Changing Behavior and Levittown: My Recent Writing

My review of the "Moving Cooler" report

A new Urban Land Institute report on Americans’ traveling behavior concludes that cleaner cars and cleaner fuels alone can’t reduce carbon emissions unless Americans drive fewer miles at slower speeds, avoid gas-burning traffic jams, and reduce their number of trips.

It’s all part of the prescription being put forward by a new ULI report linking carbon emission trends and excessive climate change to a growing population.

More fuel efficient cars and cleaner fuels alone simply won’t be sufficient, the ULI report says. Instead, it points to a need for those fundamental shifts in traveling patterns and behavior.

For the rest of my article, see the Yale Climate Media Forum:

http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2009/09/behavioral-changes-in-travel/

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Return to Levittown

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It has become politically correct since for social critics to speak of Levittown as a code word for everything gone wrong in American suburbia: here were thousands of cookie-cutter houses, plopped down many miles from shopping and jobs. Here were families all living the same conformist life, with prim front lawns on which no one seemed to do anything. Here were endlessly curving streets with names that all sounded alike.

And here were veterans’ families bedazzled by the austere park-like setting: in one old documentary a young Levittown wife stands in the developer’s office insisting on a particular home lot only because it is on Butterfly Lane. The land clerk winks at the husband and says, “Better let her have her way!”

Yes, it’s easy to critique Levittown and developer William J. Levitt, and scholars have done so, seeing it as the antithesis of community and sustainability. But there was plenty good about Levittown. People talked with their neighbors. The children played safely on the streets and yards, and their parents could watch them and the neighbors’ kids from inside the picture windows. People worked on their houses, felt incredible pride of ownership, and could afford the payments.

By far the most admirable feature of Levittown was that the homes were small. They were, in fact, typically smaller than the homes in which the World War II veterans who inhabited them had grown up.

FOR MY FULL ARTICLE, SEE blueridgepress.com.
This has appeared in New York Newsday and other newspapers. Blue Ridge Press is an environmental syndicate. Check it out.