Top 5 stories from Smart Cities Dive

Two dedicated high-speed rail lines are now under construction in the U.S., promising to bring a transportation technology that has long been common in Europe, Japan and China. More routes are being studied, with at least five in the planning stages. “We are just getting warmed up,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at the 2024 U.S. High Speed Rail Conference in May.

“There [have] been maps floating around for years, if not decades, depicting a nationwide high-speed rail network,” said Ezra Silk, political director at the U.S. High Speed Rail Coalition, a group of industry and labor advocates. Silk sees the U.S. hitting a “tipping point” as soon as the first of these new projects begins operating. “We need to have a real pipeline of projects around the country if we're going to be moving towards the national system in time to deal with climate change,” he said.

The coalition today released a 20-page guide for high-speed rail advocates on how to get started on organizing, building community and political support and finding initial and long-term funding. “We’re really trying to get this into the hands of local leaders who care about their regions and understand that this could be perhaps one of the most transformative things that's happened since the interstate highway system,” Silk said.

The document lists five stages of the high-speed rail life cycle: project initiation, project development, final design, construction and operations. “It starts with recognizing that this is going to be a complicated undertaking that's going to require a multifaceted effort to get going,” said Bernard Cohen, principal author of the guide and senior advisor for planning and operations at Alternate Concepts, a Boston-based transit service provider.

The guide lays out the beginning steps of an HSR project. First, Cohen said, “You need to start thinking about building toward a mature organization. Secondly, you need to start engaging with organizations and people who might be interested in supporting a high-speed rail project, and you need to work with them to begin to build those relationships. The third thing is you need to start some technical planning.”

The initial steps include lining up potential supporters, conducting a preliminary feasibility study, identifying risks and obstacles and developing a political outreach strategy. “The optimism, which is really important at this stage, needs to be tempered with a realistic sense of what the risks are,” Cohen said, “because projects like high-speed rail are going to have really strong supporters and are going to inevitably invoke some opposition.”

Even at an early stage, funding will be needed for planning and marketing materials. Cohen suggested asking for money from the businesses in the area the new HSR line would serve, as it could bring them a broader sphere of potential employees. Advocates should also explore local and federal funding options and consider approaching labor unions who may benefit from job creation, he said.

The road map encourages advocates to build a diverse group of supporters with varying skills. Cohen named expertise in communications, community engagement and technical planning as key additions to the team. But the most important skill set for a leader, he said, is the “ability to define and articulate the vision for what high-speed rail could do for their region … That person needs to have credibility [and] needs to have good contacts with important players in the region.”

Cohen said he believes the road map “can be helpful in sidestepping some of the challenges that create a more protracted process.” 

But Silk warned that launching a campaign for what will be a multi-billion-dollar project “is not for the faint-hearted.” He said, “These are some of the biggest and most complicated infrastructure projects in the world, and delivering them in the U.S. is challenging.”

More than 3 billion passengers ride high-speed trains around the world each year, but just over 12 million ride the United States' only high-speed rail line in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, where Acela trains reach speeds of 150 mph. The U.S. has fewer miles of high-speed rail than 10 other countries, according to the International Union of Railways. 

“We’re really going to need a series of campaigns in all the major regions of the country, coming from ground up, pushing for these high-speed rail corridors,” Silk said. “Now's the time to strike.”

Nearly five years ago, Victoria Price urged local lawmakers in Montgomery County, Maryland, to pass a policy no other local government in the region had yet enacted: Require landlords to provide tenants with cooling equipment during the summer months in the same way they must provide heat during the winter.

During a public testimony in 2019, Price, 69 at the time, told stories of her nearly 14 years as a tenant in a more than 50-year-old building for older adults where, she said, the cooling systems regularly broke down, sometimes for extended periods. She spoke of residents hospitalized for heat exhaustion, people fainting and even a neighbor who died in part due to overheating in a unit that Price said did not have working air conditioning.

Her testimony painted a picture of what can occur when vulnerable populations, like older adults, young children and those with medical conditions, don’t have indoor cooling. It’s a growing concern among lawmakers as climate change drives record-breaking temperatures in cities previously spared such heat.

Montgomery County passed the law Price and other local tenants’ advocates supported in 2020. Under the new policy, many landlords must provide air conditioning equipment from June 1 through Sept. 30 each year. The equipment must be capable of cooling the unit to at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Previously, the county didn’t have a maximum indoor temperature; it only required landlords to maintain AC in “working order” if it was already in the unit.

The final AC mandate was scaled back from County Councilmember Tom Hucker’s original proposal, which would have required landlords to provide working AC equipment in May, too. The final bill also exempts detached single-family homes and certain historic properties. Still, the law marked a significant shift in how community members view cooling: not as a nice-to-have but as a need-to-have, said Matt Losak, executive director of the Montgomery County Renters Alliance. “The purpose of it is not to make things more luxurious,” he said. “The purpose of it was to address the health hazard.”

