Urban Flooding in the Great Lakes States: A Municipality/Utility Survey Report

Chicago: CNT.As part of our Smart Water for Smart Regions initiative, the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) is working with communities across Great Lakes states to alleviate urban flooding. The purpose of this survey is to develop an understanding of the effect of flooding on Great Lakes cities and to identify strategies to manage the problem. By providing a baseline of practices and policies among municipal stormwater/sewer utilities, the survey results are intended to support collaborative initiatives for dealing with flooding. Our survey, the first of its kind in the Great Lakes, found that municipalities and stormwater utilities face significant challenges. The 30 survey respondents serve 330 municipalities with a population of approximately 19.7 million people—nearly 23 percent of the total population of the Great Lakes states and province.4 All 30 respondents received flooding complaints, with 80 percent characterizing the annual number of complaints as medium or large. Stormwater is flooding into people’s backyards, streets, and parking lots (90 percent of respondents said), into the interior of buildings through sewer backups (83.3 percent), and through the walls of homes and buildings (46.7 percent)

Editorial: Household transport costs, economic stress and energy vulnerability

International audienceSince the early 2000s issues of transport poverty and social exclusion have received increasing attention in transport studies (Dodson et al., 2004; Hine and Mitchell, 2001; Lucas et al., 2001). Although much of this research has focused on low-mobility and/or carless individuals, there has been growing awareness that the costs of daily mobility can have important economic stress impacts. In developed countries with high levels of car dependence, the costs of motoring can be burdensome, raising questions of affordability for households with limited economic resources.A number of developments in the first two decades of this century have contributed to raise the profile of household transport costs as a research topic and a policy concern. First, and more obviously, increasing and increasingly volatile global oil prices have raised concerns for the vulnerability of households to fuel price increases (Dodson and Sipe, 2007). Second, the rise of the climate change agenda has led to consider pricing measures as a key component of sustainable transport policy. Implementation of such measures however, has often been hampered by concerns for the distributional impacts of increasing transport costs faced by households. Third, the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and its aftermath have highlighted broader issues of living standards, economic stress and affordability, which go beyond the specific case of transport.In this context, a further reason to investigate household transport costs has to do with other competing pressures on household budgets

Monitoring and Documenting the Performance of Stormwater Best Management Practices

The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and Hey and Associates (Hey) worked under the support of the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) to monitor and document the performance of stormwater best management practices during 2009 and 2010. There were three components of the project: (1) we conducted real-time monitoring on a bioswale and two patches of permeable concrete and documented the results; (2) we developed and implemented an inventory of green infrastructure features throughout the 6-county Chicago Region; and (3) we selected 15 rain gardens for infiltration testing and three of those for additional synthetic drawdown testing and documented the results. The most important results can be summarized as follows: A bioswale can be an effective method of infiltrating stormwater from a large impervious surface. The limits to its performance may be the permeability of underlying soils. However, if there are existing drainage structures to serve as a backup system, the bioswale can be utilized with confidence; Permeable pavement can also be an effective method of infiltrating stormwater from a parking lot. It can be utilized with confidence if it is placed so that it surrounds existing drainage structures and if there is a maintenance program that prevents clogging. Rain gardens can be an effective method of infiltrating stormwater from a roof or other impermeable surface. While soil conditions vary greatly throughout the region, and often vary substantially within a single rain garden, rain gardens can be used with confidence as long as caution is taken not to divert water toward a vulnerable situation. Despite the many reasons often given to doubt the capacity of our soils to infiltrate stormwater, rain gardens are nearly always successful. For example, one measure of success could be the capacity of a rain garden to infiltrate a 100-year storm event from a tributary area six times larger than the garden. Thus, a garden could be considered effective if it infiltrates seven inches of rainfall from an area six times the garden’s area plus the area of the rain garden, or the equivalent of 49 inches during a 24-hour storm. Our testing indicated that all but one of the 15 rain gardens tested would successfully infiltrate the water from a 100-year storm event.Illinois Sustainable Technology Center/Grant No. HWR09218published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Prospering in Place: Linking Jobs, Development, and Transit to Spur Chicago’s Economy

Prospering in Place is CNT’s call to action. It embraces the goals of the Chicago region’s GO TO 2040 plan and translates them into a place-based blueprint for prosperity. It shows how to restore location efficiency and create new jobs and economic vitality based on our unique assets and advantages: • The most robust freight rail network in the country, • The second largest passenger rail system in the country, • Ample land adjacent to both systems available for development, and • A culture that increasingly values a vibrant urban lifestyle. A prosperous regional future depends on our ability to target investments, both private and public, to the specific places with these assets. Prospering in Place uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify those priority locations that can accelerate the region’s economic development and concludes with five key recommendations: 1. Identify Priority Areas: Designate as Priority Development Areas (PDAs) the places in the region that are ready for investment and have the ability to energize the region around GO TO 2040 goals. 2. Align Government Initiatives: Align investments by state, regional, and local agencies with a special focus on PDAs. 3. Invest in Priority Areas: Establish a $1 billion competitive Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) Sustainable Communities Initiative that awards capital grants to implement projects in PDAs. 4. Expand Transit: Put a permanent new revenue source in place to fund a large-scale expansion and upgrading of the region’s transit system. 5. Fund Pre-Development: Make dedicated funding available to underwrite the most difficult-to-fund phase of development: predevelopment costs such as land assembly and environmental remediation. This scenario faces one major obstacle: an unwillingness to make strategic development choices. The easy path is to spread limited resources evenly across the region to make every community happy. But this approach will squander the historic opportunity to target resources where the conditions are right for development and where the benefits to the region as a whole are greatest. Prospering in Place calls for investment in the places with the best chance of success. It takes the risk of identifying the specific communities, the CTA and Metra stations, the intermodal rail yards, and the industrial areas that can create the greatest value, strengthen the regional economy, and produce the largest number of jobs. We invite you to work with us to bring this economic development strategy to life