Urban Review: School Safety, New Urbanism and Racial Change in Suburban Atlanta and Hurricane Season

Title Page

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has a 40-point plan for improving school safety. Here's what it would do. Texas Tribune.

Introduction

The Hidden Costs of Losing Your City's Newspaper. CityLab.

“There are already papers that show that there are political consequences, or political outcomes, when local newspapers close,” says co-author Chang Lee, assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But that’s not really a direct impact on local residents. We wanted to show that, if you look at the municipal bond market, you can actually see the financial consequences that have to be borne by local citizens as a result of newspaper closures.”

Executive Summary

The promises of new urbanism are high. The charter for the Congress for the New Urbanism, founded in 1993, outlined planning principles around mixed-use spaces. "We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions," the charter declares, "the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy."

Despite the ambitious goals of the movement, a recent study looking at neighborhood racial change in suburban Atlanta between 2000 and 2013 suggests, "new urbanism's doctrine of social mix has often proved elusive in practice."

Since one of the aims of the movement is to encourage spaces that facilitate racial and ethnic diversity, Scott Markley, the study's author and a graduate student at the University of Georgia, set out to test the durability of integration in suburban neighborhoods with new urbanist developments. The paper includes a discussion about what constitutes a new urbanist development that is significantly different from "conventional design," and the set of standards the author used to determine that.

The analysis showed that block groups with a new urbanist project did indeed become whiter over the time period than those that did not. "This finding does not necessarily confirm the long-standing accusations that [new urbanist] development creates homogenous White enclaves," the study notes, "but it does support a relationship between new urbanism in practice and the whitening of space."

Conclusion

After several fatal crashes and a commitment from the mayor to identify and address the 10 most dangerous intersections, a group of friends of Polly Koch, who was hit and killed in a Montrose crosswalk, gathered to remembered her and call for safer streets.

"People are getting killed because drivers don’t understand and there’s just no consideration for pedestrians, bikers, and other drivers,” Bike Houston Chairman Dan Piette told Houston Public Media. “Right now it seems that if you’re in a truck and you hit a bike the correct defense is, oops, I didn’t see them. That is not acceptable.”

Endnotes