With communities from New York City to Los Angeles County looking to follow in Montgomery County’s footsteps, the county’s experience implementing the rule could hold lessons for local leaders nationwide. 

A shaky beginning

Montgomery County has tens of thousands of multifamily rental units, and most of them already had air conditioning, according to county officials and real estate industry representatives. A 2020 estimate from the local Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors found that the new law could affect 300 to 1,400 units. Still, the first summer after the county’s rule went into effect was a “little shaky” as the landlords that didn’t previously provide cooling equipment figured out ways to install it in their buildings, said Tamala Robinson, manager of code enforcement for the county’s Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

For landlords that needed to install AC, the county had electrification and weatherization funds to help offset the costs, said Nathan Bovelle, chief of community development at the county’s Department of Housing and Community Affairs. 

“The pushback was larger than the after-effect ended up being, in my estimate,” said Earl Stoddard, the county’s assistant chief administrative officer. “There [were] no buildings that went out of business or any major things like that.”

County officials don’t know how many tenants got access to working air conditioning equipment thanks to the law; that’s not something they’ve tracked. They assume property owners are largely complying, they say, because they have yet to hear otherwise. “If there were landlords who were struggling to make the changes, we would have heard about it through tenant complaints,” Stoddard said. 

Losak, with the Montgomery County Renters Alliance, said that landlords seem to be more attentive to maintaining AC since the law went into effect. “We have not seen the kinds of unresponsiveness to complaints that we had seen in the past,” he wrote in an email. He credits Montgomery County’s rule for prompting landlords to be more responsible but added that the increased responsiveness to AC issues may in part be due to this summer’s extreme heat, which could have led to serious health risks for tenants, especially older adults.

Robinson explained how the complaint reporting process works: Once a tenant calls the county to report that they don’t have working AC, an inspector goes out the same day to visit the unit and measure the indoor temperature. If it’s above 80 F, the county notifies the landlord and advises them to take action within 24 hours, although technically they have up to five days to fix the problem. If the fix will take longer than five days, the county advises the landlord to provide temporary AC units, which Robinson says most landlords do. If the AC isn’t fixed within five days, the county issues a citation along with a $500 fine, which a judge can double or reduce depending on the severity of the case. 

The complaints rarely get to the end of that process, Robinson said. The few landlords who have received citations so far have abated the issue before they go to court. 

Older buildings, more problems

Brian Anleu has seen both sides of the debate over requiring landlords to provide AC. 

He worked on the Montgomery County bill as a staffer for Hucker, the council member who sponsored the legislation. Now he represents the local real estate industry as the vice president of government affairs for Maryland at the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington.

A significant barrier to providing renters with adequate cooling on hot days, he says, is old buildings with poor HVAC systems. These buildings from the 1960s and 1970s are also the buildings that tend to be affordable and inhabited by “the least affluent, neediest populations in the county,” Anleu said. 

Hucker’s office started working on the AC requirement bill because of continuous complaints from residents in a handful of such older buildings, Anleu recalled. “Four years later, am I going to tell you that those buildings are always meeting the letter of the law?” he said. “Probably not, because those are really old buildings with really old systems.”

In certain older HVAC systems in multifamily buildings, residents can’t just adjust the thermostat to get heat or air conditioning when the weather changes. The entire building has to be switched for the season from heating to cooling, or vice versa, in a process that can take up to a week, officials explained. “If you have periods where one week it's hot and one week it cools down, like it does very often in April and May, it can be very challenging,” Stoddard said. 

This past April, Montgomery County saw days approaching 90-degree highs, which sparked a wave of tenant complaints about non-functional AC, Bovelle recalled. Several days later, temperatures dropped back to the 40- to 50-degree range.

If landlords turned off the heat during those hot days, when the weather cooled, “they would get complaints that it's too cold,” Bovelle said.

That catch-22 has resulted in lengthy conversations among county officials about how they can better help landlords choose the best time to switch their HVAC systems from heating to cooling each year, perhaps using National Weather Service or other trustworthy weather information sources, Stoddard said.

Building owners could upgrade to more modern HVAC systems, but that can be expensive, time-consuming and invasive for residents, Bovelle said. Plus, property owners typically pass costs on to tenants through higher rents, Anleu said. Local building performance standards for energy use or greenhouse gas emissions, which Montgomery County has approved, create an additional burden on landlords being asked to drive down energy use while upgrading cooling equipment, he said.

“We keep hearing … that there are billions of [federal] dollars out there to help fund these kinds of energy-efficiency improvements,” Anleu said, but the funding must go through a winding bureaucratic process involving multiple government agencies before it can reach property owners, he said.

