Building Green Cities and Green Jobs

“Green Cities: How Urban Sustainability Efforts Can and Must Drive America’s Climate Change Policies,” evaluates how well cities across the country are working on reducing urban emissions, and lays out the three key areas that will make the most impact in the least amount of time.

“[T]he emerging green economy provides us with unprecedented opportunities — from lowering energy and transportation costs to creating jobs with meaningful career ladders,” Living Cities CEO Ben Hecht writes in the introduction to the report. “In order for this to happen, however, we must intentionally build a ‘gateway’ that connects people and places to these opportunities.”

There are three key planks to a successful green cities strategy, one that will create jobs, stimulate business growth, and make cities more livable, desirable places: building retrofits, green jobs (in large part enacting those retrofits), and public transit enhancements.

Woven throughout the Green Cities report is this need to make the green economy accessible to low-income people. Without connecting low-income residents to the mainstream economy of a city, the environmental and economic improvements will never hit full stride, the authors explain.

“This report shows that cities are leaders in using green strategies to advance economic recovery efforts and create better jobs,” Don Chen, a program officer at the Ford Foundation, said in a statement. “But it also signals the urgent need for these efforts reach more people — including low-income and working families — to build stronger communities for the long term.

The report offers a thematic approach to making these changes happen for each of the three key sections: buildings, jobs and transit. The themes for achieving success are:

• To achieve the energy savings and green job opportunities possible through green buildings, cities must retrofit through systems that can achieve scale.
• To create green-collar jobs at scale, cities must re-engineer their local economic and workforce development systems.
• To spur more equitable transit-oriented development, cities need to reorient their local real estate markets.