The Ecopolitan

The Greening of Levittown

America's original suburb is going green.

At least that's the hope for Levittown, New York, the town that defined post-World War II suburban living when it rose out of Long Island fields in 1948. Levittown stands, for some, as a symbol of the good life for middle-class families and, for others, as an object of derision for its ticky tacky subdivisions.

But if officials in Nassau County, New York, have their way it will soon be known best as an innovative sustainable community. The New York Times reports (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/16levittli.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) that an ambitious project aims to cut carbon emissions 20 percent in Levittown over the next year.

"If we can make Levittown an example of easy environmentalism and show homeowners how they can make changes to save money and improve the environment," Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi told the Times, "we can do an extreme makeover of an entire community that can become a model for the rest of the country."

Plans call for canvassing all of the suburb's 17,000 households to inform homeowners of a county program offering financial support to help them buy new furnaces, install solar or biofuel power, and adopt other measures to slash the amount of energy they use--and how much they pay for it in their monthly bills.

This is great as far as it goes. But to make a Levittown a national model for fighting global warming we can't ignore transportation. Levittown is several miles from the nearest train stops, which means the great bulk of local travel is done behind the steering wheel, same as in most suburbs. And autos rank up there with power plants as a leading cause of the global climate crisis.

It's often assumed that American suburbs are lost causes when it comes to a balanced transportation system that makes it convenient and comfortable to walk, bike, and ride trains or buses. "People will never get out of their cars" is a familiar refrain, which probably influenced Nassau County officials to focus solely on home energy use.

Yet looking around the country you find many suburbs from Oak Park, Illinois, to Somerville, Massachusetts, to Shaker Heights, Ohio, that offer the leafy, peaceful qualities people seek in suburbia but that are also well-served by train service.

Even newer, outlying communities in many metropolitan areas are being retrofitted or built anew to include transit and walking. Washington Post columnist Neal Peirce, a longtime chronicler of ecopolitan trends, notes that Arlington County, Virginia, which largely grew up across the Potomac from Washington since the 1950s, has become a "star" in creating livable, walkable suburban neighborhoods around new stops on Washington's expanding Metro rail lines. (http://www.postwritersgroup.com/archives/peir071216.htm). There's no reason why other suburban communities from LaJolla (California) to Lantana (Florida) can't follow the lead of both Nassau and Arlington counties.

© The Green Guide, 2008

| Email this post

Discuss this blog