Sustainable Housing Project Underway in Savannah, GA

It sure has been difficult to find positive news recently... But here's a great one!

According to treehugger.com construction has commenced on Savannah's first housing project, and why is that positive? Because it is sustainable and it's called Sustainable Fellwood.

The plans call for 220 home units, 40% public housing, 40% for low- to mid-income families and 20% at market rate. The community features an organic garden and large green common space.

Having grown up near Chicago, I have seen projects, their failure and their destruction. This provides an amazing alternative to the public and mixed income developments I've seen because it allows for a community to grow with a closeness to food, natural surroundings and decreased utility expenses. This provides amazing educational opportunities for children, and the chance for cross-cultural and cross-class encounters.

Taking a look at the Development Team of the housing project, one can see that this is different off the bat--the most important members of the team are local Savannah business and organizations. Over the years, in Chicago, both Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes were often administered by the Federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) because the Chicago HUD board was so inept at their job, but this didn't bring good tidings to the now demolished housing projects in Chicago.

Chicago's story should be a lesson that when embarking a public housing projects, the tenants must be provided with adequate and efficient housing. Just as importantly, they should be provided with a means to establish and grow a healthy and safe community.

Hopefully Sustainable Fellwood can be a model of a new variety of housing project that will have a different story and experience than Chicago.
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Will LA City Council ban plastic bags?

Shoppers of Whole Foods Markets are already used to this trend, but now the city of Los Angeles is taking action--and good thing. When people refer to 'plastic bags,' we are talking about polyethylene bags, a petroleum product. These plastics are made from the same oil as our gasoline and add substantially to worldwide pollution and waste.

The LA Times reports that the City Council of Los Angeles voted today to ban plastic carryout bags in the city's supermarkets and stores by July 2010, if the State of California fails to impose legislation requiring a $.25 fee on each bag requested from a store or market. The city hopes to reduce the number of plastic bags in LA by 30% by 2010.

Estimates say that almost 400 billion plastic mags are manufactured for use in the United States each year, 100 billion are thrown away. The fact of the matter is that plastic bags, while a nuisance and a danger to birds and sea life, are incredibly useful and practical. They are lightweight, compact and reusable--in other words, shipping and producing them is relatively easy. However we all need to be more responsible with how we use our plastic bags.

The simplest way to more responsibly use plastic bags is to use them as sparingly as possible. The most successful and sustainable form of recycling is reusing. By reusing we reduce waste and keep harmful product out of landfills. Plastic bags are great to take to the market to bring home your local fruits, veggies and flowers; they are handy trash bags for small bins and can even be used to dump organic kitchen waste to your backyard compost bin or heap, and then wash the bag and use it again. I just used a number of plastic bags to bundle clothes to donate. There uses are endless, and with so many billions of them being made all the time, isn't it time to stop using and producing new ones? The other way to help get rid of some of these bags is to buy reusable bags that are more durable and made of recycled plastic and/or glass or use baskets.

The LA City Council is taking a positive step to create a serious reduction in the amount of plastic bags in just two years. Regulating citywide business, in this regard, is not a solution. However, the statement to actively reduce the use of plastic bags by a substantial amount in a relatively short amount of time is a good model and sends a positive message.

Thank you, people of Los Angeles, for beginning to reduce plastic bags in our city.
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It ain't easy bein' green

The "leaders" of the world have exhibited a typically leadership-less commitment to lowering the world's carbon output by the year... 2050! 2050!?

At the G-8 conference in Japan, where some members of Oxfam International were arrested during their peaceful protests, these people elected to rule their countries made an embarrassing promise universally criticized by environmentalist organizations as not even coming close to coming close to solving a serious worldwide problem.

While the world's leaders sit in their fancy homes and fancy clothes, eating their fancy food, those in developing nations are suffering from the effects of climate change. Meanwhile, one American city's mayor is trying to make a difference now.

Mayor Bill White of Houston wants to make his city the greenest in America. I first heard of Bill White in an NPR interview, and he has some great ideas for the future of Houston and America. The fact that Texas has no zoning regulations makes it easy for him to make Houston a center of mixed-use development, pairing residential and commercial zones in the same district so people can have all their services and amenities within walking distance, making it easier for Houston to have no carbon footprint.

The man has some great ideas, many of which have already been implemented. Houston has hybrid buses for public transport, he has established Houston's own Clean Air Act dedicated to lowering cancer rates in communities where mainly minorities reside. He also has a Green Building Advisory Committee and he has made it so Houston, TX runs 25% of its energy from wind power and he also intends to expand the use of solar power. All this and more can be read about at the city's website.

This mayor even makes me want to move to Texas.

As the world's "leaders" flounder in the face of this global crisis, it is nice to know that Bill White, the Mayor of Houston, Texas is doing what he can to make a difference, not in 2050, but right now.

Thank you, Mayor Bill White, for making a difference.
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