News – Page 51

Opportunity Collaborative Set to Release Baltimore Regional Plan for Sustainable Development

The Regional Plan for Sustainable Development (RPSD) represents the first ever comprehensive regional plan to bring together workforce development, transportation and housing. The Opportunity Collaborative is a consortium that includes local governments, state agencies, universities and nonprofit organizations. The co-chairs of the Collaborative are William H. Cole IV, president and CEO of the Baltimore Development Corporation, and Scot T. Spencer, of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The RPSD is the culmination of three years of work and will help the Baltimore region coordinate investments in housing, transportation and workforce development to reduce disparities and connect all of the region’s citizens to a prosperous future. The outcomes of the plan will lower transportation costs for families, create cleaner and safer communities and increase educational and employment opportunities throughout the region.

Please join other regional leaders on Monday, June 8 in Baltimore as the Opportunity Collaborative launches the first joint and sustained effort by the governments and significant non-governmental organizations in the region to collectively address regional planning issues.

You can learn more and register to attend the launch here.

Learn more about the NCSG’s participation in the Opportunity Collaborative here.

Nick FinioMay 15No Comments

No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the American Dream

The University of Maryland Urban Studies and Planning Program and
the National Center for Smart Growth’s 2015 Brown Bag Webinar Series continues with

No Place Like Home:

Weath, Community and the American Dream

Presentation by:
Brian J. McCabe Georgetown University

Wednesday, May 6
12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

Preinkert Field House – Conference Room 1112V
University of Maryland College Park

For decades, the promise of homeownership in the United States has focused on the importance of housing as a financial investment and the role that homeownership plays in building communities. On one hand, Americans hold more wealth in their homes than they do in any other investments. At the same time, we have long believed that the owner-occupied home is the centerpiece of upstanding citizenship and strong communities. In No Place Like Home, McCabe asks how the importance of building wealth through housing shapes the way homeowners engage in their communities. Often, as a way of protecting their property values, homeowners work to increase segregation and economic isolation in their neighborhoods, raising doubts about the civic benefits of owning a home. Investigating this core institution, No Place Like Home offers a new perspective on the place homeownership holds in American life.

BRIAN J. McCABE is an assistant professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. His previous research on housing, urban policy and public opinion has been published in Social Forces, City & Community, the Journal of Urban Affairs and the Journal of the American Planning Association. He is currently completing a book manuscript, titled No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the American Dream.

Nick FinioMay 06No Comments

A Google Street View on the World

The University of Maryland Urban Studies and Planning Program and
the National Center for Smart Growth’s 2015 Brown Bag Webinar Series continues with

A Google Street View on the World:

Potentials and Pitfalls of Harnessing

“Big” Geographic Data

for Neighborhood Research

Presentation by:
Michael Bader American University

Wednesday, April 22
12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

Preinkert Field House – Conference Room 1112V
University of Maryland College Park

Online spatial tools and data offer powerful opportunities for social science and health research on neighborhood conditions. Bader will describe ow he harnessed the rich geographic information provided by Google Street View to measure the walkability and physical disorder of neighborhoods across the country — the first national data using Google Street View in thhe United States. He will describe the online application that he and his team developed: the Computer Assisted Neighborhood Visual Assessment System, or CANVAS. The application allows for reliable and rapid data collection, which Bader and colleagues have applied to studies of walkability and health among children. These new tools also create new problems, including the possibility of unwittingly revealing personally identifiable information. Bader will address some of these problems and then describe the next steps for the project including the incorporation of Mechanical Turks, the study of global neighborhoods, and the influence of neighborhood conditions on aging in place.

MICHAEL BADER is an assistant professor of sociology at American University. He studies how cities and neighborhoods have changed since the height of the Civil Rights Movement. His research shows how metropolitan racial and economic inequality has evolved and the manner in which spatial inequality creates unequal health. He has developed methods to integrate different forms of “small data” and “big data” to study neighborhood environments. He has published his research in sociology, geography, and epidemiology journals. He is a faculty fellow of the Metropolitan Policy Center, an affiliate of the Center on Health, Risk, and Society, and an affiliate assistant professor Department of Public Administration and Policy. Before joining the faculty of American University, Dr. Bader was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania where he was also a senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan and his B.A. in architecture and art history from Rice University.

Nick FinioMay 01No Comments