern neighbors? If you’re from Seattle, the “obvious” answer might seem to be Vancouver’s SkyTrain light rail system, which...