Can the “new urbanism” of green city neighborhoods, convenient to transportation and jobs, also provide affordable housing?
We need to imagine a future in which Los Angeles is the greenest and cleanest big city in America,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said in his April 2006 state of the city address. That’s a tall order when you consider Los Angeles’ long-standing love affair with the twin icons of suburbia — the car and the single-family home. Yet many agree with Villaraigosa that it’s time for Los Angeles to kiss the suburban sweetheart goodbye and start courting urban green. After three decades of significantly improving air quality through tougher automobile emissions and factory standards, Los Angeles is losing ground again. The idling ships and trucks at L.A.’s port, the nation’s largest, are a major source of pollution. Proposals to “green” the port range from having docked ships turn off their engines and plug into electric outlets to encouraging rail rather than trucks to move containers out of the port. But that still leaves the cars, which produce about half the air pollution in California. If cu
