Saving the Trees, Destroying the Forest
- Posted by ryan on June 20th, 2008 filed in Cities, Environment
According the Washington Business Journal, the Earth Conservation Corps is suing the District and the federal government over toxic waste at Poplar Point, and lobbying to have the whole Point be a park. As far as I know, the name Earth Conservation Corps is not intended to be ironic.
You see, the development at Poplar Point will be dense and mixed-use. It will be near the center city and transit. In other words, the residents there will have small geographic and carbon footprints. And by helping to satisfy some of the demand for dense, urban living, development there will reduce some of the price pressure on households that pushes them out into the suburbs or away from Washington entirely, to places like Raleigh or Houston. And of course, the land occupied by such households in the suburbs, or in Raleigh or Houston, would be far, far larger than the land at Poplar Point.
Which isn’t to say we need to build on every green space in the District. Parks have value. But so does dense, central city housing. Environmental groups really need to recognize that.
June 20th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
FWIW, the density of Houston is changing, and pretty fast. A ton of people are moving here, and the metro really isn’t getting any bigger. To your point, we actually have a ton of mixed-use, dense development going in right now (not to mention that inner-loop real estate is appreciate quite rapidly, at least by Houston standards)–I can think of five separate such developments within a few miles of our house. The crazy thing, though, is that they’re building it in the suburbs, too (not the far-flung ones, but still).
Anyway, point being, right now the marginal person moving to Houston probably has a footprint not too dissimilar from that of Poplar Point (single-family building is off here, too, although not as badly as lots of places).