The Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas is located in the very southernmost region of the continental U.S.  This area is composed of three counties with 3,643 square miles which contains a population of over 1.2 million inhabitants.1 This land area is larger in square miles than two states (DE and RI), and has a population larger than eight states (WY, VT, ND, AK, SD, DE, MT, RI). If the distances weren’t enough of a problem for transit providers, there is the dispersion of the population over those 3,600 square miles. Dispersion occurs as a result of small, very poor housing communities called colonias.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisers today issued a 36 page report detailing the economic benefits that accrue from infrastructure investments.

The January 2007  "Gentrification Trends in New Transit Oriented Communities: Evidence from Fourteen Cities that Expanded and Built Rail Transit Systems" has been added to the Resource Center best practices database.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology will hold a webinar Feb. 28 at 2 p.m. CST to discuss the latest updates to the Housing + Transportion Affordability Index. 

We have piles of documents our researchers have come across that merit inclusion in our Best Practices database. For the next week or so we'll be adding at least one a day.  After each report is uploaded, we'll post a short explanation here.

Several papers that seek to measure the impact of transit on home values have been added to the best practices Research Aricles.

The LISC Green Development Center, in partnership with TransForm, will hold a free webinar Sept. 28 at 2pm EDT that explores the new GreenTRIP certification program. Register here.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities (OSHC) recently issued two Notices of Funding Availability (NOFA) for their FY 2011 Community Challenge Grants Program ($95 million in grants available) and FY 2011 Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program ($28 million available). In order to help applicants, a pair of webinars have been scheduled: