Top Ten Green Cities: Review of "The Climate Code" Episode on SustainLane's US City Rankings

The Weather Channel's "The Climate Code" covered in-depth The SustainLane US City Rankings yesterday, featuring reports from the top ten cities out of the largest 50 US cities SustainLane ranked in 2006. Look for How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings from New Society Press in April with expanded and updated information on the rankings.

Yesterday (rebroadcast Saturday, January 27 at 3, 5 and 11 p.m. Eastern), we heard about the following cities:

1. Portland, Oregon

Portland provides a great example of what cities, citizens and businesses can do together to improve their quality of life along with the local economy.

Once having some of the nation's poorest air quality, Portland now has some of the best air and tap water quality nationwide, along with free public transit downtown, the highest bike-to-work rate, the most LEED-certified buildings, strong local food and an emerging alternative fuels economy. Plus the real estate community has backed the first residential home multiple-listing service with green features in history.

2. San Francisco

San Francisco is a close competitor with Portland for managing sustainability programs that help provide the nation's best solid waste diversion rate (recycling and commercial composting), and feature bold projects for solar and tidal energy generation. San Francisco's housing affordability remains an issue that forces many to commute long distances into the city. Fortunately the Bay Area features strong public transportation to help make that commuting less polluting and congested.

3. Seattle

Mayor Greg Nickels, who appeared on "The Climate Code," is a strong national advocate for climate change policy, clean technologies, green building and effective sustainability policy management. Seattle, its port authority and King County, have been teaming up on biodiesel ferry and bus initiatives, while the city has strongly pushed for restoring native forests in the Emerald City.

4. Chicago

My hometown, and each time I visit, I'm more wowed by what I see under Mayor Daley's leadership. Mayor Daley, who spoke on "The Climate Code" about wanting to go from #4 in the SustainLane rankings to #1, has been greening streets, freeways and even abandoned industrial sites.

Chicago blends the aesthetic with the technical aspects of sustainability: the world's largest green roof at Millennium Park underlies a Frank Gehry-designed bandshell, all part of an ongoing study to reduce urban heat-island effect.

5. Oakland, California

Oakland is a great "sleeper" in the top ten, with growing public transit use, policy supporting more local food, renewable energy and a move toward energy security. New Mayor Ron Dellums is instituting a "green collar" jobs program for youth and low-income workers, so that the clean tech jobs the city is trying to lure can equally benefit professionals, skilled people in the trades, unskilled workers and students.

6. New York City

With the country's best urban public transit system, New York is not resting on its laurels. Mayor Bloomberg is putting his weight behind city appointments, committees and processes that are making a sustainability plan a reality in 2007. Out of such activities, look for the city to assume a leadership role in developing alternative fueled vehicles, renewable energy (including tidal) and Gotham-scaled green buildings.

7. Boston

The Bean goes Green. Boston is poised to become the leading city for green building with its new zoning requiring that all buildings over 50,000 sq. feet be LEED (the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified. Add that to high renewable energy use, great public transit, walkability and low sprawl, and you get a promising future. Weakness: recycling. 

8. Philadelphia

Philly's #8 has been a surprise to some, but the city is a great model for local urban food, with strong networks of farmers markets and community gardens. The city also is riding a wave of interest in sustainability from citizen groups, business (including the local Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), and just plain folks who have been attending large planning and visioning meetings.  From that process the city needs a sustainability plan that city officials buy into, along with more recycling and renewable energy.

9. Denver

When cities claim that they can't build public transit like that of such "older cities" in the top ten, I always point to Denver. The city and 30 surrounding towns in 2004 passed a ballot measure to build out more than 100 miles of new light rail and other new public transit lines.

Mayor Hickenlooper has made sustainability the foundation for the city's future, through economic development that will be integrated with the new public transit. The skinny: 4x current public transit ridership in 15 years and a vital new American city.

10. Minneapolis

Minneapolis wants to increase its energy and food security, as Mayor R.T. Rybak described on "The Climate Code" yesterday. The city will continue being the leader in renewable energy for Midwestern cities, while bolstering farmers markets and community gardens (it's already #1 in that area), and green building. 