‘Better than 10 people dying’

Robinson said she fields a lot of calls from other jurisdictions about the law. A typical question she gets is why Montgomery County exempted detached single-family rental properties from the rule. The intent was to keep those properties as affordable as possible for tenants, she said, but she advises other local governments to consider implementing a law that applies to all rental properties. “The health and safety of the residents should be no different … whether you’re living in a single-family townhome, a single-family detached dwelling or a multifamily unit,” Bovelle added. 

Montgomery County also could have considered ways to include historic properties, some of which are in low-income neighborhoods, in the law, such as by working with a historical preservation society to allow structural changes, he said.

Jurisdictions that are less built out should try to “get it right from the start,” such as by requiring new buildings to be energy-efficient and have AC, Stoddard advised. It can be a greater challenge for more built-up communities, like Montgomery County, to mandate cooling and other building upgrades without causing rents to rise. Governments in those built-up communities may have to subsidize retrofits, he said.

Price, the tenant who advocated for the county’s AC requirement in 2019, moved out of the building she testified about, she told Smart Cities Dive in June. But she remembers the tricks she would use to cool her 12th-floor apartment when it was too hot, from closing all the blinds and running fans to wedging poster board in front of the windows. Sometimes she’d flee the unit to stay with her brother in a neighboring county, she said. 

When asked if she thinks Montgomery County’s AC requirement has made a difference, Price said yes. Even if the law only helped 100 people, she said, “that’s better than 10 people dying” from extreme heat.

“Why would somebody object to something like that?”

Three years ago, Dallas transformed how it was tackling homelessness with the All Neighbors Coalition, a group of what is now 150 local organizations working to solve homelessness, says Sarah Kahn, president and CEO of Housing Forward, the coalition’s lead agency.

That meant that instead of member groups each trying separately to solve homelessness one person at a time, they could come together around a unified strategy, Kahn said. The new system allowed for public and private funding to be aligned around getting people experiencing homelessness into permanent housing with connections to support services.

The new approach is working in Dallas and Collin counties, according to local officials: Homelessness overall is down by 19% compared with 2021, and unsheltered homelessness is down 24%, according to point-in-time counts. “We are decreasing homelessness at a time where the nation has seen record increases in homelessness,” Kahn said. 

One of the successful strategies in the Dallas area has been the coalition’s “Street-To-Home” encampment response, Kahn said, which entails bringing behavioral health care and rehousing assistance on-site to encampments and eventually shutting the encampment down. The process usually takes eight weeks from start to finish, she said.

“By the end of that eight-week process, people then are literally signing a lease and being supported to move their belongings directly into their own apartment,” Kahn said.

About five staff members work as “housing locators,” building relationships with landlords to identify available housing units. That means when the “Street-to-Home” response team arrives at an encampment, they already have a centralized database with available vacant units, Kahn said. Participating landlords get a sign-on bonus of $1,000 per unit leased along with a guarantee that the rent will get paid, she said.

The on-site response team also helps people get new identification documents if needed and provides computers so people can apply for housing units or vouchers.

This approach is a shift from local governments’ traditional response of offering people living in encampments temporary shelter and then clearing the area, she said. “In that situation, we're not actually resolving the encampment,” Kahn said “People are just kind of packing up their things and moving two blocks down.” She noted that people often live outside because they don’t feel that they can use shelters for some reason; they might have pets, be in a couple or be suffering from serious mental health issues. 

Houston’s successful housing-first model for addressing homelessness has served as a blueprint for the Dallas program, Kahn said.

Kahn said her teams are finding that what a vast majority of people living outside want is a housing solution. “When we go on-site and engage with folks at those locations, 95% of the time people say yes to wanting to work with us on housing,” Kahn said. “There's a myth often that people who are living outside or people that are unsheltered are service-resistant, and that's just not the experience that we've had as a community.”

A crucial role of the local government is making sure that former encampment sites don’t become repopulated, Kahn said. That means hanging signage and having regular law enforcement presence in the area. 

Now, with the help of a $30 million public-private investment, the coalition is working toward a 50% decrease in homelessness by 2026 compared with 2021. Kahn says the biggest challenge in Dallas and across the nation is continuing to invest in moving people directly into permanent housing with services despite growing pressure to address unsheltered homelessness and proposals to build expensive interim solutions like temporary housing.

“When people see visible homelessness, they're not always feeling the progress,” she said. “That leads to mounting pressure to do something. Our biggest challenge is making sure that as a community, we stay the course and continue to align investments to those strategies that are working, that are moving people directly into permanent housing with services.”

U.S. communities are striving to keep pace with climate change impacts, and a new analysis of public agencies’ climate resilience and adaptation plans shows just how varied those efforts are.

Researchers at the nonprofit Regional Plan Association combed through 54 of these plans to “offer important examples of progress and innovation and success stories for communities in their adaptation planning journey,” the April 22 report says. It comes after the federal government’s national climate assessment warned in 2023 that current adaptation efforts are insufficient to meet the dangers posed by climate change.

The RPA analysis sheds light on which adaptation actions are getting the most attention, at least among the plans examined. Nature-based approaches to reducing flood risk, particularly those that focus on ecological restoration and conservation, made up the largest number of adaptation strategies across the plans. The 54 plans analyzed included a total of 808 strategies that use natural and nature-based responses, from increasing tree canopy to building green infrastructure.

This marks a shift in the resilience world, according to RPA. “Perhaps 10 years ago, our findings would have reflected more conversations about sea walls and other gray infrastructure practices,” Rob Freudenberg, RPA’s vice president of energy and environment, said in a statement.

Despite the growing prevalence of nature-based strategies, the report says that communities still need a better understanding of their costs and benefits, especially the community benefits that aren’t easily represented by a dollar amount. One recent paper by Boston University researchers found that, compared with efforts that drive down greenhouse gas emissions, local adaptation projects are “perceived as ‘not bankable’ or lacking a ‘clear business model.’”

The RPA report also examines local plans to retreat or relocate communities and infrastructure away from risky areas, a concept that has sparked controversy in many places. Retreat and relocation strategies made up the fewest number of total adaptation strategies examined, with 96 across the 54 plans. 

The report finds that the largest number of retreat and relocation strategies fall under the “development controls and incentives” category, which describes actions that penalize development in high-risk areas and encourage it in low-risk regions through levers like expedited permitting. RPA hypothesizes that these actions are easier to gain buy-in for and cost less than other paths.

Government buyouts of at-risk properties, which aim to help people relocate somewhere safer, were the second-most mentioned strategy type in the retreat and relocation category. RPA pointed to an innovative idea for buyouts in Houston’s resilience plan that would allow participants to undergo an expedited process and swap for a property in a lower-risk region within the same community. 

RPA also found that most plans had a dedicated section to outline potential funding sources for adaptation projects. Those sources include federal grant dollars, municipal budgets, green bonds, special financing districts, carbon credit programs and private investment dollars.

Plans also varied in how they accounted for equity. “While some plans have dedicated chapters for equity and justice, others have equity-related actions under each goal or objective,” the report says. “Some plans also prioritize equity more than the others, with some considering equity as an additional aspect but not a central priority, while others make it an integral part of all aspects of their plan.”

The Federal Highway Administration published a notice of proposed rulemaking on Feb. 21, 2024, to update the existing Highway Safety Improvement Program regulations. The updates aim to incorporate the Safe System Approach and align with the safety and equity priorities of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Roadway Safety Strategy.

The proposal would require each state to perform a system-wide safety risk assessment and clarifies that each state’s strategic highway safety plan must include a safety assessment focused on vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians, cyclists or those using a personal conveyance.

The FHWA also seeks through these new rules to streamline state reporting efforts while also requiring states to report and evaluate individual projects, programs and countermeasures.

Amid a decade-long increase in traffic fatalities, the U.S. Department of Transportation adopted the Safe System Approach in 2022, which focuses on safer roads, people, vehicles and speed along with post-crash care.

Nearly 43,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2022, including more than 7,500 pedestrians. “We recognize that the current status of traffic safety in the U.S. is unacceptable, and we’ve adopted the Safe System Approach as the guiding paradigm to address roadway safety,” said Robert Ritter, FHWA associate administrator for safety, on a webinar.

Under the new regulations, the FHWA proposes that states include representatives from underserved communities “to ensure that the needs of all road users are represented in the planning, implementation and evaluation of the [Highway Safety Improvement Program],” Karen Scurry, HSIP program manager, said on the webinar.

A Smart Cities Dive analysis of fatal pedestrian accident data showed that people of color and people in low-income communities are killed at a higher rate than other residents, even in communities with lower overall pedestrian death rates. Black or African American pedestrians are killed in traffic crashes at a rate nearly two times higher than White pedestrians. Hispanic or Latino pedestrians die at a rate 38% higher than the rate for White pedestrians.

Scurry also said the FHWA is proposing to add representatives from public health agencies “to emphasize that roadway traffic crashes are not only a traffic safety problem but also a public health problem.” In a February 2024 interview, former director of intergovernmental and strategic affairs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention John Auerbach said, “There’s a solid amount of evidence that shows that transportation has a significant impact on the health and well-being of the public.” Auerbach urged greater collaboration among health and transportation agencies.

In conclusion, Scurry said the proposed changes “would clarify provisions regarding the planning, implementation, evaluation and reporting of HSIPs that are administered in each state,” adding that “these changes would further strengthen and advance the safety and equity priorities of the DOT’s National Roadway Safety Strategy and assist us with making safety gains designed to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries on the nation’s roads.”