News for April, 2010
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
In an important step toward creating affordable communities, the Illinois legislature has adopted the measure of housing and transportation affordability as a planning tool for five agencies and as a consideration for those agencies’ investment decisions in metro areas.
Senator Kwame Raoul led the effort to pass the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index Act (SB 347) in the Illinois Senate last month, and on Tuesday the bill passed in the House with overwhelming bipartisan support, led by Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, Chief Sponsor, and seven co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle.
CNT has been working with Illinois legislators since early 2009 to advance this valuable piece of legislation that applies CNT’s framework of combining housing and transportation costs to planning and making public investment decisions. Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Policy, Transportation and Community Development | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Congratulations to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) and its partners, City of Chicago and City of Rockford, for receipt of a $25 million Department of Energy (DOE) “Retrofit Ramp-Up” award. This award recognizes the work that is being done in the Chicago area and will help expand implementation of energy efficiency programs across the region.
“This grant represents unprecedented new opportunities for the Chicago region to accelerate efforts for high performing energy efficiency initiatives,” said Scott Bernstein, President of CNT, who attended today’s announcement at the White House. “This award will help organizations around the region to expand existing initiatives and create new ones that save real money for households and building owners while also reducing our region’s carbon footprint.”
Read more »
Posted in Energy, Featured Portfolio News | 4 Comments »
Monday, April 12th, 2010
On Tuesday, April 13, CNT’s Natural Resource Director, Steve Wise will be presenting at the 2010 International Low Impact Development Conference. On Wednesday, April 14, Steve returns to Chicago to be a panelist at the Chicago premiere of acclaimed documentary Lords of Nature: Life in a Land of Great Predators, which examines the roles predators play in restoring and maintaining ecosystems and biodiversity before heading to meetings in Washington D.C.
Check our calendar of events for upcoming engagements.
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, Natural Resources | No Comments »
Monday, April 12th, 2010
Today, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing, released Boston Regional Challenge, which finds that the average working household in the Boston region spends over $34,000 a year – or 54 percent of their income – on the combined costs of housing and transportation.
The report, produced in partnership with the Center for Housing Policy (CHP) and CNT, provides a comprehensive analysis of the “cost of place” in 18 regions from southern New Hampshire to Worcester to Rhode Island by quantifying the burdens facing families in those regions to meet the number one and number two expenses – housing and transportation – and highlighting areas with extreme burdens where households spend more than 58% their income on these costs.
Read more »
Posted in Featured Portfolio News, H+T, Transportation and Community Development | No Comments »
Friday, April 9th, 2010
Chicago, Evanston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C. are some of the places where CNT staff will be speaking this weekend and over the next week.
On Saturday, April 10, CNT’s President Scott Bernstein is the keynote speaker at the Sierra Club’s Green Transportation Campaign and Building Healthy Communities Symposium while Bill Eyring, our Natural Resources Senior Engineer, will be talking about adapting your garden for climate change at the Evanston Ecology Center from 9 AM – Noon.
On Sunday, April 11, Maria Choca-Urban, Director of CNT’s Transportation & Community Development Program, will be at the American Planning Association’s Annual Meeting to discuss “Levering High Speed Rail for Urban Planning.” On Monday, April 12, Scott Bernstein will be in Boston to participate in the release of the third Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing housing and transportation cost calculator.
On Tuesday, April 13, CNT’s Natural Resource Director, Steve Wise will be presenting at the 2010 International Low Impact Development Conference. On Wednesday, April 14, Steve returns to Chicago to be a panelist at the Chicago premiere of acclaimed documentary “Lords of Nature: Life in a Land of Great Predators“, which examines the roles predators play in restoring and maintaining ecosystems and biodiversity before heading to meetings in Washington D.C.
Check our calendar of events for upcoming engagements.
Posted in General News | No Comments »
Friday, April 2nd, 2010
Or as one of our esteemed colleagues, Kaid Benfied @ NRDC said, it the “most important analysis of land use you’ll see all year”.
Of the many reviews of CNT’s recent release of the H + T expansion for 337 metros in the U.S., we thought Transportation for America’s conclusion that our research “turns the conventional wisdom about affordable housing on its head”, hit it on the head.
Indeed, our goal is to challenge and redefine the traditional measure of affordability used by planners, lenders, and most consumers.
CNT’s intensive analysis shows that only 2 out of 5 communities in the U.S. are affordable when transportation costs are added to the traditional measure of affordability.
Read more »
Posted in H+T, Transportation and Community Development | 2 Comments »
