From Marketwatch

Will rising gas prices and the burgeoning credit crunch kill the American Dream?

Blueprint America, from Thirteen/WNET New York, tackles this and other questions in a series of hard-hitting reports that will appear online and on-air beginning October 10th with the premiere of "Driven To Despair," an examination of the crisis facing Southern California suburbanites who are being forced to choose between paying for gas or paying their mortgage.....

By Jeremy Klaszus from FFWD Weekly

CALGARY - On October 15, a city council committee will vote on whether or not to put the brakes on Calgary’s sprawling expansion and steer the city’s growth in a more sustainable direction....

By Carolyn Ireland the Globe and Mail

Sean and Rebecca O'Hara were taken aback when they arrived at their new house in west-end Toronto to find a neighbour had dug up their tree....

From TVO's The Inside Agenda blog by Navin Vaswani

This map shows the top 10 states with the highest foreclosure rates last month. Click on the thumbtacks for state statistics. Click on the flags for the latest financial institutions caught up in the credit crisis. Use the "Get Agenda Smart" link for access to an immense amount of shared research.

View the map

By Margaret Hartley from the Daily Gazette

When a friend from college got his doctorate in soil sciences, he asked to be called Dr. Dirt. Now that he’s been a professor of environmental sciences for years, we like to call him Dr. Sustainability, and the last time a bunch of us got together he was the go-to guy for all our questions...

By Antoinette Martin from the New York Times.

FINALLY, the McMansion may have reached the limits of its popularity in New Jersey, where it has seemed to rule the residential market with unshakable authority for many years. Whether that setback is temporary or permanent remains to be seen...

By John Barrette from KRNV

Reno and other cities need to promote green building, combat urban sprawl and work to produce a sustainable future for the planet, according to an award-winning former mayor from Utah...

By Glenn Cordingley from Perth Now

Perth is in danger of becoming one of the longest cities in the world - as the metropolitan sprawls north and south along an uninterrupted coast...

By Alan Boniface from Canadian Architect

Vancouver is often regarded as a city that made the right decisions; dense urban living, no freeways, miles of public waterfront and a walkable and liveable downtown. So when Mayor Sam Sullivan set out to engage the citizenry in an exercise that sought to add an ecological component to the city's longstanding acceptance of downtown density, one would have assumed that the debate would have been fairly one-sided...

By Daniel Lerch from the Sacramento Bee

With a peak oil conference in Sacramento this week and the 100th anniversary of the first mass-market automobile coming up, it's a perfect time to re-visit our relationship with that most ubiquitous icon of the American (and California) Dream: The Car...

From The Motley Fool

In recent years, Americans have supersized their homes in ever-increasing numbers. The average American home has doubled in square footage since the 1950s, while family size is down from 3.7 people at the height of the baby boom to just 2.3 members per household. As a result, U.S. homeowners now have roughly three times more living space per person than their grandparents' generation...

By Alex Steffen from Worldchanging

There is a direct link between the growing "intelligence" of our homes -- their increasing ability to use electronics to sense, monitor and adapt -- and their sustainability...

By Denise Glass from BBC News

A series of Cittaslow weekends have been - and still are - taking place in the town throughout September...

By Peter Steinbrueck from Crosscut Seattle

Our region is struggling to meet housing needs in an environmentally responsible way while maintaining affordability and quality of life. With passage of the statewide Growth Management Act and establishment of urban growth boundaries, we have been searching for successful ways to contain growth within existing urban areas...

By Adam Stein from World Changing

The recent surge in gas prices and growing concern over carbon emissions have goosed efforts to increase bicycle ridership in metropolitan areas, but the U.S. still lags far behind Europe and Asia...