There’s some news today that won’t be noticed by major media but could potentially have a far greater impact on the environmental footprint of our country and communities than most environmental stories you’ll find in the Times or on CNN- today the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard opens for business.

There’s no way to sugar coat the issues- our country has an appalling record on land use policy.  From coast to coast we have fostered a development pattern entirely beholden to single occupancy automobile use that eliminates the distinction between town and country and leaves huge swaths of our population without any access to public transportation. The few that are lucky enough to live near a bus or train line find they have access to a few blocks of central business district and little else. (If you live outside Philly, for example, you can catch a bus or train into central Philly but there is no way to travel to an adjacent suburb or town.) And don’t even ask about walking or biking- which feel like criminal activities in most communities.  It’s a system that is both inefficient and ineffective. If our society is to have any measurable impact on our environmental footprint we need to make huge changes to our patterns of development and LEED-ND is the best tool we currently have to move in the direction of smart growth and sustainable communities.

Like the LEED standards for buildings, there will be lots to argue about with LEED-ND.  Should it do more to restrict greenfield development?  What are the hurdles to implementation in urban settings?  How will it mesh with municipal policies like Portland’s urban growth boundary?  I’m looking forward to those conversations- hopefully some of them will happen in this space- but first we need more people to understand that where we locate our buildings is as important as the performance of the buildings themselves and having a public standard like LEED-ND available will grease the grooves of the public conversation.  I’ve said before that one of LEED’s greatest contributions has been cultural rather than technical- it provides a conversational benchmark for people to talk about green building issues.  I expect a similar transformation of the public conversation around development issues in the years ahead.

Kaid Benfield, who was intimately involved in the development of the standard, has a nice post over at the NRDC Switchboard outlining today’s milestone.  You can find the Rating System, Checklists and the LEED Online portal to register your projects at the USGBC website.

If you follow architecture or the history of New York City you are no doubt familiar with Christopher Gray’s Streetscapes column in the New York Times.  Recently he covered my own neighborhood of Ft. Greene, Brooklyn and in particular Vanderbilt Avenue as it runs down the hill to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The column includes images of Vanderbilt from “about 1950″, included above, and from present day, included below.

The differences, of course, are striking, but while Mr. Gray focuses on the variety of architectural detailing to be found on the houses and the many changes to demographics the street has seen since shipping was the dominant industry, I find myself stunned by the two major changes to the cityscape revealed by these photos: the removal of the streetcars, and the introduction of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway at the end of the block.  The streetcars in the earlier image were removed in August of that very year, 1950, and the BQE was completed in 1964.  Both stories have been told many times by those more adept than I; the rise of the automobile, the virtual destruction of urban communities by carving interstates through them- but it’s fascinating to see the narrative so plainly exposed by a couple pictures in the paper.

Mr. Gray focuses at one point on the two houses at the end of the block, photo at left, and provides the following caption, “The houses at 69 and 71 Vanderbilt Avenue were built together around 1850. No. 71 looks freshly minted, but No. 69 is woebegone.”  What is cropped from the picture and not mentioned in the caption is that No. 69 faces the elevated highway (you can just make it out behind the forlorn trees on the left.)  There are many such houses alongside this road that once formed the center of a relatively thriving residential neighborhood and now face the bleak underside of an interstate- a haven for petty criminals and no doubt an asthma cluster.  Given it’s location it’s nothing short of a miracle that someone has seen fit to take so much care with No. 71.

On a brighter note, that picture from 1950 is, well, from 1950.  We tend to see things like the BQE as permanent fixtures of the cityscape, immutable.  But look at these images to see how much things can change in just 15 years, from the time the streetcars were removed and the BQE was completed, and ask yourself what you are doing to make sure things change for the better in the coming 15.

Update: The trees!  How could I forget to mention the trees?  They haven’t even been planted in the early photo but look at how, in the words of my friend Richard Yancey at Green Light NY “the street trees have transformed the environment for the better, and greatly enhanced the pedestrian and public realm.”  I have read some fairly snarky stuff about Bloomberg’s Million Trees initiative; questioning the climate change impacts, calling it a glorified publicity stunt, but just glance at this photo and you can see the inherent value of adding street trees to virtually any context.  And, by the way, the math works as well- street trees are one of the MOST cost effective measures to reduce CO2, improve air quality, and mitigate the heat island effect.  And the pits help with stormwater runoff.

The Federal DOT’s new Livable and Sustainable Communities Initiative includes a strong emphasis on (the horror!!) walking and biking.  US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood explains himself.