Each Friday, the Wagner Planner editorial board will publish a news roundup of recent planning news. Topics range the gamut of urban planning concentrations, but will mostly be at the discretion of the editor.

Are Cities Underestimating Carbon Pollution?

“And it wasn’t just L.A.: The city of Cleveland, Ohio, undercounted its emissions by 90%, while Torrance, California, and Blacksburg, Virginia, both miscalculated their cities’ emissions by more than 100% in their respective public reports, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications in February. Researchers from the Vulcan Project found that U.S. cities overall under-reported their greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 20%.” (CityLab)

 

We Could Solve Homelessness if We Wanted

“Though homelessness has dropped by double digits in the United States since 2007, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data published last week, it has increased by double digits in four places: New York, California, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. Those places are not linked by their stingy safety nets, high rates of poverty, or substance abuse issues. They all just have really expensive housing.” (Slate)

 

The Painful Question of Why Some Cities Thrive and Others Don’t

“Tolstoy famously wrote that all happy families are alike but unhappy families are unhappy in different ways. With apologies to Tolstoy, I would argue that cities are exactly the opposite. The successful ones all have a distinct story to tell — great universities, or stable political leadership, or favorable geography, or a series of path-breaking inventions, or something else that is special. Sometimes they have more than one of these.

When it comes to stagnant cities, the problems always seem to be similar: a failure to attract outside corporate investment and venture capital; a weak minority-owned business sector that doesn’t create many jobs; abysmally poor school performance; and a distressingly high rate of child poverty. (Detroit and Cleveland are both over 50 percent.) They all go together, almost all the time.” (Governing)