NewsWatch: Sustainable Communities -- Asphaltification to Snout Houses

Asphaltification to Snout Houses: the Worst Things About Sprawl
Sprawl has quietly been identified as a central cause behind a growing list of mounting national crises including foreign oil dependency, climate change and the obesity epidemic. Huffington Post

What Will You be Doing in 40 Years?
Today, Toffler Associates releases "40 For The Next 40" -- trends it says will shape our world from now to 2050. For example, invasion of privacy may spread -- the result of cheaper, smaller and widely available surveillance devices. Data may be collected faster than it can be analyzed, resulting in "cyberdust." USA Today

New York City Will Install Dual Flush Toilets Citywide (Video)
New York City residents, rejoice -- toilets  in new city buildings will soon have the capacity to flush 20 golf balls at a time. The New York City Council is now requiring all new buildings to install dual-flush toilets – and it appears that second-level powerful flush setting is really, really powerful. Watch the video of the American Standard taking its first of many full-on flushes ahead. Inhabitat

World’s Largest Wind Farm Will Be Built in Oregon
The US Department of Energy  has approved the partial guarantee for a $1.3 billion loan to support the construction of the world’s largest wind farm, located in eastern Oregon. Known as the Caithness Energy LLC’s Shepherds Flat Wind Project, the renewable energy initiative will give way to a massive 845-megawatt wind-powered energy generating facility located immediately south of the Columbia River, built on approximately 32,000 acres in Gilliam and Morrow counties. Inhabitat

Economic Realities vs. Downtown Ideals
When Idaho was one of the fastest-growing states in the country, Boise residents and leaders set some priorities for downtown -- they wanted to make sure development was pedestrian-friendly, offered a mix of uses and included dense housing options, so the city could grow up and not sprawl out. Then the bottom fell out of the local economy. Idaho Statesman

Hundreds of Emergency Gas Valves to be Replaced
Pacific Gas and Electric Co.  said Tuesday it intends to replace hundreds of manually operated valves on natural gas pipelines with automatic shutoffs, devices that the utility concedes would have reduced the time it took firefighters to gain control of the inferno that destroyed 37 homes in San Bruno last month. The company will first install the automatic shutoffs on the more than 1,000 miles of transmission lines that run under cities, suburbs and other "high-consequence areas" San Francisco Chronicle

Darien, Conn., Sued Over Inclusionary Zoning
The New York Times has an interesting article  about a Justice Department probe into Darien, CT’s local inclusionary zoning rules. Inclusionary zoning means essentially that multi-unit developments have to offer a portion of the project as “affordable housing,” which invariably means charging below-market rents. It essentially acts as a tax on dense development that’s not levied on the sort of one-off developments that are usually large lot, detached houses, which discriminates against the very people that it purports to be helping. While the people who live in the units certainly benefit from the too-good-to-be-true rents, every other poor person loses out as their housing costs rise. Market Urbanism

Photo: Dean Terry, NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic