The vacant-lot greening treatment costs a little more than a dollar per square foot to install and about a nickel per square foot to maintain each year.21 The grass planting takes only an hour and is in the form of a seed mixture of resilient grass applied with leaf blowers. The trees selected for these lots are the heartiest species to survive urb

Proponents of parks, like the advocates of urban planning, struggled to articulate a rationale for what was a rather novel political idea in the laissez-faire era of politics in the United States. Developing parks required all the tactics we currently use in our modern urban planning apparatus: the condemnation and taking of private property for pu

CPTED offers a recipe for reducing crime by shifting the availability of easy targets. This does not mean that an offender’s motivations to commit crime have been erased; it simply means that some offenses won’t occur in given areas because offenders either choose to go elsewhere or to not commit the crime. If one assumes that not all crimes are ea

The economic costs of abandoned housing alone justifies the need for more insight into ways of addressing the problem. The Government Accountability Office reports that cities spend anywhere from $233 to $1,400 per property on temporary exterior maintenance costs, such as boarding up broken windows and otherwise securing these abandoned structures.

Imagine a downtown area with small-scale parks, nice shops, clean and safe streets, and signage that encourages exercise. This is the kind of place where a family wants to bring kids, where retirees and college students alike want to socialize, and where street entertainers naturally gravitate to perform and get paid. These places exist in many cit

The study compared asthma-related triggers for children who moved into BEHs with a control group of children who had similar baseline asthma levels and whose parents were similar in age, employment, education, race, and ethnicity. The two groups looked much the same, although one group was exposed to their new BEH and the other was not. Recall that

The results from the study showed that the control parks saw a small decline in the number of observed and self-reported users on the order of 6 to 10 percent, as well as declines in physical activity. In contrast, parks in the treatment group that received the additional $4,000 saw a 7-to-12-percent increase in observed and self-reported park usag

A basic analysis of the changes in BMI and physical activity before and after the opening of the transit line found that using LRT was associated with reductions in BMI. Light rail users reduced their BMI by an average of 1.18 kg/m2 compared to similarly situated car commuters over a twelve-to-eighteen-month follow-up period. For a person who is 5′

The study team conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) where 274 children with asthma received a comprehensive intervention that involved an environmental audit of the home, an action plan for helping remediate the home that included the delivery of allergy and pest remediation materials, and four to eight additional visits by community healt