Comments

[Blair Cohen]

I am a college student in Colorado and I must say it is cool to see Denver and other cities taken such positive steps towards being more green. Have any of you seen these cities or others that are creating complete sustainability plans that the average person can get excited about? One of my profs just showed me a link to a really cool sustainability plan for Marin County in California. I know they didn't make the top 10 rankings here but their plan posted on their website (www.future-marin.org) looks pretty comprehensive and is obviously done in a way to let everyone understand what they are doing (they actually had a 700 page PDF file but now they have this web tool).

[Warren Karlenzig]

Blair,

Yes Marin County has a great general plan that has incorporated major sustainability elements throughout it, particularly in green building. Distributed renewable energy plans are next for this Northern California County. You can read abstarcts of elements of that plan on http://www.sustainlane.us/home.jsp under "sustainability management". The most fully developed sustainability plans are those of Seattle, Chicago, Portland and San Francisco, with Denver being well on its way with Greenprint Denver http://www.greenprintdenver.org/. New York is also putting a plan into motion through the the mayor's office and some advisory groups that will be holding meetings in neighborhoods for input. I helped put together the SF sustainability plan http://www.sustainable-city.org/ ten years ago, along with a couple hundred other people from the city, businesses, NGOs, etc. That was adopted by the city after 18 months of work

[Randy]

I live in Portland, it's a great city. Our air however not that good. I'm regularly choking in diesel fumes from the buses. Buildings here are not preserved, they are torn down and the Willamette river is still very polluted.

[Warren Karlenzig]

Randy,

Thanks for writing. Our ranking compared cities relative to one another. In that regard, Portland did have the second best average air quality index of the largest 50 US cities when compared to the others (first was Honolulu, with the air quality advantage of being on an island). That doesn't mean that there isn't air pollution or room for improvement--particularly at the level of bus exhaust fumes on city streets. As for building preservation--which we did not measure--The Pearl District in particular seems to have kept its historic integrity. Finally, on water quality, you're right, the Willamette is very polluted. We did not compare levels of water pollution as they vary in terms of what you can measure (rivers, ocean water, lakes), when you measure (season) and what you are measuring for. That could however be a good additional metric for our future studies.

[Alicia]

I live in Portland, Oregon. I love this city but I don't love our air. Terrible toxic smells waft through my lovely neighborhood on a regular basis. I wonder what aspect of our air quality (what kinds of air pollutants) you have considered for evaluation. There was an article yesterday (2/4/07) in the Oregonian that revealed some parts of the city (e.g. downtown) have 50 times the safe level of benzine in the air. Oregon has poor gasoline and diesel fuel quality standards and that, along with other problems, means we end up breathing some pretty toxic air. It makes me deeply sad.

[Warren Karlenzig]

Alicia,

You're right--every city has its share of air pollution, and it can vary according to type of pollutant, neighborhood, street and even time of day.

Overall, though, Portland does have some of the best overall air quality for a US city. Compared to the other cities out of the 50 largest in the US, Portland ranked number 2 (after Honolulu) in 2005. We based this ranking on data from the US EPA http://www.airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=static.aqi that measures five major pollutants: carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, particulates (soot, etc.), nitrogen dioxides and ground-level ozone (smog).

Portland's overall average Air Quality Index was the second lowest of 50 cities (the lower it is, the cleaner the air), and it had no violations of the Clean Air Act in any of the five pollutant categories during 2005.

That said, Benzene, a component of all gasoline, is a major air pollution health concern that will soon be more regulated more strictly by the EPA by 2011. The Northwest and Rocky Mountain states will soon be getting gasoline to match the reformulated gasoline with lower benzene levels that is already in use in places like California, Chicago and the Northeast.

Warren

[Jaasmeen Hamed]

I am a college student researching cities within the US that have green zoning standards. Would you please help me locate this information?

[greengo]

How exactly are you coming to these rankings?

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