A San Francisco area study has found that land conservation efforts, contrary to decades of complaint from business groups, has had little impact on the amount of available housing in the region.  There has long been an argument from the development industry that land conservation contributes dramatically to rising home prices, especially in places like the SF Bay area and Portland, Oregon with it’s urban growth boundary, but this study suggests that it is simply not the case.

Lloyd Alter at Treehugger writes on this under-construction Passivhaus project in California. Most Passivhaus projects have been in northern climates and have gone to great lengths to minimize square footage and exterior surface area (leading to squat though not always inelegant boxes.) This CA house aims to show the standard can be achieved with a more conventional (by American standards) sized home in a courtyard configuration. We’ll be following this project as it develops.

The Toxies.  Wherein Californians for a Healthy and Green Economy (CHanGE) present “Bad Actor” awards to harmful chemicals and compounds found in everyday products. The emphasis is on consumer goods but many of the “winners” are found in building materials- with massively negative impacts on the quality of our indoor environments. They need to work on their PR, you can only see the list of awards by downloading an 8MB pdf. They could use a simple webpage, methinks, but the download is worth it. Tons of interesting factoids about the chemicals in question in a hilarious Oscar format. My favorite?

Worst Costume: Perchlorethylene, commonly used in dry cleaning but can cause dizziness, nausea and organ damage.

The students at the California College of Arts and Design have asked the question: Where does your taco come from?  A research project that resulted in the map  shown here.  It’s a fascinating look at what you might consider a simple product, and if you are buying it from a sidewalk truck you might assume the taco in question is basically “local”.  But as their research shows, this is anything but the case. (Via BLDGBLOG, who rightly points to Sourcemap as a similarly fascinating exercise.)

I am reminded of a local example specific to green buildings.  A project manager I know well was recently researching a poured terrazo floor for a LEED-aspiring retail space.  They had selected a product manufactured in New Jersey because they have, unlike most such products, very low amounts of VOCs.  They also figured the flooring would apply towards the Regional Materials credit since it is composed, mostly, of sand and recycled glass aggregate  There’s plenty of that stuff within 500 miles, right?  Well- it turns out the company in question gets their recycled glass from . . .  Indiana.  And the sand?  Washington State.  There would appear to be no good reason this would be the case but these are the sorts of inefficiencies that exist because we still basically don’t pay attention to this stuff.  Keep in mind- this is at a company who have done highly admirable work, dedicating several staff to reducing the environmental impacts of their products- hence the low VOC %.  But no one had asked about their material origins, until now.

Timothy Egan’s opinion piece in the NYT about the increasing frequency of foreclosure in American suburbs reads like a call to arms- let us not make the same land-use mistakes in the years ahead!  He rightly references Christopher Leinberger’s excellent piece from the Atlantic in 2008 but he seems, to this reader, overly optimistic about the prospects for recovery of our vast tracts of vinyl-sided homes, turf grass and pavement.  Most of these homes were not built to last and they have been deployed in an almost unimprovable pattern that requires very cheap gasoline and is virtually impenetrable to public transportation.  We’ve dug ourselves a very, very deep hole.  From Egan,

Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley. Nobody is home in the cities of the future.

It’s great to see a state with as much influence on national policy adopting a green code. The implementation concerns noted in the article, however, seem very real and it’s not a minor point. One of the great benefits of green code improvements, of course, is that it involves virtually everyone in improving the environmental performance of our communities. But if we botch the delivery of these changes to folks unfamiliar with green building concepts we risk losing a vast sea of potential new converts to our cause.

The Infrastructurist maps out the lay of recent efforts across the country to revive streetcars as a principle mode of public transportation, rather than just as the background for movies set in San Francisco. Ray LaHood has $130 million for six lucky cities to carve up.