On Thursday, October 27, 2011 Mayor Michael Bloomberg and US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar signed an agreement to jointly manage over 10,000 acres of federal and city land in and around Jamaica Bay improving parks and water quality throughout the Bay, including Floyd Bennett Field. This collaboration was the key recommendation of the RPA-staffed Floyd Bennett Field Blue Ribbon Panel. City Hall and the US Department of the Interior will now move forward to develop a jointly-managed vision and governance structure, creating a Jamaica Bay master plan that will guide the redevelopment and management of both the Jamaica Bay Unit of Gateway National Recreation as well as adjoining city parkland, like Marine Park and Rockaway Beach. One specific goal will be to increase the accessibility of these parks, including improvements to the Jamaica Bay Greenway, where RPA is leading a public -private coalition.

"The parks in and around Jamaica Bay are natural and recreational treasures, all the more so because of their location right in the heart of the Nation's largest metropolitan area" said Robert D. Yaro, President of Regional Plan Association. "We congratulate Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Mayor Michael Bloomberg for establishing the framework that was needed to make this area a premier regional destination."

Click here to see the Floyd Bennett Field Blue Ribbon Panel Report. Click here to see the press release. Click here to see video coverage of the event.

A new report released today by Regional Plan Association recommends strategies for leveraging public investments in the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield (NHHS) Rail Corridor for economic growth. Titled, "Dependable Rail in 2016: What Will it Mean for the Knowledge Corridor Region?", the report includes lessons from successful passenger rail corridors in Maine and Northern California, and proposes a broad set of strategies to build on the $400 million initial public investment being made to upgrade the NHHS Rail Corridor.

These preliminary, recommended strategies are offered for discussion at a convening of business leaders and local officials today in Rocky Hill, who will explore additional strategies and next steps for achieving the maximum economic benefit from the NHHS rail project.

Download the Report (PDF - 5MB).

High-speed rail has been adopted throughout the world, and is now being planned and developed in the United States. Over the past 50 years, U.S. transportation spending has heavily favored the development of interstate highway and aviation systems. In the meantime, countries such as China, Japan, Spain, France, and Germany have been investing in modern, high-speed rail systems to satisfy the travel demands of their current and future generations. As the United States embarks on the High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program launched in 2009, it can learn from the experiences of other countries in planning, constructing, and operating high-speed rail.

This long-term perspective, discussion of benefits, and recommendations for making high-speed rail work in the United States is presented in a new report released today by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, called "High-Speed Rail: International Lessons for U.S. Policy Makers" (PDF). Written by RPA authors Petra Todorovich, Dan Schned, and Robert Lane, the report documents lessons from over four decades of international experience in high-speed rail in Europe and Asia, applies them to the U.S. context, and recommends a fresh approach that creates new, accountable, rail management structures, brings in the private sector, and concentrates for now on California and the Northeast.

RPA today released "Redevelop Camden," a research report that evaluates Camden's capacity to implement land use and redevelopment plans based on its prior experiences. The report makes recommendations to the public, private, non-profit, and philanthropic sectors to improve urban planning outcomes over the next decade and help to lower barriers to redevelopment in this important city of need.

Regional Plan Association today released a report commissioned by Manhattan Community Board 11 East Harlem/El Barrio which analyzed housing stock in the area. Overall the report shows unregulated housing is on the rise while public housing and rent-stabilized units still dominate the overall share of units available. The report recommends strategies to preserve rent regulated housing, including increasing community access to, and use of, housing data including warning systems for when units are about to be deregulated and creation of tenant associations to create their own listings of housing stock. The report also recommends exploring establishment of a community land trust which will preserve housing for future generations in the community

View the Release

Download the Report

On June 12, 2011 the Floyd Bennett Field Blue Ribbon Panel released its final recommendations on how to revitalize Floyd Bennett Field and make Gateway National Recreation Area and into an iconic urban national park. Click here to download the full report. Click here to download the full press release.

The Panel released its recommendations in advance of Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Mayor Bloomberg gathering at Gracie Mansion to discuss how best to elevate Gateway National Recreation Area into an urban national park.

Competition over land use poses challenges to natural systems that support wildlife, human health, and industry. While land use issues are generally resolved locally, the health of these natural systems is best planned for at a landscape scale. For this reason, multi-jurisdictional, multi-objective landscape conservation initiatives are often well-positioned to address conservation needs.

Regional Plan Association and America 2050 are engaged in a project to evaluate landscape initiatives working in the Northeast Megaregion and to study the conservation and development context for their work. We're continuing to build our Northeast Landscape Initiatives Inventory, which now totals 165 initiatives. The website now also includes three new sets of context maps for Habitat, Water, and Open Space, as well as case studies profiling landscape initiatives that have been successful at protecting these important resources.

New Haven gained the most residents over the last decade of any Connecticut municipality, according to this month's release of US Census redistricting data gathered during the 2010 census. The release provides data on the number of residents and their ethnicity and age as well as the number of vacant or occupied housing units by towns, census tracts, and smaller census geographies.
 
Interactive maps prepared by RPA provide multiple perspectives on the changes that have occurred over the last decade. The maps show changes in population, total housing units, and vacant units by town, and tell a different story from the one usually reported in the press. Most newspapers have touted the high rate of population growth in some of Connecticut's smallest towns as heralds of continuing suburban sprawl. A closer look at the numbers, however, shows that many cities across Connecticut have reversed their decline and are adding more new residents and housing than exurban towns.

Big changes are coming to Central Connecticut. The federal government is on the cusp of awarding 80% federal funding for the construction of the New Britain-Hartford Busway, and has already contributed over $150 million towards commuter rail service between New Haven and Springfield. Both services should be operating within the next five years.

The Busway and Commuter Rail will transform mobility along the I-91 corridor and the core of the Hartford region. But how can some of the region's outlying communities, particularly the cities of New Britain and Bristol (10 and 15 miles southwest of Hartford, respectively), be served by these two projects and build ridership to someday expand transit in these cities?

RPA's Connecticut Office has released a video, "Transit Solutions for Central Connecticut" that shows how the Busway and Commuter Rail will work together to serve New Britain and Bristol and how rail services can be added to the region as demand for transit grows.

(NY, NY) Regional Plan Association, working alongside experts, stakeholders and members of the Better Airports Alliance, today released a comprehensive report and recommendations on increasing the New York region's overall airport capacity and efficiency over the next generation. Entitled "Upgrading to World Class: The Future of the Regions Airports," the report is the result of a two-year long collaborative planning and research effort. Most notably, the report calls for the expeditious implementation of NextGen technologies to transform the nation's air traffic control system and immediate planning for the eventual expansion and/or reconfiguration of John F. Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International airports.

The RPA report will be the centerpiece for discussion at a full-day conference being held today, hosted by RPA and the Better Airports Alliance at JP Morgan Chase. The conference, also entitled, "Upgrading to World Class: The Future of the New York Region's Airports," will bring together hundreds of top business, civic, philanthropic, media and government leaders from across the metropolitan region and nation to discuss the report findings.