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The Washington Postreports today that the US poverty rate rose for the fourth consecutive year last year, to 12.7 percent.  That is, one out of eight Americans now lives in poverty.  At the same time, median incomes stagnated in 2004, and the number of people nationwide who have no health insurance grew by 800,000. Without any apparent irony, the Post reports that… [t]he increase in poverty came despite strong economic...

Via Wired Magazine, a nifty idea from Lyon, France: a rent-a-bike program that lets subscribers borrow a bike for just over a dollar an hour.  The first half hour is free—which makes the service ideal for people who want to make short jaunts downtown, but don’t want to lug their bicycles with them wherever they go. Impressively, the service attracted 15,000 subscribers within the first 3 months. As the article...

The US national rate of obesity has doubled since 1990, so that in 2004, nearly one-quarter of Americans (23.1 percent) were classified as obese. Medical studies have established clear links from obesity to a variety of medical conditions, including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and others. Obesity is also costly: the increasing prevalence of obesity and costs of treating obesity-related diseases has helped to fuel the recent...

In our ongoing quest to discover how land use and urban form links to human health effects, I recently stumbled across something odd. It’s a 2000 study of vehicle emissions per household in Puget Sound, authored by Larry Frank. I wanted to find out if there is a connection between air pollution and urban density. According to this study, there is, but in a way I didn’t expect. It turns...

A recent article highlights yet another benefit of energy-efficient homes: they could qualify you for an energy-efficient mortgage (EEM).  Since an energy-efficient house costs less to operate, Fannie Mae, the government-established private company that backs mortgages for low- to moderate-income homebuyers, recognizes that the money saved can be spent on housing costs. Thus, it adds the projected savings to the borrower’s income, raising that income and qualifying them for a...

Oregon appears set to lead the way in an innovative approach to protecting forestlands. A new state law allows local governments to form "forest authorities," which can purchase forests using government bonds. The authority retires the bond with the revenue generated by sustainable-yield timber cutting and perhaps even recreation fees. The upshot is that local governments can preserve both timber jobs and forests, rather than losing them to sprawling development....

I’ve been noticing that older houses in my Seattle-area neighborhood are being steadily replaced by much larger mansion-sized structures—one of which is large enough to be an orphanage. Apparently this is a national trend: the size of new single-family homes has more than doubled since the 1940s (from 1,100 to 2,340 sq.ft.), according to a recent article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (see full pdf here). Combining this with...

A few weeks back, there was a bit of a stir (see this article for an example) over new US Census Bureau estimates suggesting that, after the urban resurgence of the 1990s, center-city populations in the US were once again on the decline.  For someone like me who’s convinced of the environmental and social benefits of city living, this didn’t seem like good news. But now, two Brookings Institution researchers...

This article in Sunday’s Washington Post, penned by New America Foundation fellow Joel Kotkin, is definitely thought provoking.  In the wake of terrorist attacks in London and New York, Kotkin argues that the single most important challenge facing modern cities is providing basic security to their citizens.  To wit… While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it’s only by acknowledging the primacy of security—and addressing it in the...

Editor’s Note: Dan Staley, a frequent commenter on the Scorecard blog, will contribute an occasional column on land use and quality of life from Buckley, Washington, a small town near Mt. Rainier where Dan serves as planning director. This is his first post. I bicycle a short 5-8 miles to work in Buckley every day, taking different routes through a beautiful pastoral landscape that is full of little surprises. For...