This is your source for Smart Growth, Sustainable Cities, and Understanding Sprawl in Hampton Roads Virginia.
Livable Cities—Hampton Roads is a group of citizens who are interested in preserving and improving the quality of life in Hampton Roads. We are a nonpolitical, nonprofit education and research organization.
Our founding tenets are:
- Responsibility for basic Quality of Life decisions resides in an informed community: citizens, businesses and associations of both.
- Our focus is the social and economic effect of the built fabric on our lives. (Uncontrolled sprawl and poorly planned urban centers are widely regarded as a major factor in decreasing quality of life.)
- The business community is a key force in Quality of Life dynamics and decisions.
- Urban decay and suburban sprawl are two symptoms of the same problem.
Many decisions about land use and transportation are made politically, without due consideration for Quality of Life implications. A primary cause of this is a lack of relevant, unbiased information about those decisions. Therefore Livable Cities—Hampton Roads has committed to:
- A systemic, holistic approach to build a livable and healthy region, an approach that represents both city and suburb, environmental protection and business development, social justice and individual responsibility.
- To support the approach, perform fact-based, unbiased, professional-level studies on the Quality of Life issues associated with land use, urban issues and transportation planning in Hampton Roads.
- Do so by leveraging work by others and working closely with the communities involved: business and citizen groups.
- Publicly present all facts pro and con on these issues without regard to politics.
- Because the discourse on Light Rail was most in need of this attention, it was the focus of our first study.
Click Here for links to related sites.
Click Here for summaries of selected reports.
Click Here for the Board of Directors, Mission Statement, and Affiliate Organizations.
Click Here for our (now obsolete) Study on Light Rail.
Updates:
8 Nov 99-Dallas case study, a nice comparative chart, comments on what went wrong with the referendum, and some rearrangement of files to archive the Light RAil work.
27 Oct 99-Three case studies (Portland, St Louis, San Diego), more distortions, more references
15 Oct 99-Started a Cost Misrepresentation Truth in Advertising piece, and the vision.
20 Sep 99-Added a small safety analysis, and more summarized references.
08 Sep 99-Added a CACI "truth in advertising piece; they misquote Prof. Cervero
30 Aug 99-Started the economic questions (1, 2), more external links and the new truth in advertizing section
23 Aug 99-Added more links to sites, more summarized references.
The term "Livable Cities—Hampton Roads" and the contents of this site are copyright.
